What makes a good digital citizen

What makes us good digital citizens of social media? 

Is social media actually the problem? 

“If you look for the light you can often find it, but if you look for the dark that is all you will ever see.” – Iroh. 

I was lucky. I was born when phones were only just beginning to look less like bricks and slightly more like the sleek pieces of technology we know today. I had a childhood of colouring, climbing trees, dressing up, playing in the mud and almost everything that kids nowadays don’t seem to enjoy doing. My family had one desktop computer, one TV and a house phone. That was the extent of our ‘technology’ but at this point we didn’t need anything else. This was enough.

My parents eventually got mobile phones and my brother and I were finally allowed Nokias in year 7. It sounds insane now but it was all we needed because we didn’t spend our lives online. We visited people instead of facetiming or messaging them. We experienced things ourselves because we wanted to, not because everyone else was and we wanted to join the montage of Facebook photos. Our private lives were private and we enjoyed what we did without having to tell the whole online world about it.

My family, like so many others ten years ago, were content and happy with focusing on reality and only using the internet when necessary; computers then took so long to turn on, most of the time we just didn’t bother.

But time changes, whether we want it to or not. I remember starting secondary school and hearing about Facebook and Twitter and I was so blissfully unaware. By my second year of secondary school I was a fully pledged member of the online world; constantly connected to Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. It had taken me ages to convince my dad to let me get Facebook and as soon as I made that account, everything spiralled out of control. It was strange because I loved it, I completely relied on it, it was my life but I also hated it. It controlled me all the time and although it was horrible, I felt like it would be worse to not have it at all.

Bullying at school was made significantly worse through the use of social media because the bullying didn’t stop when I got home. The sadness and despair I was feeling was thoroughly amplified through social media because it gave the bullies a new found confidence. They were behind a screen and a keyboard, away from anyone who could overhear them. Social media gave the bullies anonymity which only added to their confidence and their abuse. They were free to say whatever they wanted and they abused that freedom completely. Bullying and abuse is, unfortunately, very common and social media only seems to escalate the problems people face instead of helping them.

But despite all of this, despite all of the negative aspects that I’ve seen, heard about and experienced, there is one thing I will always believe about social media. Social media isn’t, never has been and never will be the problem. We are. How we use it gives the affects that we hate to see. Social media is blamed for self-harm rates and bullying but social media doesn’t do the bullying; we do.

In a generation growing up along with developing technology, it seems that older generations are scared of the new things and happy to stick with old, traditions. New technology is not something to be scared of; it is something to be celebrated and researched.

Most of what I hear about social media is negative but if we all stop for a minute and think about the positives of social media you’ll find they considerably outweigh the negatives. There is actually only one negative and that is how we use it. We can call people who live across the other side of the world and see their face and their family. We can research and develop new ideas through social media.

Social media helped me find people who were similar to me. I found that there were people who, like me, hated this patriarchal society and there was something I could do about it. I found friends across the other side of the world. I found inspirational people like Emma Watson and Malala Yousafzai, who fought for my beliefs and fought for others who did not have a voice. I found people to inspire me to live my life how I wanted to and to never give up and to always fight for what I believed in. My passions were brought to life on social media and I found there was somewhere I could voice my views on gender inequality and homophobia. I found out about places that I had never heard of and used them as inspiration to beat my demons and visit all the amazing places this world has to offer. I found the one thing that could save my life, on social media: music. I found people who sang for me and I made friends because of the music that I loved. In the latter years of my life I have found that if you look for negativity, then that’s all that will ever be, but if you look for positivity and hope, you can find it in the strangest of places.

Social media can be very detrimental to society and especially to young girls with the constant pictures of models, giving them the impression that they aren’t good enough, when this couldn’t be further from the truth. But it’s not social media that causes all of these problems; it’s how we use it and if we abuse the power that it gives us.

Social media has been blamed repeatedly for the problems that I faced growing up; from body confidence to self-harm and although I cannot deny it worsened the situation, I do think that social media is not the one we should be blaming here. It’s us.

Harriett Smith.