How Many Likes Did You Get?

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Artice I reference in this blog found here.

I have heard this phrase many times throughout my life, especially in relation to Instagram, or another social media platform. It is almost as if the amount of likes equates to how accepted you are, or how much you are liked by another person. This can be a form of anxiety for many teenagers because we are at an age where we really want to be accepted; to be part of a group. According to Jacqueline Shall, a member of the Department of Psychology in Education in Pennsylvania, "Fitting in, or gaining peer acceptance, is a primary objective of youth in the high school context and, for many adolescents, may be more important than academic goals. Not surprisingly then, perceptions of belonging have been determined to have important effects on adolescent development, influencing both social and academic outcomes. For example, the prevalence of teasing and bullying as perceived by adolescents is predictive of dropout rates among those students." I find this extremely true. I can call on my own experience that gives more evidence to their findings. It is just harder for a student to do well if they are struggling to fit in.
For example, if you are so focused on fitting in, you may hang out with friends just to be included when you know you have a lot of homework to do. You may wear something that you may not really like, just to try to fit in. You may even start skipping school to try to be cool. This is extremely detrimental to your school like, because how are you supposed to learn if you are not even in the class. With social media, this is even worse. You might have even more anxiety to try to fit in and conform, you might spend so much time obsessing over your statistics, or the number of likes that you get that you have to stay up until the early hours of the morning to finish your homework, or you will just go to sleep. This is just going to continue to drop your grades. It's difficult being a teen in a world up to it's neck in technology. 

Comments

  1. UnknownDecember 17, 2017 at 5:09 PM

    I agree; as a teenager growing up in this media-centric society, I find much validation in getting a certain amount of likes, even if that number grows along with my inability to discern "cool" from "good." I find that I am happier when someone tells me that they like my most recent post on Instagram or if one of my posts happens to reach the number of likes that I have deemed "acceptable" in relation to my amount of followers more gratifying than learning a new bit of information. The ideals created by social media have shaped our society as well as the minds of the people who have been exposed to such media long enough to care about abiding by the "rules" in order to feel accepted.

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