Remember those days when we sat in front of those big, bulky desktop computers and waited for the noise of the creaking door opening, meaning that someone just logged onto their AIM account?
If you were in middle school or high school in the 2000s, I’m sure you can relate to this memory. The two main social media sites that I remember using were AIM and MySpace. I never was allowed to have a MySpace page, but that was the most popular site at the time.
Now, let’s fast-forward to 2017, we have instant gratification to our cell phones and computers and can easily access the hundreds of social media sites that people check constantly.
Growing up, I remember always having a time limit on how long I was going to be on AIM, or for some of you MySpace, for. We created our silly screen names and chatted with our friends from school or from far away. It was kept simple and there didn’t seem to be an addiction to being on technology.
Today’s society has completely changed. We now have Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and Pinterest. We also can access these sites instantly at our fingertips for any amount of time that we choose. Time restriction is not a thing to children growing up in today’s society. Research has shown that children spend more than 8 hours a day on some type of technology. We are constantly checking up on who has uploaded the newest, coolest picture of their life and then we think to ourselves how we want to post something as well. Social media has become a competition, not only of who can post the most interesting things about their life, but also who can just post the most comments and get the most likes. What happened to just chatting with our silly screen names?
There is a lack of appreciation of technology in today’s world because we use it so frequently, that we don’t feel lucky to have that 30 minutes or an hour to be on AIM or see new MySpace posts. It is scary how addicted we have become to all of the new sites available. It is also quite scary thinking about how much personal information is easily accessible compared to the past. I never had what town I lived in on my AIM profile or what school I went too, but now someone could check my Facebook and instantly know specific details about my life.
Parents are also having more trouble monitoring their child’s social media because of the increased use of cell phones at such young ages. With a desktop or laptop computer its easier to see what posts are being done, but when they can just post it on their phones and be on their phones continually, there is a lack of monitoring how long they are on sites and what they are posting.
It is frightening to think that within a decade such addictions to social media have occurred and more and more are created each day, so we have no clue what the future is going to look like with social media sites.
