Recently, a couple of AHS students got in a car crash on a snowy morning. Within the hour it was the talk of the school even though none of them came to class afterwards.
In previous generations, if something big happened you would have to wait to tell everyone the next time you saw them, but now everyone already knows after checking their Snapchat stories.
A student’s social life is mostly consumed with digital connection over social media. A portion of time spent with friends is usually wasted with the checking of certain apps and updating followers on what they are doing.
Even in their free time, teenagers spend countless hours on Netflix, watching Youtube videos, playing popular interactive games, or scrolling through Tumblr or Twitter.
Twitter has become an outlet for kids to express their thoughts, opinions or random things about their daily life. Then they can see the reactions of the people that follow them.
“I feel like on Twitter people put on a certain persona. It’s kind of like a place where people go to get attention. I can’t exactly explain it to someone who doesn’t know. It’s just an app full of useless information. I watch Twitter like I watch the news,” junior Maddie Little said.
Out of the seven billion people on this planet, 1.35 billion are active Facebook users. Every 60 seconds, 350 thousand tweets are tweeted and last year alone eight trillion text messages were received.
In this day and age, more than half of an average teenage life will be spent on phones or computers.
Technology plays a role in almost every aspect of a high school student’s life.
In school, learning is being merged with electronics. Assignments are being typed and submitted over the Internet and online classes are becoming increasingly popular. Phones are also being allowed in classrooms for educational purposes.
Online textbooks are used frequently as well as paper books being converted to Ebooks to be viewed on an iPad or other device. Even standardized testing is now completely digitalized.
Teenagers aren’t the only ones tech obsessed. A large number of adults are active Facebook users and are now finding their way into other forms of media.
According to an A-Blast survey, 97 percent of AHS students have phones. Although 89 percent of their phone bills are being paid by their parents, only about 16 percent of AHS parents have total access to their kids’ phones.
Young kids are no exception either. Kids as young as six are being consumed by their personal devices.
This doesn’t mean that the new digital era is necessarily a bad thing. People are still connecting with one and other but in a different way.
Information spreads like wildfire through the online world. Certain causes appeal to the interest of people online to bring attention to what they are trying to promote.
Hash tags on Twitter and the sharing tool on Facebook are just some of the ways a trend can find its way to a large mass of people. Things like the ice bucket challenge and the hash tag #BringBackOurGirls, when 273 girls where kidnapped by Boko Haram Terrorists in Nigeria, are examples of exposure to worthy causes.
Society is being guided by the online era. We have become a culture where people can even make money off the Internet.
Popular YouTube members are being paid to make frequent videos and popular Instagram accounts are being given free things and compensation for just posting about brands or posing with products.
As well as this, certain popular Vine accounts are achieving legitimate fame.
Celebrities prove to be on another level of media attention. People like Kim Kardashian and Beyonce both have more then 20 million people following them on Instagram. On Twitter, Katy Perry has managed to get about 63 million followers.
These numbers make celebrities extremely influential. If Perry sends out a tweet, a group of people about the same size as the population of Italy will be able to see it.
Apple, Google and Yahoo’s stocks are some of most profitable companies in the market. Considering their upcoming developments, stocks in these three companies are said to be valued at higher prices.
Technological development is also one of the most innovative and fast paced industries in the world.
Ingenious programmers and engineers are making new inventions every day. You can see people making new apps or computer programs designed to make your life easier and even benefit you. It seems that a new Apple product comes out every year.
All developments in the tech industry are impressive and as our generation enters into the digital age, the possibilities are limitless.
Constant information and communication will continue for a long time so next snow day, if another catastrophe takes place people will know almost as soon as it happens.