It is no secret that today’s youth have a peculiar addiction to all things technological and media-oriented. Twitter, the micro-blogging site where people inform their “followers” of their day-to-day routines. Facebook, where it has become socially acceptable to stalk people to whom you have not spoken since high school. YouTube, the epicenter of “viral” videos of flash mobs performing the Party Rock Shuffle. StumbleUpon, the holy grail of adorable, captioned photos of cats and sleeping babies. However, it has cause a great disturbance in school work, family affairs, and social life. Face it, more adolescents would rather spend their afternoons stalking their exes and favorite celebrities and watching videos of a three-year-old rambling existential nonsense after a visit to the dentist than visiting with relatives or going to the movies with their friends. That is, if they still have friends after spending so much time on the internet. That is why this author proposes changes to the social habits of today’s teens through means of serious intervention by incorporating these strictly online phenomenons into real-life situations.
Imagine sharing your most mundane thoughts of every waking moment with the entire world. Now imagine millions of people you do not know also know these amusing factoids about your personal life. In order to solve the Twitter addiction, in which teens inform their “followers” of their mental/emotional/relationship statuses, not to mention their location or their absolute loathing of the amount of homework they have, all within 140 characters or less. This is often the case for celebrity personas who share their lives on the internet. People are obsessed with knowing every minute detail of their lives. The solution to the problem is simple. Instead of virtually “following” them, teens will be required to spend one whole day with a celebrity. However, they cannot directly interact with them, just as they would not be able to through the Internet. They could only observe them and their daily routine from a safe distance away. They will be able to comprehend the fact that other people’s lives, no matter how glamorous they may seem over the internet, are just as boring as theirs and not worth the time. Similar tests were conducted at Yale in 2007 with lab rats and hamsters. These two animals were put into the same cage and given a hamster wheel for entertainment. Specialists have claimed over the years that the only reason rats use the wheels is so they can look and feel like the much more socially adept hamsters. However, when placed in the same cage, the rats realized that the hamsters never actually used the wheel anyway; it was all for show. The rats now know how boring the life of a hamster really is, thus giving validation to the Twitter experiment.
The next problem to address is the so-called “Facebook addiction” of the recent generation. Almost as bad as Twitter, but ten times more interactive. People can post pictures of themselves, their friends, their families, play mind-enriching games such as FarmVille, and openly stalk their one-time high school boyfriend. They can also post their “status” of what they are doing at the time (similar to Twitter, but the character limit doesn’t exist). However, due to what is known as the phenomenon of the “Me, too” generation, most of the activities on this site have been characterized as narcissistic or attention-seeking from the individual user. That is why this author proposes a new rule of Facebook, to be implemented immediately. When updating a status, the user must include some positive remark about another user. That way, the site becomes a tool to encourage people instead of tearing them down. Such as an example would be “Had fun today at the beach. Shirley, I like your shoes”. Users feel much better about themselves when they know they increased someone’s self-esteem by mentioning them in a status update. These measures will soon extend beyond the world behind the computer screen and transition into real-life. People will begin to complement one another right and left and think next to nothing about themselves anymore.
Finally, we must tackle the problem of YouTube overload. One can only handle so many videos of sneezing baby pandas and renditions of Rebecca Black’s iconic, award-winning song “Friday”. However, watching these videos has become a regular pastime for teens, taking the place of reading, doing homework, talking with friends on the phone, and even playing video games. People are simply taking greater pleasure in watching someone crash on their bicycle or fall off a trampoline. To reverse this problem, the solution is simple. For every video watched, the viewer must endure a similar, humiliating circumstance to that of the video they watched for the same duration of the video. For example, if they watched a two-minute video of someone pogo-sticking unsuccessfully, the same fate shall be bestowed upon them. The same goes for watching the music video for Beyonce’s “Single Ladies—you have to do the dance—or watching that age-old classic from the Muppets, “Mahna Mahna”. And yes, you must sing the song for the full three minutes. If this poor subject can endure endless views and comments regarding a moment’s poor judgment, the viewer can surely endure something similar in the comfort and privacy of their own home.
Three different sites, three different preventative measures toward social media addiction. Through this, teens will hopefully come to the realization that reality, in fact, is better than the internet.
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