The Space Race

Social media is something that we as the majority of people use on an everyday basis. A lot of people would agree that they probably use social media more than they are told they should. Social media is a great tool that allows people to connect to any other people in the world within a matter of just a few seconds. Instead of being trapped and secluded to only our state and town, our daily tasks can be changed just by knowing about the events taking place in the world. Now, with electronic devices being prevalent in almost every school district in the nation it’s reasonable to believe that social media will have an impact on student lives. I personally believe that while social media does have its known negatives, a lot of those drawbacks can be corrected and the benefits we can receive from it would be invaluable to the rest of history. 

It’s completely understandable why parents, teachers, school board members, etc., would think that social media will negatively impact student education. Social media isn’t perfect and it will never be perfect. But as technology advances we can take preventative measures to ensure people are seeing appropriate and veritable information. The other issue with trying to take it out of schools is of how frequently social media is used by everything in the world. There’s no point in teaching students not to use social media when they are going to be using it in every other aspect of their life in the future.

Thankfully, social media gives us something that no other humans have been able to experience in all of history; instant access to relevant information. For thousands of years, if we wanted to figure out what is going on in another country we’d have to wait months or maybe years for the news to travel by mouth, land, or sea. I mean we didn’t even know that the Earth was a globe or that there was land west of Europe, nevermind being able to share news. So the fact that we can now send any information to any other person on the planet in the matter of a few seconds is a miracle in itself. New technologies like social media are what allow us as a species to grow and evolve into even more advanced technology. If we don’t use social media to the best of our abilities we will inevitably be hurting our technological advancement.

Social media isn’t the first or last innovation that humans will be skeptical and hesitant about. We need those people who disagree to make sure what we create is for the greater good of human life and not for destruction. Social media needs and will be corrected as time moves forward, but getting rid of it won’t be the solution.

“Technology Is Not Technology” by lgb06 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.