Cenizal, Hershey R.

November 3, 2020

Social Media Dangers Documentary Analysis

As the Information Age starts to evolve, there are also risks that are to consider. In the
film made by Jamin Winans, Robert Muratore, and Kiowa Winans, ‘Social Media Dangers —
Childhood 2.0’, mental health problems, addiction, and the increase of digital crimes are
highlighted as a cause by the effect of social media.

Over the course of time, physical connection is overruled but the digital connection. The
technology may have done good in the world, like the fast production of things that were
manually being curated before, but with good, there is also the bad. Bullying before was not as
harmful as before, you can avoid people and not be in their way apart from today where bullying
can’t seem to be escaped because the life of this generation is merely focused on creating a life in
the digital world. Simply not tagging a person on a group photo would be considered as an insult
or an act of bullying for some people, the ‘old ways’ of bullying are transferred and altered in the
Information Age.

The vast approach of information and technology came to place, this includes the
emergence of pornography. Before it’s just physical copies of magazines and VHS tapes, and as
time progressed it reached the internet where porn isn’t the same as it is now, where a slowly-
loading photo of a naked woman is considered to be porn. Nowadays, porn is anything you could
think of, actually, rule number 34 of the internet, “If it exists, or can be imagined, there is
Internet porn of it.” Addiction isn’t just being addicted to substances, with the technology we
have we could be addicted to anything, a game or obsessing over a specific content — most men
are addicted to consuming porn, living in a world believing that what they see in these videos are
the same with real life, it becomes a problem.

With that also came the danger of oblivious kids partaking in one — consuming and/or
becoming victims. In social media, there are people who are disguised, posers, trolls, child
predators who could easily take advantage of children and that comes responsibility from the
children themselves and most importantly the guardian, giving them a support system. As per
Chris McKenna, “It’s time for every parent on earth to leave the ignorance of the land of “if” and
embrace the reality of “when.”

As a teenager myself, personal relationships in this day and age aren't hard to find, but
looking for a genuine one is. Prior to the Information Age, relationships are more likely to be
built in a physical setting, a gathering per say, where a relationship is solely created by trust
because there wasn’t always a phone; where you can always check up on someone and the like.
The pursuer is more creative than before, you would really love the person to even go through
that kind of process. Instead of today, where you build a relationship through a device, where
one can easily hide a whole other relationship or worse portray as somebody who they’re not —
catfishing. Sexual messages became normal, where if you don’t partake in one you’re lame and
boring but if you do, you’re a prude and cheap. Today it is very common to ask for nudes, it is
like another checkbox to tick in a relationship, which can also cause danger, because most of
these are used to blackmail, predators are using psychological strategies to their partners, and
worse, to kids.

There are numerous cases that support the existing danger of the internet, the suicide of
Amanda Todd where she was a victim of an adult troll to show her breasts and was cyberbullied
her whole existence, leading to her death. Other case is the Gypsy Rose Blanchard story where
she was profited by her mother, creating all these crazy diagnosis for her, when in fact she was
just a normal kid, which led her to going behind her back and meeting someone on the internet
who she want to live a life with but couldn’t causing her and her internet boyfriend administering
this murder for her mother. There are many more of these cases and sadly there are even kids
who are groomed all around the globe, kids who are innocently taken advantage of — threatened
to harm their family if they don’t follow the predators commands.

Blackmailing became very prevalent, where 1 suspect is likely to have 250 victims. As
Detective Richard Wistocki said, “Law enforcement should learn technology training,” and that
would create the demand for more officers but that isn’t the problem. When you create a new
world (pertaining to the digital world), with a pre-existing one, there are more things to take care
of and consider, which is a toxic combination in this day and age.

This departs from the physical concerns from before to the emotional and mental
concerns today. Suicide rates had gone up by 56% since 2017 from ages 10 to 24 because of
cyberbullying and 43% of 1.12 million children who are presented to the emergency rooms
because of suicide attempts were under the age of 11. The life before was very different from
now, you can get distracted with working on the farm with your family, or being outside all day
with your friends, which isn’t as appealing to kids nowadays. Things are presented to us, a
machine can do this, or you can buy this from this store, where before you have to get it by
yourself without help from machinery.

Boredom isn’t a child’s fault or even anyone. The way we cope with things is the one to
blame, actually. As time progresses and goes by, we should create things to lessen a person's
boredom — a healthier version, a less risky, and addictive one. You can't just blame things and
not do something about it. CHANGE is constant, especially with today and what we created for
ourselves, sadly, we can't even keep up with it. We have to keep up, make solutions for the
problems we also created. According to Joel Stoddard, we are a living experiment and it is
indeed a “painful process of adaptation to somethings that's fundamentally changed our culture.”