Picture Courtesy of The Social Dilemma Official Website
Most days on the way home from school when I’m sitting on the bus I open my phone and go straight to Instagram or Snapchat. Not to check anything specific simply to scroll through and see what people have posted in the past few hours. But when did this become my norm?
I remember a time when the first thing I would do on the bus was crack open a book and ignore my phone entirely. While over the course of the bus ride I eventually make my way back to a book, it’s no longer the first thing I do. So when did social media and online communication become so important? Whenever it did, there’s no denying that technology continues to become further ingrained in our society. Whether it’s checking social media to pass the time, texting a friend or completing school work most of the day is spent online. Over the past three years especially, this has been the case, with our phones being the only mode of communication for much of 2020. While we have returned to in-person learning and other social gatherings for over a year at this point, the residual effects of social distancing and quarantine continue to impact social scenes and education.
To learn more about Fieldston’s interaction with technology I met with Charlotte Selous from the technology department. Selous said, “when your whole social interaction and all of your social skills are built online and when you come back in person there’s a breakdown in the way you’re communicating and interacting with other people.” She went on to explain how people share information online that they most likely wouldn’t have a face to face conversation about. This oversharing leads to people feeling more comfortable conversing online rather than in-person. Reliance on social media to communicate reduces personal interaction and connection leaving many students feeling isolated from the community.
For students just joining the Fieldston community during remote learning, it was challenging for them to get to know their classmates because most students had their cameras off. With no other way to “meet” classmates, some of these new students would turn to social media, specifically Instagram. While social media allowed these students to put names to faces, it can also be incredibly harmful to students and teenagers. As we all know, what we post to social media is the idyllic version of real events, almost never showing everything that occurs. While recently people have been more publicly open to sharing their troubles, it can be really easy to compare yourself to a picture your classmate posted or see only the online life they cultivate. Instead of comparing, it is important to remember that what you see on social media likely isn’t the full picture. If we tried to communicate with each other in person instead, by asking someone how their weekend was or how they are doing, we will not only feel more connected, but further empathize with each other.
While it is easy to feel discouraged about our increasing use of social media, Selous says that “approaching something from an all or nothing standpoint is not necessarily always the best. You don’t have to be either social media is bad or social media is good.” If you interact with social media while regulating your own emotions then online communication doesn’t have to be detrimental and it can even be beneficial. Knowing the way specific videos or posts make you feel is the first step in deciding the ways in which, and how much you want to engage in social media. If you can find niches where you build online communities with welcoming people, your engagement will feel more positive rather than spending your time scrolling or constantly comparing yourself to others.
Another way to regulate your social media usage is finding times to unplug and spend time by yourself or with friends and family. With the increase in social media usage especially among the teenage population, there is constant pressure to chronicle your life online. There is also the expectation that you must respond to people within a certain period of receiving a text or email. However “the idea that we’re available 24/7 is fairly new. Even before email we used to be able to go home after school or after work and not communicate with people” according to Selous. While making the decision not to respond or stop looking at your phone for a certain period of time can be challenging, sometimes it can be the best thing for your mental health. Choosing to unplug is always an option, and communicating this to those around you can not only improve your mental health but can help strengthen your in-person relationships.
However, social media isn’t the only form of technology prevalent in a Fieldston student’s daily life. Google classroom is an integral component of teacher-student communication.
Selous and the other faculty in the technology office have been collecting data from google classroom to get a better understanding of how it impacts students’ workload. Selous described much of her daily work as “getting a lot of data from google classroom to see on average how many assignments you have at different times of the year and to kind of map out the life of a student from a larger perspective, like a year long life. So we can really have conversations around workload.” At Fieldston we have many discussions based around the importance of improving student’s mental health, so as a community we need to prioritize healthy workloads.
These conversations are already happening. For the past few years, Form VI student Emmett Levine has been working with MSelous to revamp the ways in which google classroom is used around Fieldston. Levine, along with a few of his peers, sent out a survey in 2021 to get a better sense of the student homework load. He discovered that many teachers had different modes of assigning homework between google classroom and websites. Levine described, “that a simple fix in google classroom would help take off the cognitive load of students who needed to figure out how to use all these different teachers’ methods of posting homework.” In an effort to implement these changes Levine, along with Selous, started a “pilot group” of around six to seven teachers. Using feedback from both the teachers and students in these classes, Levine and Selous were able to tweak the initiative before bringing to the attention of Dr. Kenny Graves, Upper School Principal Stacy Bobo and the Departement Chairs who were all on board with implementing it into the school. While the program was supposed to have been fully rolled out this spring semester, Levine is still working with teachers “who best need support to enable this change.” He went on to explain that any change takes time and effort to implement into the Fieldston community. Since many teachers have already started switching to google classroom and assigning homework under his created guidelines hopefully it will stick!
At the end of the day, while social media and other technology can be detrimental to mental health, when used correctly it can have a positive impact on teenagers, specifically within the Fieldston student body.
