Living as a teenager in the digital age can be grueling, especially at Doherty High School and any school under District 11. New trends come and go faster than the speed of light, and before some can even comprehend what the upcoming slang terms mean, the newest one will become outplayed in a week. There are more types of “pretty” to go along with twice the number of insecurities. If you dress up too much or too little, you might be the next in line to be posted and laughed at on the latest “(insert your school)_exposed” account. And heaven forbid you simply don’t care about these latest teenage social media standards! You don’t want to get barked at while youre having lunch, do you? Life for teenagers has always been tough; however, with such access to the public, digital world, it has become the regular for young people to see others like them get put up into cringe compilations and harassed by your everyday commenter.
So, what should D11 do?
Well, D11 did the extreme. They took away phones completely. While this brings up many issues on its own, a good thing can come out of this controversial decision. Teenagers no longer have to be camera ready.
“I think taking away phones is an answer for a lot of problems,” said English teacher Erin Ahnfeldt. “It is an answer for creating an environment where people are not drawn to something that is distracting, so they can be more engaged in class. And it is also a way to keep from bullying because kids are not taking pictures of each other and then posting them online and saying, ‘This is the pick-me person’ or ‘this is the person who is rated a 1 or a 10’ in terms of how they look.”
Some students see how hard social media makes teen’s lives. “It makes harassment so much worse,” Luka Halford said when asked about whether social media helps or hurts harassment. “Having an infinite web of people to talk to and spread things within make harassment a lot more prevalent, and it happens not only in person but online- and its really hard to escape from it.”
And that it is. When something is on the internet, the evidence is forever imprinted into the fabrics of social media. While deleting something can possibly help, screenshots and screen recordings can combat this. In cases where an image of someone circulates without a person’s knowledge, it may take a few days to even months for the person to even realize that image had been uploaded. And in cases where that image goes viral, it is more than likely that it is not just classmates poking fun at you. Others from different schools, districts, and even states can laugh at you like an animal in a circus.
This new policy may irritate many students, but in the case of peer harassment, there are more advantages when it comes to getting rid of phones in school. In 2022, the School Crime Supplement (AKA SCS) created a survey for students to take about their experience being bullied. The survey found that out of all the students who took the survey, 19.2% of them had been bullied. Out of this 19.2% of students, 22.6% of those cases were through the internet.
Now, before some readers decided to go grab their torches and pitchforks and burn me at the stake, I do not like Yondr pouches as a solution. I believe that a cubby pouch placed in each class would have done the trick just fine without the hassle of spending $25 on students who will most likely throw them in toilets and dookie on them in rebellion. All I am saying is that bullying has become scarily normalized on social platforms, and that Yondr pouches address this issue without blaming the internet.
When cyberbullying is talked about, it seems that its always discussed by older people who do not quite know how to even work a phone. In some way or another, the conversation ends with: “The internet is evil! Go back to the old days!” before they go about their lives getting their grandkids to teach them how to share minion memes with their friends on Facebook. I am in no way trying to piggyback off of old people who do not know how the new world works. All I am saying is that like real life bullying, cyberbullying is an issue that needs to be taken more seriously without demonizing social media as a whole.
Social media is not the issue, the bullies are!
