The Sponge and its Enemy: Social Media by Amber

The Sponge and its Enemy: Social Media by Amber - March 2022 Scholarship Essay

Our brains are like sponges, scrubbing over new information daily until it finds a puddle of knowledge to absorb. Today, technology and social media allow everyone the opportunity to research and discover an abundance of knowledge. However, good things always have their flaws. Social media encourages kids to interact digitally instead of vocally, manipulates facts, and provides easy ways for students to find answers without actually learning the educational content they were supposed to master. While our brains are sponges looking for knowledge to absorb, social media acts as its enemy, a hand, wringing out all the knowledge that our brains read to send it on a journey down the sink drain.

In March 2020, all American schools had to close due to the rapid spreading of COVID-19. Schools had to quickly figure out how to continue teaching students the required curriculum while staying home and safe from the coronavirus. Forty years ago, someone would have laughed if you told them students would be learning from home for up to a year.

Online learning allowed students across the country to continue their educational studies from the safety and comfort of their homes. School used to be a place where kids interacted and developed social skills, but as online learning continued, kids began to socialize better digitally than in person. Social media allowed kids to still collaborate on group projects without being in a room together, but the quality of work being completed by the students was not as exceptional as it could have been if the students were sitting beside each other. The social and collaboration skills of students drastically declined due to online learning. In ten years, most kids will lack the necessary social skills to succeed in the real world because social media has become the primary source of peer communication.

When students do not know the correct answer, what do they do? They search for the answer on Google. As great as it would be if everything on Google is accurate, it is not. Social media has the power to manipulate and rewrite any source of data to make it seem as if it is true when it is not. The false information readily available to students has led them to often believe unfactual statements. It can be a struggle for students to decipher whether or not a website or article they are reading is facts or fiction. Social media agencies have tried to fact-check information, but the fact-checking system has proven to be very flawed and biased in our current society.

The purpose of going to school is to obtain an education through lectures, reading, studying, and taking tests to check whether or not a student's brain retained the information. It has been made aware that through online learning, more and more students are not truly taking the time to learn the educational content provided to them and are instead looking up correct answers so they can receive a passing grade on the assignment. I even often find myself guilty of doing this task. Social media can help students learn and discover answers to tricky questions on assignments, but when a student begins to consistently rely on answers they find online, they are not fully grasping the knowledge being made available to them.

While social media allows students across our nation to continue their educational path from home while providing resources that allow them to obtain an infinite amount of knowledge, social media is also lessening the social skills of students, spreading potentially false information, and encouraging students to search up answers instead of taking time out of their day to study and learn it. When today’s younger generation gets older and enters the workforce, they will not know how to properly communicate with people or find factual information on their own. Social media can teach them new things, but it can also brainwash them into believing false statements. The human brain can discover something new every day, but if an effort is not being made to retain that information, social media is preventing a students' brain from absorbing all the knowledge it has the potential to absorb. Social media can positively impact the education of the students of our nation, but until it is being used in ways that benefit the growth of knowledge and not its decline, social media will continue to limit the educational capacities of students.