As time goes by it is becoming increasingly more obvious that teens do not value their privacy. We live in a new age where technology dominates the majority of all of our lives, from school, work, and our hobbies.

In my opinion teens don’t seem to care about what is happening to our data. We use social media everyday sharing countless amounts of personal information about ourselves yet we really don’t know who is seeing what we share or what could happen to it.

This topic is one that was recently covered in a documentary called “The Social Dilemma” which was released this past summer. The documentary goes in depth into how technology companies are dominating our lives, how we can stop it, and how they directly benefit the more they control us.

Everyone should go watch this documentary, I learned so much and it only confirmed a lot of things I previously thought about technology.

It estimated that 84% percent of all teenagers in America have a cell phone.

This is potentially dangerous, if someone were to somehow disable our devices we would be quite hopeless as we are the first generation to really be raised on these devices.

Another area that the documentary explores is the potential radicalization of people due to what they see on social media.

This is something that I think is especially relevant to teenagers because we have seen many examples of teens that have been radicalized and have decided  to do especially horrid things. 

Now I’m not saying your Instagram feed is going to make you become a Nazi or something but the social media machine is definitely a contributing factor into the downwards spiral of some terrible people.

According to a Pew Research Center poll 53% of Americans claim to get news from social media or online. In the poll it is now stated that people are more likely to get news from social media than they are a newspaper. 

This is especially alarming as it is no secret that the information that is found and gathered on social media is usually quite biased and sometimes flat out untrue.

This is just another instance of how social media is becoming more dominant in our lives as time goes on, and how what we think is being influenced by algorithms.

To be honest I don’t know if there’s all too much we can really do to stop the spread of the social media influence on our lives, but one of the solutions presented in the documentary is that we may not be able to stop the spread, but we should at least be conscious of it, and the impact social media is having on our lives.

I personally feel like if we all start being even a little more conscious, we can help combat the stranglehold that social media algorithms have on our minds, and be more aware of why we are shown the content that we are shown on social media.