What a privilege to have had my niece stay for a week. I say privilege, neither of us had any choice, she was banished from her home town because she’s been ‘acting up’ and is ‘going off the rails’ and mum and dad both felt she would benefit from time away. I was informed of this the day before. I am Aunty Max and welcome to my week of hell!
The face is fair, the lashes big, gluey and black, the jeans ripped, the towels always wet and in a heap, the earphones in, the always music loud. Everything for the first day was done one handed, she made toast, ran a bath, brushed her teeth, walked and drew, all with one hand because in the other hand was her mobile phone.
Mobile phone addiction is REAL. It also got me thinking about my own usage and realisation that no doubt my mobile phone is beloved, it gets me up, puts me to sleep, arranges my life, work, play, travel, eating, banking, its my dictionary, encyclopedia, TV, HIFI, mirror, and behind that cover, my secret stash place. Its technology is more sophisticated than the computers used by NASA to go to the moon. Its all round my favourite piece of kit.
But observe young people using them and it becomes clear its so much more to them. It’s a 14cm long by 7cm wide hand held portal to acceptance, rejection, love, hate, all you can eat imagery, fantasy, reality, beauty filtered noise, that orchestrates their emotions every time they unlock it. Which sounds like that is a voluntary choice until you hear the relentless notifications, buzzes and beeps as it pleads and wins their attention.
Pretty sure the science is there for the chemical, dopamine, which releases when yet another picture of their gob, gets liked. However dopamine is one common chem. She oozes out when we get social, and we are driven by an evolutionary urge to be social, so thats not really news to me. Its the hyper social environments that are afforded to young people from platforms like Snapchap, (genuine typo that im not correcting) Instewham, and Hickory tick tock etc etc, that just didnt exist when I was a teenager.
Popularity at school is paramount for a lot of young people. Being accepted and liked in the playground is no different form the language used for socialising now online. Couple that with a national lockdown, restrictions on young people socialising, school closures and parents and carers not having the time to home school their children, there has inevitably been a spike in mobile phone usage by teenagers.
After I saw the scars left behind from self harm, it occurred to me that its spawned from that 14 x 7cm rectangle. That black hole of emotions that once you are locked into, can torment, bully, internationally harass you to the point that by the time you take the headphones out, look up and take a breath, her heart is already pounding, her body flooding with feelings that has taken seconds to consume her and will take hours to leave. Feelings a 15 year old does not have the capacity to deal with. It silently takes over. If you are a perceptive parent, you might be lucky enough to learn what happened and you can talk it through/ walk her round the block as she screams and swears, otherwise she just looks like a teenager sat on the sofa spending too much time on her phone.
I genuinely feel more afraid for young people online these days than a child in a Michael Jackson music video.
Although they try to survive social medias a silent killer, for no mere mortal can resist the evil of the beauty filter.
Hahahahahahah
majorloveme 