I sat in my fifth grade class. We were in an island of desks. All of us were using our free time to take silly photos of each other on Snapchat. I scrolled through every silly filter available in the hopes of finding the one that would make me look the ugliest that I could send to all of my friends around me.
I still have all those photos at the bottom of my saved snaps. They remain as memories of what Snapchat used to be for me. But over time, the childishness of Snapchat began to fade away, and I became aware of the true horrors within social media. That social media isn’t a childish game of silly photos but a cat race of who can look the best and have the most fun.
Snapchat has now become an obsession for me. I no longer use filters or draw on my snaps. Instead, I snap hundreds of people every day, track locations, snap scores, best friends lists. It’s a whole other world. I have to worry about why someone isn’t snapping me or why I’m not as high on their best friends list as they are on mine.
The best way to describe this change is that I lost my innocence. I lost the joy of looking funny when I see people post themselves looking twenty. I lost the fun of sending people snaps when it became a game of who snaps who and who snaps who more. Snapchat isn’t a funny little app. I was only fourteen years old, yet I constantly saw stories of what seniors were up to, and I felt like I was in some cat race to be some of those girls. Everything began to move so fast where you couldn’t enjoy where you were at because you were so focused on what older people were doing. Seeing snap stories of people in my grade going out when I was at home destroyed me. I still feel like I have to document every time I go out just so people know that I do.
And the worst part is, it only gets worse. Every single year of high school I found a new thing to do on Snapchat that would rip my innocence to shreds. It’s a huge domino effect that when some people begin to send explicit messages, everyone eventually begins to do it too. And the domino effect isn’t just for the horrible thing that is sexting, it’s the location stalking and half swiping that has made its way to the lives of almost every teen.
Even worse is that I’ve begun to see kids lose their innocence a lot younger than I did. One time I sat at my friend’s kitchen table tutoring her sister in math. She was only in fifth grade, yet keeping her away from her phone was always a constant struggle. The thing that broke me the most was the things she would say so casually while we worked through problems together. “Would you rather be skinny or toned?” “What does it mean to be a slut?” These are just a few of the questions she would randomly ask me through our session, and when she asked them, it hit me that she was exposed to the negative side of social media at the age that I was still snapping my friends the dog filter. I was staring at a twelve year old wondering how she already cared what her body looked like.
Social media has changed us all. Snapchat is just one example. It has changed my life in ways I never thought it would. It took me from a foolish child to what my friend’s sister calls a “snapchat slut”. It has taken young kids into a chokehold by showing them teenagers five years older than them and convincing them that they somehow need to look like them. So I full-heartedly believe that social media is negative because I look at that girl with the dog filter and wonder what even happened.
