Jill’s Digital World
Last week I interviewed a close friend of mine, Jill Johnson. She is a 16 year old student-athlete in a High School here in the states. Jill plays multiple sports and excels in all of them. She is also an exemplary student as she is currently maintaining a 4.0 GPA in all of her classes. She is literally the poster child for the high school. Jill also leads a great spiritual life and helps around the community whenever she can. She is well known around town too as she also has a great social life with many friends surrounding her. Most of her friends are also in sports, but some of them she met through school. You may ask what they all have in common? They all live in the same Digital World.
When asked what she uses the internet for, she gave a great answer. Jill uses the internet for “Everything”. More specifically she uses it for homework, looking anything up, socially connecting, games, among many other things. Jill has been in quarantine lately so the internet is her only reliable way of socially interacting and reaching the outside world. A majority of her time on the internet are on these social media platforms. When we got talking about these social media platforms, Jill revealed that she cared deeply what other people thought of her and how many likes she had gotten on her posts. This in and of itself is a problem in society today.
Speaking of problems, Jill has another rather large one. That is internet addiction. When asked how many hours on average she spends on the internet she responded, “On the internet or my phone?” So I decided to go with the lesser of the two and ask about her phone. Jill spends on average 10.5 hours a day in front of her phone. That is more than a third of her time spent in front of a screen that is 5 inches long and 3 inches wide. Most of her time on that phone is spent on a rather new app called TikTok. This is a social media platform where the user creates a short video and shares it with billions of other people. It is not a bad thing to be using this app as it is quite entertaining, however using it for around 9 hours a day is not healthy.
Jill’s problem is not uncommon. There are tons of youth struggling with the same problem. The sad part is, that most of them do not know they are struggling with this problem at all. If the Iphone did not tell you that your screen time rose or declined, I doubt anyone would pay attention to it. However having that little feature tell us where we are spending our precious time can be a life save. She is spending over a third of her current life on TikTok. A full year spent at this rate would result in around 122 full days on the app. This is equivalent to 175,680 minutes on the app. As the videos can only be 1 minute long maximum, that is at least 175,680 videos. Do you imagine what that can do to the attention span of a developing child? It could cause serious problems for the rest of Jill’s and many other’s lives.
This internet addiction prohibits Jill from living her best life in so many different manners. She explains how her attention span has greatly declined after watching so many short videos and how she cannot commit to longer videos like movies anymore. She must always be checking her phone and when she does, she will end up on TikTok without knowing it. Another repercussion of this addiction is that her sleep schedule is very concerning. She gets on average 6 hours of sleep per night. That being said, she watches TikToks for 3 more hours a day than she sleeps. Without getting too deep into the science, a lack of sleep can greatly decrease your brainpower, motivation, dietary habits, athletic ability, and how prone to injuries you are. She is not the only one struggling with this problem, and there are many articles studying this internet addiction.
As stated in the above article, many different parents and guardians struggle to help their children and youth overcome such a scary addiction. There are many different warning signs that show that a member of the youth may be addicted to the internet as Jill is. Some of these signs include: losing track of time online, sacrificing sleep for the internet, becoming upset when their online time is interrupted, and being depressed when not around the internet. These are very concerning symptoms to see in the youth today and it will be interesting to see how their brain develops and how they will grow because of it. If you know someone who is struggling with this problem, this article also brings up some good points as to helping them solve their addiction.
Jill is not alone in her struggle though. She states that a lot of her friends have the same problem she does and some of them may even be worse off than her. Her friend Susy spends just as much time on the internet as her, however she does not participate in sports or excel in school like Jill. This may be because she has immersed herself so deeply into the internet and TikTok that she has lost motivation to excel in something as “boring” as school. Even the girls on Jill’s sports teams are addicted as well. These girls all connect through their addiction though, as they have the same interests in common. In a sick sort of way, it could be a team bonding or chemistry boost for them all to struggle with the same addiction. I do not believe this to be a problem that will eventually go away. This problem, along with the internet, is here to stay. Therefore, doctors and psychologists must make a conscience effort to help these adolescents grow up to their fullest potential with the help of the internet.
There are many different ways to solve this psychological problem, but the first step to solving the problem is admitting you have one. Jill was very open and eager to admit she had a problem, and to be honest I do to. I do not spend nearly that much time on TikTok or the internet as she does, but it still intrudes in my daily life as well. I have witnessed these problems and addictions before firsthand. The one addiction that I can most closely relate to the internet addiction is that of a child’s addiction to Disney and Nickelodeon shows. These shows are written by people who are smart enough to know how to capture an audience and keep an audience for what ends up being hours. I can recall once sitting down to watch iCarly at 9 am and before I even realized anything, it was night. So my cut and dry solution after I figured out I had a problem was to just simply stop watching the shows. I would no longer watch the beginning of the show because I know I would not be able to stop watching. This is how I can relate to Jill’s struggle with the internet along with many other people as well.
All in all, the youth nowadays are hurting deeply without knowing it. Jill told me that she does not remember the last time she went outside to play with her friends in the backyard. If they wanted to get together they would just facetime or play a game online with each other. This could seem sad to those of us who grew up outside and on the swing-set, however this is just the world we live in now. As humans always have done and will continue to do, we must adapt to our surroundings and face the new world and the problems that come with it. It truly is a digital world, and Jill shares it with all of us.