Blog Post #3 - Social Media, Kayla, and Anxiety. (Colby Harrison)

    I find it interesting that our generation, a generation raised on social media, is rife with mental health problems. Maybe this is because mental health advocation has improved greatly or maybe the number of people dealing with mental health problems are much, MUCH higher.  Regardless, I think we can all agree that social media has certainly had an impact on this, and anxiety has been a frequent issue within the realm of mental health and social media.   

    

    Baym is right, our regular day practices and routines have been altered because of social media. We are conscious of every action we do and life begins to feel staged or fictional because we see everything through a distorted lens of social media. Technological determinism sums up our current situation perfectly, that the development and implementation of technology aka social media, is what has established our present social structure and culture, acting as a base for everything to come. It's the technology (social media) that has resulted in this anxiety inducing effect on society. 

    Baym mentions interactivity and social media pushes you to “interact” whether that involves you consuming or producing within the platform, you are interacting with the monster that is social media. The life of Kayla in Eighth Grade does such an amazing job at documenting a teenager grappling with the anxieties brought on from social media and the complete alteration of typical social practices.  

    Kayla is a quiet girl. She feels the pressure to stand out and make friends at school but is constantly overwhelmed by the social environment around her, one that feels like she is judged by others. This is all a product of social media. The fictional and perfect world presented through social media is not the same as reality and it becomes so difficult to discern between the two, therefore us (Kayla), being the children of social media that we are, retreat to the safe and manageable world of social media which only feeds the addiction. Eighth Grade does a fantastic job highlighting how scary the world can be when raised on social media, something accentuated when you were younger like Kayla is, for now that we are older, it's hard to believe that we once saw the world in this manner. This is part of what makes Eighth Grade so powerful, it captures the terrifying world that we all navigated our way through when we were 14 years old. Social media affected our lives making life seem scary, and anxiety filled, this is the implication of technological determinism. Social media has given people a place to show off and perform, and for someone in elementary school growing up, that's all we wanted to do. It's highly interactive, for now we don't interact with other people just in person but also online, through video games, and on social media and so much more. Our time truly spent alone begins to lessen and lessen with the further implementation of social media but yet we continue to use it. Fear of missing out sets in because social media has broken down typical privacy barriers of our lives making everything feel like a performance. I hope this makes some sense to you guys because I am just writing down my thoughts, but this is exactly what caused so much anxiety in Kayla's life. She was always chasing the person she wanted to be and forgot about who she truly is at that time in her life. 

    The way we act, speak, and move within society was forever changed from technology. You might not think so but it's in the little social intricacies of life. For example, how many of us hate having to call a restaurant on the phone now? We would much rather text or email right? We have become conditioned to having the pleasure of crafting a response or maybe not even responding at all, that the idea of talking on the phone or in person to someone seems scary. That is shown in Eighth Grade too when Kayla (who we know is fun and caring) struggles to properly convey her emotions and how she feels, resulting in her never forming a true connection with someone until the end of the film, when she drops the act that social media presence has caused her to create. Social media has pushed us to constantly “perform” and I think the word interactive is misleading. Interactive feels as though we are serving a purpose and interacting with the world through social media but that's not the case at all. What we really are doing is interacting with a fictional world created to satisfy our needs and in there lies the cause of all our anxiety and Kaylas.