Blog post #11: Final Blog

 My Relationship With Technology

As someone who was born at the beginning of the 21st century, I have grown up with technology in the back of my pocket, literally. Having a cellphone at such a young age and being such an avid consumer of news through technology so early in life, shaped the way I grew up and the way I use technology today. However, I would not necessarily say I love the way that I grew up relying on technology or that I have the healthiest relationship with technology and social media as a whole. In this age, with mental illnesses on the forefront, teen suicide rates rising, low self-esteem and body image at an all-time low, and technology at an all-time high, it's hard to think that these things are not related. With the prominence of social media in a young person's life, so is the pressure of living up to others' standards, wanting to have the picture-perfect look that the social media and vogue models have, and hating yourself because you want to be someone else. This balance between learning to love yourself for who you are and not sinking to the media's standards is something that is very hard in today's world. 

As someone who has struggled with wanting to fit in with the look of the media, I am aware of my not so healthy relationship with the internet and social media. However, technology itself is a different story. While social media use has been linked to unhappiness and rising levels of anxiety and depression, which is shown in this article here, technology is not the same. In my opinion, there are many different ways to look at the damages and impacts of social media and technology, but with technology itself, the good outweighs the bad. Take out the social media, the texting, all of that. Technology stripped to its core acts as a pocket-size and constant GPS, MP3 player, etc. Technology was made to make people's lives easier, to make finding out information quickly easier, and to make getting places easier. 

Technology is something I have grown up with and something I have very much come to rely on in my everyday life. Whether it is negative or positive, social media and technology have become so prominent in the way I live my life and I can't imagine it without it now, healthy or not.