Children and Social Media

My ten year old niece told me about her Facebook page and how proud she was about all the 200 hundred friends she had. I thought how a child can known 200 people. When I asked her about it, her answer was “I don’t personally know all of them but they are still my friends”. Nowadays, children have access to social media in a very early age, regardless of the sex, the country or the social status they belong to. I have wondered how having 200 friends can benefit my niece or how having a Facebook profile can benefit any child? My English teacher share with us the article “Children: Social Networking sites, A Debate in the House of Lords;” where the England Baroness Susan Greenfield expose the problems that being expose to social media can bring to children. This has been a controversial debate going around the world; although, every day millions of young kids open their Facebook accounts. The site policies specify that to open an account the user needs to be at least 13 years old, but that policy didn’t stop my niece when she opened her profile at age 9. In that imaginary world you can say and express anything you want to post and your friends have access to all your personal information. Several articles have exposed the hazards of publishing everything on the social media where everybody have access to. Thousands of minors around the world are contacted everyday by estrangers through their media profiles. Most parents are aware of the risk to be contact by unknown people, but not many are aware of the physical risk their kids are facing. Greenfield expresses the constant exposure to social media can lead the children to alienation, isolation and behavioral disorders. That’s why I think that parents should be more involved on their children usage of social media; knowing their passwords, establishing the maximum amount of friends they can have and limiting the time they spend on-line. One of my dearest friends’ daughter, who is also my friend on facebook, posted one day that she was to depress and wanted to end her life. She is just 13 years old. When I told my friend about this post; she said that she hasn’t checked her daughter account on so many days; and that she doesn’t understand why the girl wasn’t posting those kind of things. At the end, the reason was that the teenager was so depressed because her best friends haven’t like her last posts on her profiles, and she was trying to get their attention, (and of course my friend’s attention too.)

Spring Break Assignment

Spring Break was finally here and so my homework assignment. I needed to keep track by hours and minutes how many time I spend with technology. The incredible result was that during these seven days I expend 31 hours and 7 minutes connected. I think my husband is right when he says that I am addicted to Facebook. That blue square with the white F on my phone had the majority of my attention during this week with 13 hours and 15 minutes. For me, it is hard to stay away from it. I need to know, what are my friends doing and where they are; with 935 friends, imagine how long I spend scrolling down. Living far away from the majority of my friends, 700 of them live in Guatemala; Facebook gives me the way to continue being part of their lives even from thousand of miles away. I spend a lot of time on it, even thought I can just check it during my breaks while I’m working. Instagram is another time-consumer. My annotations show that I spend 3 hours and 10 minutes on it. With five new babies in the family and four from my coworkers, my Instagram is full of cute and gorgeous pictures of little ones. I also have a lot of professional photographers as friends which added plenty of more images to watch and like. Another thing I noticed was that I love to web surfed looking for news. As a former journalist I need to be updated with everything that is happening in the world. My searches range between politics, entertainment and society. I spend 3 hours and 48 minutes looking around on the web. I need to admit that I really took a vacation from my school assignments, and I didn’t check anything on Moodle, LBCC Email or Online homework. Although, I didn’t spend a lot of time per day on my E-mail when you added the whole week it was 3 hours and 9 minutes. The funniest part is that I didn’t even have any personal messages from friends or family it was most commercial E-mails (such as my bank or my Disney Movies accounts). I need to admit I’m addicted to Disney Movies (as a Disneyland Cast Member I think it is kind of normal) and I’m always checking my account to see the new releases and the latest sales. Talking about Disney Movies, I was 1 hour and 45 minutes online shopping with the final result of the addition of Cars 2 and Mary Poppins to my collection. I am not to much a video player but if playing games on my phone counts as video games, I spend 2 hours 35 minutes on them. After my friend Rosemary introduced me with “My Vegas Slots” and some of the saga games, I have the urgent need of keep gambling to win more coins and points. This week I spend 2 hours and 35 minutes, rolling the slots. After all this 31 hours and 7 minutes spent on Technology, I can tell that most of it is a waste of time. I should be happier spending this time with my husband, friends and close family than playing or buying things. I think technology is good and useful, if you learn to control it and don’t let it to control you. It amaze me how the new generations are getting more and more isolated; with their eyes focus more on the screen and less in the eyes of the people surrounding them.

24 hours without Facebook

            My English teacher asked me for something I thought will be impossible: 24 hours without the technology I use the most. In my case it was my dear Facebook This little blue square with a white letter F, is the most valuable App in my phone. I just love it. I check my phone constantly to see what my friends and family, here in the US and in Guatemala, are doing. I thought that 24 hours without it would be a nightmare; but actually I wasn’t that bad. I need to accept that I cheated during my lunch at work. I was alone in the break room, and the TV wasn’t working. I got really bored and decided to surf the web, and without thinking I ended checking my wall. After that I told myself: “Salia it is just 24 hours, what can happen in just one day?” I decided to give it a try. When I come home after work, the first thing that I usually do is check my Face. Last night was different; I actually sit at the living room with my husband and started chatting with him. He looked at me and said: “What happened with your phone.”  It was horrible to notice that I wasn’t giving my husband the time he deserves because all my attention was to focus on my little device. I told him: “Nothing, I just don’t want to use it today.” He gave me a strange look, but I think he liked the idea because he was so talkative and interested on my day at work; and I actually was paying attention to him no to my phone’s screen. After this experiment, I noticed that technology has stolen a lot of our human interaction. It was so sad for me to discover that the valuable time I should spend talking with my husband and co-workers; I was wasting it being too focused on a little screen. I know that is interesting to see what other people is doing, but it is more important to share time and pay attention to the people I have close to me.