Blog Post #3 - Noah Weinstein

  Baym certainly makes some excellent points about the anxiety that stems from digital media. Just as she states, these media raise significant issues regarding authenticity and well-being of people, interactions, and relationships, and this is reflected extremely well in the movie, Eighth Grade. In the movie, Kayla, the protagonist, is emblematic of our entire generation that has been raised on social media. She is quite awkward and appears to have difficulty forming relationships at school. She is often seen using social media, whether it be scrolling through her feed, posting a Snapchat story, or filming a YouTube video. However, just as Baym described, she is very clearly not acting authentic over social media. For example, in her YouTube videos, she gives social advice and acts as if she possesses very strong social skills. Most often, she gives advice that is completely contradictory to her own actions. Or, as I mentioned in my previous blog post, there is an instance in which she puts on makeup before getting back into bed, and then takes a selfie to post to her Snapchat story with a caption similar to, “Just woke up like this”. Social media has taught her an unrealistic standard of beauty that she feels pressure to conform to. The reality is that nobody wakes up looking like this, but people on social media want everyone to think that they do. This is a major cause of anxiety, especially amongst young people, as they feel that they can never live up to this unauthentic standard.

It is quite clear that Kayla’s ability to interact and create relationships with others is impacted by social media. Having grown up while social media is so prominent in society, she has not developed some crucial interpersonal skills that would assist her with these. Instead, she has learned how to interact via social media as opposed to in-person, which are quite different. It appears as though her confidence is significantly higher on social media, which is evident through the contrast in her behaviour between her YouTube videos and how she speaks to her classmates. She is far less anxious online, while in person she seems nervous, self-conscious and hesitant.

Kayla has countless outbursts directed towards her father throughout the movie. This seems to be a result of her social struggles and she unfortunately takes out her frustration on her dad. This is exactly what Baym refers to when she mentions technological determinism in order to understand the anxieties she discusses; the development and use of technology, which in this case is social media, impacts the functioning and standards of society. Social media has drastically changed the way that everyone, especially young people, live their lives. It has made things seem scary, made people feel less of themselves, pressured people to conform to unrealistic standards, harmed people’s abilities to interact with each other, the list goes on. Technological determinism explains Kayla’s anxiety perfectly. Her world is turned upside-down by the power that social media holds over society and there is little she can do to fight it.