Many Staples students – and probably a good amount of teachers, too – have scrolled through their Facebook newsfeeds until there’s nothing left to see, stalked people they don’t even remotely know and spent hours on Facebook messenger keeping up with annoying group chats.
The addictiveness of Facebook resonates with most of us, but it may have lost its appeal with the younger generation.
Most upperclassmen have Facebooks for the sheer social aspect, but Facebook has also helped students in contacting their fellow peers for help with school. However, many freshmen are not using Facebook for the same reasons.
“I chose to get a Facebook because of pressure from my older sister,” Samantha Smith ’18 said. “My sister thought that I would use it to communicate with other people in my classes if I needed help with homework, but I don’t know many people in my grade that do that.”
She explained how she uses Facebook mostly for her extracurriculars. “I do Yearbook, and I conduct most of the interviews through the messager thing on Facebook,” Smith said.
Amelia Brown ’18 has had similar experiences to Smith. She got Facebook to communicate with her field hockey team. However, she noted that she prefers Instagram over Facebook.
“I use it way more than Facebook because it’s less confusing,” Brown said. “With Facebook, everything you do, other people can see, which I don’t like.”
Instagram, with its array of filters for photographs that make people appear to be “artsy,” is all the rage with the underclassmen.
“My younger brother, an eighth grader, uses Instagram like crazy,” Jenna Patterson ’16 said. “For them, it’s all about picking a good photo to Instagram, editing it, picking a good caption and getting likes.”
Although it seems like Facebook started the social media craze, other social media outlets like Instagram and Snapchat may be pioneering a whole new social media trend. The real question is, will Facebook just become dust in the wind and end up like MySpace?
Patterson, acknowledging that “in some ways Facebook is becoming the next MySpace,” still has hope for Facebook.
“I think, by the time the younger generations get older, they will appreciate all the benefits of Facebook, like I mentioned; getting useful information from activities or classes you participate in.”
