Letter from the Editor

Posted by admin on Mar 10, 2010 in From the Editor | 1 comment

Since the advent of social media in the last decade, it has become easy to be engulfed by its wide web. As young people, social media is sold to us as a tool to have ourselves more connected with others and the world going on around us. For many of us, these tools quickly turn into vices, but for most, they act as devices for keeping in touch with our friends, family, or estranged high school acquaintances we’d just rather forget about all together.

Musicians have been using social media for years to self-promote themselves, and in the last few years everyone from television shows to politicians have gotten in on the act of self-promotion through social media. Despite this flood of new users dying to attract our attention for a few minutes, not surprisingly, the level of media usage by young people is positively correlated with unhappiness. For most of us, we’ve realized that spending a half hour cruising Facebook for no particular reason doesn’t feel very fulfilling.

What is important, however, is not that we should monitor how much time we spend in our days trying to ‘connect’ with people, but rather why we’re doing it. For many of us we become like those politicians and musicians – using social media to self-promote ourselves for whatever reason. What shouldn’t be lost in this shuffle is that social media should be a tool for us to be better friends, siblings and children. It should be used as a means of helping us to stay and reconnect with the people that matter to us, and to help love them.

With peace + love,

John Hennenfent
Editor-in-Chief