It’s the fourth period, the sweet teacher is trying to get through their lesson. You are bored to no belief, and you try to crack a joke with some of your buds. No laugh. No scoff. Not even a pity laugh. I look over and three people are on their phones, plugged in. 

I would like to use the first sentence of this paragraph to make it known that I hate to sound like my parents. However, social media has completely ruined the genuine day-to-day basis of being at school. And believe me, I know that social media has also enhanced a lot of our lives. We keep a calculator, camera, music player, video games, and a social status no bigger than the length of our hand in our pocket all day. I will give the smartphone props for combining so many different tools all in one and make it so handy. With that being said, my gripe is with social media, not the use of the smartphone.

A simple anecdote that I can give you is a TikTok trend where people would steal stuff inside the school. People would record what they stole and post it on the social media app called ‘TikTok’. Kids in our school have started to do this and they have stolen a barrage of miscellaneous items. At the date of writing this article, there is still no soap in the bathrooms. And kids do this for a couple of likes on social media. Now I usually don’t care what kids do for likes, but if it is at my expense it ticks me off. I, along with everyone else would prefer if there was soap to use after the use of the bathrooms. 

Social media is slowly creeping into our day-to-day lives are the people begging for homecoming court votes. This is not the biggest deal to see on your Snapchat or Instagram, but it sure is an eyesore. Keep in mind, these are not the votes that determine king or queen, but the votes that determine the homecoming court. I have never seen this happen in my four-year experience. This doesn’t affect my day-to-day life at all, but it does get annoying every time I see it.

I remember back when I was in fourth or fifth grade where no one even had a smartphone. Nobody cares about the likings of others on social media, and nobody was plugged into a mobile game 24/7. The biggest thought on everyone’s mind was ‘What are we doing for recess? What’s for lunch today? When do we go home again?’ It was easy. It was simple. Oh to go back again.

There are many more examples of social media coming upon everyone who goes to high school. Everywhere you turn someone is on their phone, playing a video game, or listening to music. There is no petitioning one high school newspaper writer can do to reverse this, so we are all going to have to live with the fact that social media is a part of everyone’s life.