Photo by Apollo Reyes on Unsplash
6.5 hours! That is the time I spent on my phone yesterday. I am not sure how I feel about this. Is online time preventing me from bonding with the actual humans, and pets, in my life that are physically in the room with me? I have had Twitter for years now. I mainly use the medium as a way of getting news and catching up with friends from far away. However, I feel I am in a space of self-promotion more and more. Unfortunately, I am horrible at self-promotion. I don’t really want to and never have. I am starting to realize that getting out there (twitterverse) and meeting groups that I can reflect with is a great thing. This week alone, I added some colleagues from around the province that I would never have known about if I were not on Twitter.
In this week’s class we had a guest speaker, Jessie Miller, and we discussed safety, privacy, and professionalism. I found Mr. Miller to be very well informed and he had great ideas on how we as practitioners can work with students, and parents, to reach a level of online awareness and safety, not only for today but 10 years from now. I agree with this sentiment as I have had to have discussions with students about what is being posted by them and how it may affect them later on. I tell them the story of me being a hiring manager at a restaurant and how I used to Facebook search the applicants. I found some very interesting things that I don’t believe were intended for public consumption. When Jessie Miller talked about the fact that once it is on the internet it is out there, I realized that I have had those conversations with the students. Moreover, most students don’t seem to care. I know that it is where they are developmentally and they will care one day; however I don’t know how to impress that on them.
I have seen the destructive force of social media at play in students’ lives. Bullying now is 24/7. We as a school work hard at looking into online student behavior and working with the students on appropriate comments, think before you send, and other strategies to help them become good online citizens. However, there seems to be this belief that parents are involved and there to help. That is not always the case. Ideally, parents would help with the education of students on appropriate etiquette around management and use of a device. Unfortunately, some parents, and the percentages change based on where you are and many other social and situational factors, don’t want to help and think it is our job to educate this situation alone. I feel we gloss over, or don’t want to see, the levels that addiction can play in the narrative of this story. There are so many aspects of media and device-use that we are struggling to meld together that do not mesh right now: Not yet.
I am not saying that phones and social media are evil, and that they are going to cause the downfall of society as we know it, because society as we know it is ever-changing. We need to see the issues as they are and deal with them. Moreover, we need to enhance the positive aspects of social media use; greater reach with your ideas, networking, connections to others that were never possible before. Social media is a fantastic invention that will, and is, revolutionizing the way we see the world and interact with it. However, we are tending to see this issue in a very polarized way.
Those who believe that social media is great, usually have trouble hearing the negatives to it. In contrast, those who dislike social media do not want to hear the good. I want to qualify this in that this statement represents most but not all, in my opinion. Social media is like a city. Imagine if you went to a city and only saw the affluent, well put together, and safe areas with trees and parks where people are milling around. You would say, “What a beautiful place”. However, what if you went to the same city and went to the other side of the tracks and you saw the destitution and struggle. Graffitti covering the walls and various nefarious things happening on the street corner. You would say, “That place is brutal, I would never live there”. The fact is, this is all the same city, just different areas of it. It is impossible to live in one area without even acknowledging that the other exists. So the answer comes down to, do you want to ignore or minimize the other area that you don’t like.
To claim that Twitter is 98% positive is outlandish. Just like it would be outlandish to say it is 98% negative. It all comes down to what part of the metaphorical city you live in. Unfortunately, for those in the negative parts, they are there by choice more than for social-economic reasons that an actual city implies. It is my contention that people will find what they want on these networks. Furthermore, why they are in the areas, or groups, they are in says more about them and their desires than their financial and social predicament. If people want to argue, belittle, abuse, and slam others they will tend towards politics and other social hot-button topics. They will follow and retweet what they like and in doing so, create a place online that caters to them. If they like sports they will follow sports networks, athletes, and teams. If they want to talk about education they tend towards other educators and researchers in the various fields and pedagogies of the discipline. Networks, therefore, are the cities you make.
Upon reflection, I find myself in an interesting journey when it comes to social media. I am influenced by the actions and reactions of the young people I see using it and think it can hurt. I see my fellow professionals in education using it and I can see that it helps to foster understanding and community. I see the sports people talking and realize that Kawhi Leonard left and Mitch Marner has still not yet signed and I get sad. It all comes down to where you want to be. That being said, we as people cannot diminish or ignore what is happening on the other side of the tracks while we celebrate the greatness of the medium.
Andrew Vogelsang
P.S. I cannot, in any way, blame Twitter for my 6.5 hours yesterday. There is this game called “Alien Shooter” and I think I have a serious problem.