No!!! Well can I? No!!!! Well can we change.. NO!!!! I don’t like.. NOW YOUR CANCELLED WE’LL RUIN YOUR LIFE!!! I’m sorry for the overdramatics but from my experience that’s all I hear these days, no to change, no to being different, no to you being you. If you didn’t then the idea I’m trying to convey is that when someone wants to be different in this generation, my generation they are shut down and put down because they don’t want to be like everyone else and want to stray from the crowd. People who feel the effects of this can range from famous people to people with little publicity. In this blog I will write about the negative effects my generation has pushed around by bringing down people who want to have their own opinion and be different.
For one example when it comes to popular figures or even not so popular figures people have created something called cancel culture. This is when a community/group of people dig up bad things about celebrities or regular people to try to ruin their life or “cancel them”. The whole cancel culture is rooted mostly around people getting mad about someone not liking something or disagreeing with something that lots of other people think is right. This “cancel culture” sometimes do end up ruining peoples lives because online footprint is a real thing and sadly in this generation people care more about the media’s perspective on things then their own so if people realize lots of other people do not like that person online people will base their opinions on others and causing them to lose out on lot of opportunities that they could have had if not for the social media.
Social media takes a huge and likely the main part of this situation and this is because of the spread of these negative things on social media and the people who watch it the most and absorb the most information from it are teens. This makes teens more vulnerable to the negative things spread across social media because most of them are more worried about doing things like everyone else and fitting in to get famous instead of doing things and not caring what other people think about you. This is what leads to an increase of hate because teenagers always want to be a part of a community because that’s what being a teen is about finding who you fit in with. This should be a good thing for teens, finding themselves in a community but the biggest community right now is sadly the “cancel culture” of social media. Now these teens now learn to grow and hate with a bad crowd instead of having a heart of love and being unique.
In conclusion sadly I cant change everyones behavior online because well I dont have the power to do that but I want to highly influence that we start the adjustment in high school and to be specific, a class in high school that addresses the wrongs of supporting groups like “cancel culture”. I suggest this because young minds are very easy to influence which is proven with things like peer pressure and the want or need to fit in. This leads me to say that a social awareness class could be made and enforced into high school classes to make teens more aware of the things they see and support online. I believe that if we persuade a generation to be different, do their own thing and to have their own opinion starting at a young age then we can make a future where there is less hate between people.
Zakai Bullock – Mount Carmel High School – DMSF Class of 2029
Photo Credit: christianchan – Adobe Stock