In a recent episode of the Tyra Show (I know... I like to watch Tyra, sometimes good topics like this one come on!) she had a show called "The Internet Has Taken Over My Life", and there were several young girls who claim the Internet is ruining their lives.
The first young girl says she is addicted to Facebook because she seems to miss appointments and sometimes she checks it up to 100 times a day. She has 1,336 friends on there, and I feel as if she is doing this because she wants to be popular and liked, and the online environment allows her to achieve that. But is she really making friends? Will these people make her life more enjoyable? I wonder what she gains from spending so much time on in Internet rather than “real-life”?
Another fad that is going around among young girls is reading celebrity blogs. Some girls say they are reading the blogs up to 25 times throughout the day. They say they don’t want to go to school or even on vacation because they might miss what’s going on in those celebrities’ lives, and they NEED to know. Has this fad made young girls want to change their identity to be like the celebrities? Are we going to see a difference in this age groups online activity in the coming years because of these blogs?
Along with the girls, young men are getting caught up in this as well. Boyfriends are checking Facebook pages out of jealousy. He checks her page up to 4 times in 1 hour! Is the Internet making him question his trust in his girlfriend? Or is he just using the Internet to show his true personality?
Finally, the most drastic case was a young girl who participates in an online anime community and in turn, it has totally isolated her from the rest of the world. She spends about 14 hours a day on this site. She said “The more time I spend on the web, the more I start feeling it’s the only world I’ve got. She now has no friends to physically hang out with, she failed high school and is re-taking it, and had gained 30 pounds because of lack of exercise. She also never even goes out of the house if she does not have to. She locks herself in her room isolated from her family and friends to live in this online community.
Are all of these people afraid of something? Are they ashamed of who they are? Do they turn to the internet because people are maybe more accepting there?
I am still trying to figure out why people spend this much time on the Internet and hopefully with further research I will be able to come to some assumptions that will clear up this grey area for me…..
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You talked about the young girl who had over a thousand friends. And I agree I think that facebook has become a tool that people use as a basis of popularity. There is no way she has that many friends who she talks to regularly. The internet is an amazing tool, I can't imagine my life without it. However I do think that it is being abused by many people. You talked about the boyfriend who checks his girlfriends facebook multiple times in 1 hour. Wow what kind of ideals is this laying out for his future relationships. I can see him having some seroius trust issues.
ReplyDeleteI also agree. We talked about Facebook today in class and it can add and subtract from social capital. And in these cases it is definitely subtracting from the social capital. I also think that these people do not have a very clear distinction between reality and virtual reality. When one spends most of their time online, and are suffering because of it, it has then become too much.
ReplyDeleteOne of the Harmful Social Implications Brey wrote about was that the internet. Under the topic about identity formation he mentions this line between virtual and real worlds, and how the internet can become addicting. Having too much of one thing is never good, and it also applies to the internet.
I totally agree that the internet can be abused. Those who spend more time on it than in reality or in "real life" being social have maybe gotten a little carried away. However what about those people we talked about who might have troubles interacting in "real life" and look for the internet to be their outlet. The internet to them might be like being back in the day when we were 16 and wanted nothing but to be with our friends all of time, except they just want to be online I guess there are always exceptions to everything!
ReplyDeleteI also think that parents are part of the problem when the kid doesn't graduate high school. I think that when you let your kids get away with being on the internet all the time thats all that they ever want to do and it totally affects their lives on and offline.