FINAL KEY POST

 MY RELATIONSHIP WITH MEDIA

    The age of advanced technology has brought about many blessings and makes communicating more efficient, yet it can also have negatives to it as well. Having to balance your daily activities with engaging on social media can be hard for lots of people, but if you're a responsible person it can help you out in several way and make life more enjoyable. Personally, I believe that I maintain a healthy relationship with my use of my cell phone. I do use social media apps like Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok but it doesn't become a distraction for me. On average, I spend about 4 and a half hours per day on my phone. That may seem like a lot on first glance but the average for teenage screen time was 7 hours as of the year 2019. I try to prioritize using my phone as a reward for getting all of my work done during the day so that I can use my phone as a luxury to help me wind down and relax after a hard-working day. Like I mentioned earlier, technology has many benefits for the young adult brain, but being able to decipher good information from bad/fake information is a skill that I've been able to develop over the last 4 years. I even took a class here at High Point University that focused on features that make a news source fabricated or misleading. That class allowed me to take in information and make an educated decision on whether or not to subscribe to the opinions or narrative that the author is trying to spin. I've also developed the ability to find alternative sources for news, especially for politics, that offer the same facts but filter out all the opinionated takes that the talking heads feel the need to express. I try not to let all the stress of the online sphere affect me, but watching some people my age use social media in a negative fashion has rubbed me the wrong way in the past. That's why being able to block and mute people on social media allows you to remove those negative people off the platform. 

    

    It's interesting to look at how the older generations have approached the advance in technology. My father in particular is a software engineer so he has to use technology everyday for his job. Because of that, he's more technologically savvy than the ordinary middle-aged person would be. My mom on the other hand doesn't feel the need to use her phone as much. She typically only uses it to check on what other people are up to on Facebook and to communicate with the rest of my immediate family. I'd say the one bad thing that has come with my family adapting to digital media is their use of Life360. That's an app that allows a user to track the rest of their family through a tracking device integrated into your cellphone. It's important to have for emergency situations, but it can be extremely frustrating to be tracked for no reason other than that. It makes my social life a little bit harder to navigate but I can sympathize with my parents for why they feel the need to keep tabs on what I'm doing when I'm not around or at school. All together, I feel as if cellphones have lots of positives and negatives but ultimately gives us lots of opportunities to learn and feel safer.