Everyone has spent numerous hours on Twitter, Instagram and endless more apps and social media sites, but have you ever thought to think about different ways to spend your time? When our parents were growing up they spent their time playing kickball or playing four square with their neighbors, but it seems like the only time our generation goes outside is to get to our cars.
Social media is a way to stay in touch with peers, but sometimes teens use it too much and for the wrong reasons. High school students shouldn’t spend endless hours a day looking at a screen to see someone they’ve seen seven hours a day a day at school or random people’s selfies. Honestly how exciting can it be?
“I think that people should just hang out with friends in real life instead of just waiting to see what they do on social media like Facebook,” junior Kyle Timmons said. “Don’t look at the memories your friends made, make memories with your friends.”
I am guilty of this terrible habit. It is really “fun” to look through people’s Instagram accounts from other schools that you barely know, but you shouldn’t need them to accept your follow request so you have one more person’s profile to stalk during your free time.
“I wish I grew up in a world without social media because it gives me headaches and makes my life way more complicated,” freshman Janie Ferris said.
Instead of looking at endless tweets about Kim Kardashian and gold and black dresses you could be outside playing with your dog who you might seem to ignore quite often because you are always on your phone.
Many teens will start their homework just to be interrupted three minutes later because they are responding with an ugly face to a snap chat to a friend. A recent Milestone survey shows that 78% of students spend one to two hours distracted at school by social media, and many said they would rather not have social media as a part of their everyday life.
“I spend one to two hours at school getting distracted by social media, but I like to be able to able to see what is going on in the world,” junior Sara Crooker said.
Social media is a great tool to be used in moderation, but it shouldn’t cause your life to be more complicated. Now that social media has been embedded in our society, there might be no way of breaking the habit of looking at it for hours on end, but Society as a whole should find a way to limit the amount of time spent on social media.
The McNicholas Milestone 