by Ben Henschel, co-Editor-in-Chief
Chris Jones didn’t go to his son’s graduation ceremony for a lunar launch — but he got one.
Just above the rafters at the Shawnee Mission North Stadium, it was there: the steep upcurve of a jetstream, just above the outline of the moon. Just a “weird image” that sparked symbolic interest — like his own son, launching into his future. So he wrote down a caption and posted it on Instagram, hoping it would strike emotions with others on the app, too.
That’s what Instagram is for Jones and his family, consisting of two students at East and another two that have graduated. It’s a medium to share their heartfelt, often funny thoughts and moments that would otherwise remain captionless on their camera roll.
But as the 2010s came and went — and the sweeping popularity of mobile media apps and social networks surged — East students have found themselves steeped in online cultures with ends that prove far more corrosive.
Human interaction, according to senior Reilly Moreland, was traded for a system of photo-swaps and glittery post comments. People’s lives documented on Instagram proved to be a far cry from reality, said sophomore Luke Friskel, with fake captions and fabricated photos strewn across every feed. Everyone’s a critic, said junior Josie Lenger, and it leads to a deep sense of self-doubt and incentive to contribute to the excess of exaggerated content. And those who have joined in, to junior Paige Good, are fighting an addiction that increases by the day.
Physical life has taken the back seat, they said — and reality is clouded with holier-than-thou messages built on a media-driven bed of fiction.
“My personality on social media, especially in the first half of the time I’ve been using it, it’s been stripped back,” Lenger said. “You see people and you’re like, ‘oh my god she looks good,’ and you try it. If it doesn’t work, you want to fix it however you can, and a lot of people shape themselves down in a fake way just because they think it’s worth it.”
Instagram and Snapchat — mobile media apps that boast over 1.2 billion combined users — serve varying purposes. But according to Moreland, as norms develop and trends set, digressions from the most popular fads that showcase a person’s natural character are few and far between. The ways in which someone would normally act, according to Lenger, are brushed aside in favor of whatever approach is prevalent, like the endless stream of beach pictures over winter break or the wave of posts that clutter a post-school dance Sunday.
Conclusive evidence on the effects of media on the minds of youth remain to fully be seen, according to former President of the Kansas Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics Dr. Dennis Cooley. But the tendency of students to sway with public opinion regardless of their own personal thought, he said, is present without a doubt.
Lenger’s first few years on Instagram were built off of a perceived need to “fit an image,” with her pictures and captions aimed at matching the polished ones that filled her feed. She scrolled past summer pool pictures with paper-thin subjects in the summer of seventh grade, and felt compelled to photoshop her own. If she saw a pose she wanted to replicate but couldn’t, an app like Facetune could do it for her.
It wasn’t until years later — after playing the pincushion at school, being told how strangely “different [she] looked in real life” and asked why she feels the need to edit photos — that she realized none of it was ever worth it, and all of it was gratuitous.
“Editing the photos that much was just never worth it, and it took me a bit to realize it, but it’s really the stupidest thing,” Lenger said. “It’s whatever I feel like now. They’re going to see me in person, why would I try so hard to fake that? A lot of people just don’t get it still.”
Snapchat serves as a different, but equally contrived platform that takes people out of their real lives and emphasizes the false importance of their digital ones, according to East parent and former high school principal Vicky Griffin.
Users are able to see their friends’ lives in real time, Griffin said — like on Snapmap, a feature of Snapchat that allows users to transmit their location each time they use the app. And according to Griffin, when they see a group of their friends together from their phone screen, without an invitation themselves, it fuels feelings of self-doubt that aren’t easily mended.
And in spite of the palpable risks surrounding the app, many students aren’t able to pinpoint why they use it in the first place.
“I honestly don’t understand it at all, maybe it’s just the routine,” junior Paige Good, who downloaded Snapchat only recently due to her friends’ rare use of conventional texting, said. “That’s how people are communicating. It’s just really dumb and I thought I might start to understand it, but I still don’t.”
“It’s more of a, ‘hey, I’m here’ thing than anything we should really be spending time on,” Moreland said. “And it’s so hard to get off of.”
There is more to be lost from deleting apps like Snapchat and Instagram than you’d think, according to Lenger. She uses Snapchat mostly for her private story, which she’s come to value as a vessel for self-expression — and when she deleted it, there was a vacuum that sucked away her sense of connection to her friends.
“Honestly, I wouldn’t want to admit it but those three weeks were pretty miserable,” Lenger said. “I would see the funniest picture, type it all out even though I knew I couldn’t post it. I don’t know, I just felt empty because I couldn’t express myself. I had to start it again.”
There’s danger in the amount that youth consume social media, Griffin said — life on social media is wiped clean of reality’s dirt, and personalities are split with every Snapchat sent and every picture edited.
When Griffin was a high school principal, students used flip-phones for nothing more than the occasional call or text — there was interaction. Students learned fine motor and social skills by solving problems in person. If someone had a problem, they’d resolve it and meet in the middle with conversation.
Now, what has changed to her is clear.
“There’s none of it,” Griffin said. “The interaction is gone, and it’s not just kids. It’s everyone. The difference is that kids being born now and before, and even you guys, you’re born into it. These kids are born with a cell phone in their hands.”
Social media’s influence won’t dwindle as society moves into the 2020’s, according to Moreland, and that’s why it’s more important than ever to be true to yourself on mobile media apps and put them away when they begin to pervade the truth, she said.
According to Dr. Dennis Cooley, the anxiety and media-induced depression cases that doctors see will increase in quantity and scope — so the importance of “kids understanding the effects and how to use [social media]” is more important than ever, he said.
And with the incremental surge of youth media use in and out of the classroom, Griffin said, the level of digital immersion and technology-driven anxiety to be seen in the future introduces problems that may never come with conclusive answers — and the hope for a change in mindset is high.
“I’m really, really interested to see where this generation ends up later on,” Griffin said. “How many likes can I get? How many [Snapchat streaks] can I get? That’s what people are focusing on. Maybe that’s the way [society] is going. But I really hope it’s not.”
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