Are you a Social (media) Butterfly?

 It’s a Saturday morning and there’s a knock at the door. Knock. Knocking. Knock some more. You get there and pull back the door to find your best pal from down the block ready with his bike for the days adventure.  You hear your ma yelling something about brushing your teeth before you head out for the day, but you’re already gone. Ready for adventure, ready to play with your friend and snoop around the neighborhood (neighborhoods) and find out what’s been going on since the previous Saturday. You couldn’t wait to get out of the house.  You couldn’t wait to get out of the neighborhood (secretly of course).  You played in the woods with your friends who all met up at different times throughout the day (depending on how quickly they could bust out of their own houses).  You had a designated meeting place (places) because you didn’t carry around phones and you weren’t able to text or call or snap or whatever at a moments notice.  You craved the face to face interaction with your friends.  It was necessary. It was mandatory.  It was like breathing.  It had to happen.  Friendshipping used to be showing up, in person, being present and enjoying that time with one another interacting and communicating with one another.  But, now…  Now, showing up is the equivalent of snapping the best silly filter or sharing the funniest meme on facebook, having the best picture on insta or the best video on tiktok.  It;s a whole new world.  Some kids are flourishing and some are flopping.  Some kids feel like they have more friends than they would have otherwise while others feel like they are only ignored by multiple avenues that wouldn’t be accessible otherwise.  It’s a whole new world and not in the beautiful sense that Aladdin was singing about.  

 

Blast from the past. That’s a story that was clearly 15, 20, 30 years ago. My kids, In 2020?  Well, let’s not get started on 2020, but without phones and the many social media platforms, they wouldn’t know what to do.  I wonder if they would be as social as they are. I wonder if they would know as much as they do about other people. (I always wonder if they know too much).   I’m at a complete loss on how to really monitor and parent and just keep up with what they should and shouldn’t be allowed to do.  Ugh.  I am not trying to make this a post about parenting because it isn’t, but it is about social media and friendships and teens and how it is taking over so please don’t mind my rant.


I've been thinking about a lot of random things lately though and I can't help but wonder if there won't come a time where this all sort of shuts down for a time. When and if that happens, do these younger generations even know how to communicate? I can't even say that some older generations wouldn't be on the struggle bus if that happened.


It's okay to be a social (media) butterfly, but what if, on occasion, we take the media out of that phrase?


Everything should have balance.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When a phone was just a phone-

  Dopamine- sometimes known as the “feel-good neurotransmitter”.   We all need it, we crave it, we function at a much more excited level when we have it.   Would it blow your mind to know that we get a surge of dopamine when we check our phones?   It’s a pleasure.   It excites us.   What happens when we’re bored?   We pick up our phone.   When we have lost time throughout the day, it’s usually because we’ve gotten lost in a whirlwind of “stuff” on our phone.   We are a generation of addicts.   Not only are we addicted, we can’t get enough.   It’s the last thing we do at night, the first thing we do in the morning, hell when we wake up in the middle of the night we check our phones.   We have new terminology that is based solely on our phone addictions.   Words like ‘nomophobia’ which is the fear of not having your phone, ‘textaphrenia’ is the fear of not being able to send or receive texts, and ‘phantom vibrations’ which is feeling your phone alerting you when it isn’t. Excessive cel
Read more

Lets Disconnect, Together....

About 6 months ago, I got hooked listening to Ted Talks during my morning and afternoon commutes to and from work.  I could listen to all sorts of Ted conversations and it all started with Simon Sinek (thank you Dr. Padgett).  I started out listening to speakers discuss leadership roles and hot=w to find your why or purpose and I ended up in this cycle of stories going on about how connected we are to one another now that we have so much instant access to everyone and everything, but the question that was continually raised was “is this actually causing us more loneliness”? The answer was always different because it can go both ways. At some point we all have to ask ourselves if we are connecting with others for the sake of connection (the number of facebook friends or instagram followers) or are we truly making connections with others.  Teenagers today seem to be lacking a lot of true connecting skills.  It’s more about how many likes or shares or retweets than it is about having an a
Read more

We have the education, but not the Etiquette

Image
  Some of these statistics are blowing my mind.   The majority of people who have their own cell phone are higher educated people, but it appears we have no social decency and etiquette when it comes to handling ourselves in public.   I mean, at what point did we decide we were too important to be present in a conversation or a meeting or WHILE WE ARE DRIVING?   What’s even crazier is that when we are with someone who pulls out their phone to use it in our presence we often feel offended, but are the first ones to pull out our own phone when we are then in the presence of someone else.   I can’t help but wonder why this is.   Do we believe that we are really that important and that every text, call and email must receive a response right away?   But, we are not able to reciprocate that feeling towards others who use their phone in our company?   So far I am simply talking about social gatherings, but have you been in a situation where you find yourself in a professional setting and
Read more