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In the movies, high school kids are either in the popular group or are nerdy outcasts trying to fit in and climb the social ladder. Apparently there are only about thirty students in each grade and there is no middle ground. The way that I remember high school there were a handful of people that seemed pretty universally liked, a handful of real dweebs, and about two hundred others that fell somewhere in between. I probably would have fallen closer to the dweeb end of that imaginary scale, but I was never wedgied, swirlied, or stuffed into a locker, so things weren’t all that bad.
For today’s teenagers, that scale is no longer imaginary. Popularity is something that can be easily quantified. Facebook friends, Twitter followers, likes, shares, and so many other ways across all the various social media platforms. Daily life is now a non stop popularity contest, with the results at their fingertips. Before it became the juggernaut that it is today, Facebook was once known as Facesmash, a site for Harvard students to rate each other’s attractiveness. It literally started as a popularity contest.
By now everyone is aware of how important it is to monitor our children’s online activities, but I wonder if we are always looking at the right things. A positive status update or a new Instagram selfie showing off a haircut or new outfit may seem like good things to us, but without enough “likes” or other online positive reinforcement can easily lead to moodiness or feelings of inadequacy. There’s even a fancy name for it : Social Media Anxiety Disorder, the excessive preoccupation with how the things being shared are received.
It’s not just teenagers that are having these problems. If anything, it seems like social media has a way of turning perfectly adjusted adults back into high schoolers. Jealousy, braggadocio, pettiness, we see all of these daily as we scroll through the minutia of other people’s lives. Its no secret that the size of a person’s stones increases greatly when it’s a screen in front of them and not another person.
This isn’t intended to be another old man rant about how much better things used to be. If you’re around my age, chances are you first signed up for Facebook as a way to reconnect with people from old jobs or schools that you wouldn’t keep in contact with otherwise. Several of my best friends live in other parts of the country now and I get to see pictures of them and their children frequently. I get most of my sports news from my phone and a few months ago played a game of “who would win a fight between” with novelist Joe Hill and a few other fans on Twitter. It was cool.
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This post was previously published on www.thirstydaddy.com and is republished here with permission from the author.
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Photo credit: Istockphoto.com