The platforms that the research for this article was conducted on, the app that it was written on, and the device that you are reading this on would not even exist if it were not for technology and its advancements.  The very foundations of the information age and therefore almost the entirety of our modern world are very deeply rooted into technology.  In fact, one can argue that it is so deeply rooted in our daily lives that it has started to influence our culture, impact our thought processes and fundamentally change our behaviour.  The main question is: has it changed us for better or for worse?  This article will explore and reinforce the thesis that technology is really quite subjective when it comes to its impacts, because the amount of harm or good it does is dependent solely on whether an individual chooses to utilise it in a positive way or not - as a society, we need to enforce personal limits on ourselves and take responsibility for our time spent on screen keeping our mental health in mind, as well as recognise that technology isn’t inherently worse than any other forms of media when it comes to affecting mental health. 

To begin with, let's first acknowledge that for the past few years, technology and its impacts have been focal points of attention for avid internet users, creating a distrust between the typical ‘internaut’ and their virtual environment.  More and more studies are popping up which are piercing the thick layer of ambiguity that social media has been using as a shield to conceal its negative effects.  People are starting to talk about the impact of social media on the mental health of teenagers, and have been becoming more aware about the time they spend on screen, more aware of the things they do and the links that they click on while on social media.  And with this uprising awareness, an emerging question has also popped into all of our minds - what if we went off social media?  It would mean a lack of distractions and a lack of global toxicity too - logically, won’t it help us be so much more productive and safe?  Paul Miller, an American Technology Journalist from Springfield, Missouri and senior editor for The Verge, had the same thought (Tedx Talks, 00:00:10 - 00:04:09 & 00:15:01 - 00:15:10).  Going off the internet for an entire year was his solution to an observed decreased productivity, which he attributed to the Internet and technology in general.  According to him, however, it didn’t really help.  While he definitely stopped looking at his phone every few seconds, like all of us absorbed in our own virtual realities do, he simply found another alternative to use as an outlet for sheer boredom - constantly playing video games.  As a result, going off the internet wasn’t really that helpful; he wasn’t able to be as productive as he hoped he would, and he wasn’t able to access and reap the benefits of a multitude of information and tools that the internet offered either - basically, it was a lose-lose situation.  And a main reason this happens is because we often forget a key aspect that influences our internet usage - boredom.  External factors also impact internal motivations and lead to an unnecessary and therefore sometimes harmful usage of the internet.  For example, when a person is feeling bored, it seems only natural for them to pick up a device, access the Internet, and to immediately be interested by the content they find on there, leading to them spending maybe hours scrolling through their Facebook feed.  It’s instinctive to take the path of least resistance.  But is it necessary?  No one’s forcing us to pick up the phone.  No one’s forcing us to use the Internet to satisfy our ennui.  What we need is a little bit of self control in order to take responsibility for the way we spend our time online and enforce personal limits on ourselves in order to be able to fully experience the best parts of the internet and contain the addictive parts too.  

Another benefit of the internet is one that’s fairly obvious to most: connection.  The internet helps us to stay in contact with people from all over the world, sometimes from places we’ve never even heard the names of before.  Is this a bad thing?  After coming back online, Paul Miller experienced a precious and funny moment with his niece, who he was babysitting, and shared the incident on Twitter, leading him to realise something that a lot of us miss when it comes to understanding the value of our digital lives through something his friend told him. According to the video, ‘“He said, "If you were still 100% online, you would have missed this experience, and if you were still 100% offline, we would have missed it."  Yes, I did. I found a balance.  I did something in real life, I told the Internet about it.  I'm very happy because I just want to make sure that we ask ourselves what is our priority, and that we do that thing and not let the Internet tell us differently.”’ (Tedx Talks, 00:17:19 - 00:17:50).  Being completely off the grid, Miller was, in essence, disconnected.  He was disconnected from his friends and even his family (he mentions how he noticed he gradually lost contact with members of his family that lived in different states, and how he was unable to relate to his friends ike he did before because they were always a few paces ahead in conversation - he hadn’t watched the movies they had, or listened to the songs they did, leading to a feeling of isolation from both his personal and social life).  It’s important for us to find that balance between our digital environment and our physical one in order for us to be If and when used correctly, the Internet allows us to form bridges across chasms that used to separate us based on our language, location or even race.  Using these bridges in a positive way, in order to build and perpetuate global relationships is a choice, and one that is extremely beneficial to our knowledge of the world.  Using these bridges in a negative way, in order to spread fake news, body dysphoria and cybercriminal/cyberbully activity is also a choice, and one that is extremely harmful to our wellbeing, both mental and emotional.  And this links the next topic of discussion as well: preserving our mental health and continuing to grow while using technology.

Reliable and evidence-supported research has also shown visible results of being constantly surrounded by a virtual environment on the mental health of its users, especially teen girls.  While I definitely do not stand against any of these credible studies and statistics, I do think it’s important to recognise prospective biases and therefore limitations in the sources that are giving us this information.  For example,  Quoting Jessica Grose in her New York Times article ‘The Messy Truth About Teen Girls and Instagram’, “as Anya Kamenetz, an NPR reporter and the author of “The Art of Screen Time,” pointed out: Facebook’s research [studies which showed the drastically negative effect of Instagram on teen girls] had a small sample size and was not peer-reviewed. It’s also worth noting that teenagers may struggle more with depression and anxiety at this moment because, like every other demographic, we’re all still living in a pandemic.”  Such holes in the research make one of the go-to sources when talking about social media and its negative effects unreliable.  Unrecognised limitations in such a significant source not only leads to confusion, but also the spread of fake news on the effects of social media - isn’t that exactly what we’re trying to avoid with the rise of the Internet?  And what about the flip side of the coin?  Instagram itself isn’t bad.  Is it really worse than any other forms of media like television was for previous generations?  From forcing women to wear corsets to making the use of Instagram filters a norm, society has long made their bodies into the prime focus of contention for women throughout history.  However,  the beautiful thing about social media is that you have the power to pick your feed.  You have the power to keep liking content that makes you feel terrible about your body, about your intelligence, and about your life.  Or, you have the power to keep liking content that teaches you new things about different cultures everyday, spread positive change and to boost our mental health.  There is a multitude of positivity on social media - body-positive campaigners, climate activists, LGBTQ+ advocates, feminist supporters and so much more.  We choose the content we see and the links that we click on, just like we used to choose the shows that we watched and the channels we clicked on on TV back when technology wasn’t as developed as it is now.  Depending on the way we choose to use technology and the social media that it allows us access to, the world can be either an unmaneuverable jungle facing an epidemic of fake news and bullying, or a close-to-utopia where we see, share and comment on content that is mentally-enriching to our community.  Placing extra emphasis on ‘depending on the way we choose to use technology” here.

Nonetheless, I cannot deny the fact that social media has had scientifically and psychologically-proven negative effects on our minds, regardless of whether we control ourselves or not.  Indirectly quoting the ‘The Social Dilemma’, a documentary-film exploring the negative effects of social media, the “For teenage girls, the rate of non-fatal self-harm rose 62 percent; for preteen girls, 189 percent. Since the last decade, the suicide rates of these groups have risen 70 percent and 151 percent respectively.”  These statistics are directly connected to the rise of social media, showing a clear connection between these frankly harrowing suicide and self harm rates and the advancements of social media.  The source also argues that as long as major tech-giants (like Google, Facebook, Pinterest, etc) don’t have a limit on the amount of profit they can make from capturing the attention of it’s users, social media will continue to benefit companies instead of people.  The algorithms of almost any kind of platform on the Internet, from social media to games, are specifically designed to make sure we spend as much time as possible on them, leading to monetary gain for the company but extreme loss for our humanity.  It’s easy to get sucked into this vortex of false likes, fake follows and phoney comments, making cyberbullying and trolling one of the most significant problems of social media and technology.  But yet again, we choose what we want to see when we use technology to access social media, we choose what we put out into the Internet, and we choose how much time we spend on social media too.  According to Nir Eyal, a journalist who has written two established books on the addictive algorithms of social media technologies as well as on how we can stop this repetitive cycle of clicking on the next link and even sitting down for an interview with the creators of the above-mentioned source, The Social Dilemma (although his part of the interview was cut out, possibly leading to a conflict of interest), “there are countless ways to reclaim your time and attention and find the right balance of social-media use, including a cottage industry of tools, like apps that cleverly limit the time spent on certain websites, and movements to disconnect for periods of time. Creative technologists and designers have built products to limit tracking, defeat the temptation of watching the next video on YouTube, block Facebook’s Newsfeed, and even limit the ravages of doom scrolling and FOMO. These tools work, and there’s nothing big bad tech companies can do to reach into your device and uninstall them. We can all take action and take steps to limit distraction and the bad aspects of social media, starting right now.” (Eyal, Review of The Social Dilemma: No, social media is not "hijacking" your brain).  The rise of the information age, which has led to the rise of unsafety of the users of technology, has also led to a rise of a counterattack against these dangers - one of the main problems of technology is the amount of time we waste online by getting sucked into the addictive cycle of clicking on the next link; well, now we can avoid that danger by using helpful designed to prevent that from happening (such as tools created by one of the above-mentioned tech-giants themselves, Google, that prevent you from clicking on the next, tempting link and therefore decreasing the time you waste online that can take both a physical and mental toll by increasing your productivity).  Another, much more dire problem is the one plaguing teenage mental health through cyber bullying - Google, Instagram and quite a few other social media/technology apps have enabled features that allow us to report offensive/harmful content, as well as block sensitive images that might take a toll on our mental health (but the main benefits come from the add-ons or extensions that help us set limits on the type of content we want to see and block the ones we don’t, which does act as a limitation for some who don’t have access to them). At the end of the day, it all boils down to how much we, as ‘internauts’, are willing to change our own, slightly unhealthy behaviour when it comes to using technology, and enforce personal restrictions on ourselves and take responsibility for our own mental health. 

To reinstate my point, technology is not inherently bad.  In today's day and age where technology dominates our lives, it’s understandable how one might think that it might soon dominate our minds too.  But what we forget is that we are still in control.  We are still in control of our activity online, we are still in control of our productivity and we are definitely still in control of ourselves.  The way we, as a society, choose to use this vast sea of information at our fingertips is completely up to us - and our choices in this aspect determine the true impact of technology.  The decision of using the internet to spread positive change, to boost our mental health and to grow is in our hands - as has been mentioned, social media (and technology as a whole too) shows us what we want to see - we choose our feeds.  There is a multitude of positivity on social media - however, it’s up to us to see it and then, to use it to our benefit.