Blog Post #11

 Final Blog Post

  My relationship with technology and social media is equally distributed, in my opinion. There are times where I think technology and social media in general are very bad for me, especially for my mental health. But then there are times where I think that I wouldn't know where my life would have gone if I didn't have the experience I had with technology, especially since I have my own platform on social media. My own platform on social media has gotten me to so many milestones in my life that I never would have thought could happen, so for that aspect of the use of technologies, it's really impacted my life. But there are definitely downsides that come along with that. There have been multiple occasions where I've been on my technologies including my phone, laptop, and iPad for an excessive amount of hours. This is obviously not good for myself --- both mentally and physically. There have been times where I've spent over 2 hours on TikTok, and I've really procrastinated doing homework because of this. This affected my work ethic at school tremendously and showed that the use of technology took up a lot of my time, when it shouldn't. 

    For my friends and family, I think technology has its advantages and disadvantages with them as well. With my friends, I'd say their relationship with technology is similar to my experience with technology as we were all born in the generation where technology has become such a powerful and special thing to us. With my parents though, I feel that their relationship with technology is not the same as my sibling and I's, but my parents definitely see the positive in the technologies, especially with the way it supports us in doing such tasks like transferring money with our phones, communicating via text messages, FaceTime, and so much more. But my parents sometimes will also think technology, and social media in general have more negative impacts, more so regarding technology with the younger generation. My brother is considered a part of the "younger generation", and he is definitely more glued to his technologies, along with kids his age. I've seen my parents limit his screen time, especially since it's affected his work ethic at school, and not only that, but it also was not good for his health --- both physically and mentally. Since my brother is always looking at screens, his eyes have gotten really bad and although he has glasses now, this shows that his eyes have gotten tremendously worse due to technologies. On the other hand, with the use of technology, it allows my family and I to communicate with our families all over the globe. Having family members overseas is very hard sometimes as we can't see each other all the time, but technology has allowed us to keep in touch with each other with just a click of a button, which is definitely a huge benefit of technology. Studies have shown that 54% of people think technologies helps them be closer to their families and friends, which could be why we're always glued to our phones.

     If I was applying to a job, my prospective employer would see my social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. They would find the content I create for my own personal platform and for the school I'm attending. I have quite a presence online as one of the first things that pop up when I search my name up are my social media platforms. In addition to the social media platforms, my prospective employer would also see my LinkedIn profile, which shows all my information on where I attend school, my major, work and internship experiences, along with my skills and achievements. This paints a positive image on myself when applying to jobs as it expresses my professionalism. Although there isn't really anything I would edit out, I would double check all of the content I post on my socials, especially my old content to make sure there isn't anything on there that I wouldn't want shown to the public, especially towards my employers.

Overall, we can see that there are both positives and negatives to technology and the use of social media. While I think sometimes there's a good balance between the benefits and costs of technologies and social media, I wouldn't necessarily take technology away from people because it definitely has a huge impact on our economy and the way our world works. Although I don't personally think getting rid of technologies overall is a good thing, there are many ways people can try to limit their use of technology, which can then lead to better and happier outcomes of it. As I've grown older, I've learned to set limits for myself, and one of them is to try and balance out my use of technology, especially social media, with what I'm doing. I've struggled with mental health before and a big part of that was due to the use of social media, and I've recently started going on walks and moving my body to try and boost my health, both physically and mentally. Being a content creator who's always on social media, it's hard to separate myself from technology as social media content creation is something that I am passionate about. But learning to be more active, while also balancing content creation on top of that, I've learned that it's one of the best and easiest things an individual could do to help boost their mental health.