Social Media: Friend or Enemy

Social Media: Friend or Enemy

Before even starting this assignment I had an interpretation of myself as someone not dependent on social and mass media. I went into this experiment confident that 24-hours with no media would be easy, but soon found I was mistaken. This would alienate me from everything I used to entertain and communicate with others: television, iPod, car radio, newspapers, magazines, texting, and computers to name a few. On Saturday I decided to start my 24-hour experiment to see if I could succeed in completing the challenge. I started my test at 10 p.m. right before bed on Saturday, January 28, 2012. I reassured myself that this would be no issue at all, and maybe I would opt to delete social media from my life once the experiment was over.

The next day I woke up later in the morning looking forward to the changes I had made for the day ahead. I had no interest in checking my Facebook or viewing text messages on my phone. I looked for alternatives to the media aspect of life, and came up with ideas to entertain and better myself. I began the morning with breakfast and coffee while talking with my parents. I felt a greater need to communicate with them knowing I was chastised from communicating with others. After our conversation I soon realized I had lost touch with the activities my family encountered, and that just maybe this was a result from my customs of social networking. I neglected the times when I saw my parents as my biggest supporters and someone to talk to about anything.

As the afternoon settled and my mental state begun to deteriorate. I went from happy and spontaneous to a feeling of anxiety and depression. I was a stranded person, on a deserted island looking for solutions to pass the time. Every now and then I could hear a beeping tone from my pocket telling me I had multiple unviewed text messages. I thought of a million reasons why I had to view it, but was never defeated by the ideas. I couldn't stop the irrational thoughts of what I was missing; in the meantime I listened to music, played with my dog, and washed my car.

I began to fidget in the last 30 minutes of my 24-hour window; I missed Facebook and all my media devices. I was addicted and there was no denying it.

At 10:02 pm on Sunday, I checked my Facebook, viewed my missed texts, and looked at news that happened during the day. I had a dependency that did not involve me but almost every other teen in America, we are hooked and there is nothing we could do about it.