The Role of Social Media in our Lives | Jake Swayze | TEDxSouthPasadenaHigh

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] my name is Jake suy and I'm a teen okay over the course of the next 10 minutes I'm going to touch on a lot of things but basically here's how it's going to go I'm going to talk about privacy how phones and social media affect our lives and what we should do about that okay everyone good cool so this is a talk about technology which is an amorphous topic and lately when people talk about technology they talk about privacy but when they talk about privacy they talk about the NSA big corporations and these huge entities that are spying on us constantly which is true but I don't really care I'm fine with the government spying on me it's cool I don't do anything interesting the worst that could happen is if I try to work for the government and they're like wow you watch way too many videos of Kanye singing with his mom you should not spend that many hours watching noted rapper Kanye Omari West singing with his mom we are not going to hire you so I'm just going to ignore the evil government and corporations using technology to spy on you aspect of privacy because there's a different one I do care about because of these phones we all have we're always accessible no matter where we are no matter what we're doing people can get to us whether it's through text email Facebook kick they can contact you and they can get mad at you when they don't respond before cell phones became omnipresent you could just be out and that was it there wasn't anything anyone could do about it you didn't have to check in with anyone you were just gone and everyone just had the trust that you'd be back but now we're Tethered to our phones and to the responsibilities that come with it so in a very real sense we don't have a private life anymore as long as you have your phone you're in some way connected to other people they have access we've allowed our private lives to become public what this means is with a smartphone and the access it allows the lines of Separation in our life have been eroded our work our responsibilities our relationship with our family and our personal life are now intertwined you can never be entirely focused on one group because the machine in your pocket allows all groups access all the time this erodes any experiences that we have because we can never be entirely focused on one thing have you ever had a conversation with someone and while you're talking they just pull out their phone and start looking at it yeah it's crazy how much this happens to me and maybe I'm just really boring which is definitely a possibility but I suspect this is a common experience another common experience faced by us modern teens is when you're hanging out with a group of people just chilling and you know vibing and then one person pulls out their phone and then another person and then soon everyone has their phone off and is shut off from the people around them everyone looks away from the people they're with to watch videos and see pictures of what other people are doing it's like we're experiencing withdrawal from our phones and need a quick fix this is going to sound very new wagy and um like something someone who uh does yoga and drinks cold pressed juice would say but it keeps us from being present not to be an alarmist uh but we've entered an apocalypse one where our basic social conventions have been replaced the desire to be in constant contact with a touchcreen as apocalypses go it's not that bad but it is upon us and if you need proof of this apocalypse all you need to do is go to New Jersey specifically the New York airport over spring break my family and I had dinner at a restaurant in there and at that restaurant they had set up iPads so that every seat in the restaurant had own iPad and everyone at the restaurant was using them and they weren't eating alone I mean I know I didn't want to talk to my family because you know teen but it's really depressing that no one at the restaurant wanted to speak to the people they were eating with they were far more interested in the screen in front of them than the people they had paid a lot of money to eat terrible food with to be fair uh the iPads did have Tinder but still shouldn't we at the very least be able to avoid playing with our devices while we're eating at restaurants and it's not just the devices themselves that should be avoided it's social media in general except Snapchat Snapchat's cool excluding Snapchat however social media is a cultural abomination consuming far too much of our time and energy have you ever had a great time on Facebook have you ever logged in scroll down your news feed and thought wow what an incredible experience I feel like a much better and more informed person now that I know six of my friends are going to an event 90% of my newsfeed is people rsvping to events and changing the profile picture so why do we keep coming back because social media is a compulsion we compulsively check social media to see what has changed to see if anyone has favored it or retweeted a tweet mentioned us in a comment or liked a photo of us in 2012 Ben rer an artist and developer created a browser extension called the Facebook demetricator which automatically removes the red numbers that pop up on your Facebook he studied the effect this extension had on users fake Facebook habits and wrote in the journal computional culture that metrics activate the desire for more driving users to want more likes more comments and more friends further the metrics Inspire users to craft self-imposed rules around those numbers guiding them on how when and with whom to interact when the numbers were removed people checked into Facebook at significantly lower rates so obviously we're in large part motivated to check Facebook because of these red numbers but why do they have that effect on us the reason the red numbers are so compelling is because we associate them with positive emotions with being liked and being thought of as human beings we are constantly seeking attention and validation and the programmers behind Facebook and other social media interfaces have engineered their platforms to take advantage of that we keep coming back to Facebook for the shiny red numbers not for anything anyone says or posts in real life it's hard to know whether someone liked something you did or said on social media you have a finite measure of it and I don't think it's healthy to derive any sense of self-worth based off people clicking a thumbs up in but we can't give it up because we're all addicted to this technology these black mirrors that promise connection while actually disconnecting us of course some people can use social media in a positive way people can use Facebook to keep in touch with old friends people can say funny stuff on Twitter people can use Instagram to send Lil be direct messages of their feet I actually did that once anyways these are all great and valuable things to do but for the vast majority of us social media isn't a creative Outlet it's just a way to see what other people are doing with their lives it's socially acceptable voyerism and this voyerism gives a misleading impression of the lives of others people's online personas are far different than who they are in real life everyone wants to use show social media to show who they hang out with and all the interesting places they're going teens especially seem to want to use social media to create this cool image for themselves using it as a weird form of branding but people don't post everything that they do only the things that fit the image they're trying to project so when we look at social media all we see is people doing cool and interesting things and we compare this with what we're currently doing which usually isn't cool and interesting so when we look at so it seems like we're the only one not doing cool and interesting things this leads to isolation because although we realize that we've personally created an image online that's cooler than our actuality we fail to realize that this is what everyone else has done this isn't to say that you should throw away your iPhone and delete your social media accounts though I mean maybe you should but we all need to think about and evaluate the role they play in our lives is it positive do they make you feel better do they make you less stressed or do they make you more stressed do they make you compare your life to the Highlight Reel others present on the internet do they make you constantly aware of your online presence and how your perceived while distracting from your actual reality I don't have the answers to these questions I still have an iPhone uh I still miss my Samsung Intensity sometimes I still have a Facebook because you kind of have to have a Facebook and I still spend too much time on my phone but I'm conscious of it I'm actively trying to be aware of the effect all this technology is having on my life and that's something we all should do thank you my name is Jake suy [Music] [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 163,955

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Technology, Apps, Behavior, Communication, Connection, Culture, Digital, Exposure, Happiness, Identity, Internet, Mindfulness, Online video, Privacy, Relationships, Smartphone, Social Media, Software, Youth

Id: BmV-4qx0sIs

Length: 11min 44sec (704 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 27 2015