angels,

 Thank you so much for all the comments on my last post, it has been really interesting to read your thoughts. For some reason, there's a slight bug in that I'm unable to reply to any comments, but I have loved to read your personal experiences with the evil side of social media. 

I've officially begun my two month period where I'm completely off social media. No TikTok and Instagram. I've been questioning over whether YouTube is a social media platform, and I've decided that for me personally, it's not. I don't watch YouTube shorts, I only watch video essays and with school and work I won't get time to watch many anyway. 

After I've finished my two month break offline, I'm going to write an essay or at least a long piece about my experiences. Maybe even a video essay myself ! 

But back to the topic: I was now thinking more about this topic of consumerism, and I decided to watch some YouTube videos on it. Not only is the lack of independence such an issue, but as a society we've lost the ability to think critically. Movies are 'dumb' now. They feed the audience the parts of the plot that require thinking time. We get told who's the bad guy, who's the good guy, when I find the most fun part of a movie is discussing it afterward and working out who's the villain. 

The same goes for books. Colleen Hoover, Freida McFadden and Ana Huang are amongst the most popular authors for teenagers to young adults recently. I have no hate toward these authors at all, but their books (I've read five) are all fast-paced. You know things quickly. You don't have to stop and question why. It is because as a society, we don't care about critical thinking any more. 

It is why we're in such a harsh literary crisis. 

There's also the question of who we can blame apart from ourselves. Can we blame the phones? The devices that hold the social media, that we call addicting? Can we blame the evil tech companies who code algorithms to keep us engaged? Or can we blame no one but ourselves for giving into the trickery, and is it too late? 

How can we fight back? I ask myself this quite often. I think it is true, people are starting to take notice of how bad AI and social media is. How amazing life is offline. When you're not worrying about how many views your post has. 

Many people above the age of 21 are starting to delete social media such as Snapchat as they enter adulthood. 

The UK are introducing an Under 16 Social Media Ban, which Australia originally put in place a while back. However, I don't believe it'll work. The teens won't be suddenly back to acting how we used to before it was all about social media. They'll be feral animals, trying to find loopholes in the systems. We all remember when the US banned TikTok for a day, and even then influencers were so desperate to post that they found ways around the ban. 

The only way we can fight back now is by deleting social media once and for all. Just fight back for yourself. 

Anyway, those are my thoughts! 

I've also been inspired to start my own magazine. I'm going to start by making one issue, and selling it for free. I'll find a way for you guys to be able to purchase (£0.00) on here, and the issue will likely be a digital PDF you can download. I'm just experimenting for now. 

Bye Angels !