Were In The Same Boat: Navigating the Tides of Social Media

Written by Katherine McCracken
Edited by Kathy Lu
Cover Image by Nancy Cao

Last Thursday night I spent 30 minutes reading comments on some random person’s video, attempting to find something controversial to keep me interested. Kanye West is canceled again. Again? He tweeted that he’s about to go “deathcon 3 on jewish people.” You'll check the comments to see what others think, believing that you already know, until you find the top comments and you realize you were wrong: “you cant even have a damn opinon nowadays”, “they control anything”, “people cant handle the truth,” “hes breaking out of the matrix,” “WE BELIEVE YOU,” “Facts 100 emoji,” “I stand with Ye.” Whether it is muscle memory or desensitization, I scrolled on to some other scandal and some other controversy. At some point I fell asleep.

In downtown Jacksonville, the phrase “Kanye is right about the jews” was projected on multiple buildings, and yet somehow word of Taylor Swift’s net worth surpassing Kanye’s is the more popular topic of discussion. Her new album just dropped but it was also Holocaust Awareness week and a Survivor was speaking at school. She begged the thirty individuals in the EK library to not let any other groups of people down in the same way that she and her mother were let down during World War II. She warned us before she left: “you never know who the next group will be,” before she was cut off as class had started one minute ago. She spread images of her family across a table for lingering individuals to look at. I then had chemistry class.

It is no wonder why we cannot stop looking at our screens late into the night, distracting ourselves from sleep with unfulfilling mindless consumption. How are we supposed to go from math homework, to fifteen second Tiktoks and Instagram infographics with images of dead children, to funny skits and television shows about the royal family, to history class and genocide, to chatting with your friends, to Kim Kardashian’s latest surgery, to Holocaust remembrance, to chemistry class without a sense of numbness? I find myself struggling to form a sentence to describe these events without horrifying an English teacher: a sentence should be comprehensible, but when it’s constantly flooded with stimulation from social media, it becomes difficult to separate mundane events in our lives from the tragic realities of others. Everything blends together and nobody knows how to transition between them. It seems inappropriate to coexist with tragedy, responsibility and joy when they are at such drastic odds to one another. It feels insensitive to have humor while others are suffering, or to leave a Holocaust survivor’s presentation early to get to class on time. I don’t think we can fully feel both joy and great loss to the extent they deserve without emotional collapse and so the pit I find myself in is one of numbness. The emotional maturity required to safely navigate social media is rare amongst adults, let alone a 12-year-old who just got Instagram and is making some right-of-passage embarrassing selfies. I know children as young as in grade 4 with phones and access to social media. This is not to say minors shouldn’t have social media. It can be a tool to amplify the voices of underrepresented people, to connect with others and is simply fun to have and to use. Kids care about issues perceived as “grown up problems,” but that label is misdefined unless it is in regards to taxes. We care about social justice issues because they are connected to our lives. Our youth doesn’t absolve us from caring about the justice and wellbeing of others. The question of “why can’t kids just be kids anymore” can be answered by our access to social media. We have the means to be just as educated as the adults are on global issues. Learning about these affairs is empowering and terrifying at the same time. This article does not hold the key to balancing excessive consumption, world issues, or mental health, but I have some ideas that might be helpful in navigating our feelings and overall help us feel less sad.

I may have heard it said by a seemingly shallow character called Karen from Mean Girls. She calls it the “rule of twos”' and describes it as “everything is really two things.” I've taken that and added some details: two things can be true at the same time. For example, social media can be good for my mental health, and at the same time it can be bad for me. This rule applies to balancing online access to world issues and your in-person life in the sense that you can care about big societal problems, and you can care about the comparatively trivial things in your life at the same time. The value of both things doesn’t need to be weighed on the same scale because in comparison to life or death situations, school work seems irrelevant. But as we've just learned, two things can be true: schoolwork is less urgent than global issues, and at the same time, it is a privilege to have an education and important to take it seriously. Secondly, you don't need permission to be happy. Joy isn’t the absence of tragedy but its acceptance: accepting that tragedy happens and it is a part of life, but we love life enough to keep going, and that tragedy only exists because of beautiful things like our fight for love and freedom and these wonderful things that make us human. Mourning is also celebrating.

My second piece of advice is to be mindful of your age and use it as an advantage. Social media creates immense pressure to do great things right now. My suggestion is to slow down. Being young means you have time to think and explore different things. Everyone is different, so it only makes sense that everyone’s activism is different. Some of us probably aren’t going to change the world at fifteen, however the things we are doing now might help us change the world later on. Our investment in our education in combination with our own passions and ideas will make a difference at some point in our lives and will manifest itself in many forms. The road less traveled isn’t more important than the regular road, as long as you are moving along and enjoying the journey. My final words of wisdom are those Phoebe-Waller Bridge’s mother told her: “Darling, you can be whatever you want to be as long as you’re outrageous.”