Do I recommend changing careers in your 50s? Absolutely! I call it Alzheimer’s prevention. Going from teaching school to being a medical scribe has been one of the most difficult things I have ever accomplished. Learning a completely new set of skills as well as vocabulary keeps my little brain cells and neurons firing and well connected! I am shocked every time I realize I have only been out of the classroom two years because that seems like a lifetime ago - and in many ways it was.
But you can take the English teacher out of the classroom, but you can’t take the literature out of the English teacher. I can always espouse an appropriate Caesar monologue to ease the tension when people forget you aren’t supposed to talk politics at polite social gatherings. A recitation of the prologue to the Canterbury Tales is also a fun party trick (thank you Mary Walker).
So trust me I get it when I stated in my last post that it is a paradox that I am commenting on social media about social media. I am taking advantage of the very platform I am critiquing to promote the ideas I wish to express. I am not here to denigrate social media. Funny animal videos and Dr. Glaucomflecken can turn my frown upside down in a millisecond. My goal is to hopefully prompt some thoughtful dialogue be it between you and your child, spouse, friends, or simply within your own thoughts.
I began the metaphor of the coronavirus pandemic and social media, and I would like to extend that in this post. Disclaimer alert!!! I am NOT making any political comments here. I am only using an analogy to serve my rhetorical purpose. I am engaging in hyperbolic extrapolation.
Saying the virus originated in a lab as the result of gain of function research makes a much better analogy to the rise of social media than saying the virus evolved naturally by jumping from an animal to a person - get it - hyperbolic extrapolation…
Once the virus and the social media algorithms got away from their creators, they were beyond the creators’ control. Everyone just kind of held their breath and said we can’t do much about it now so we have to wait and see what happens.
So what happened with the coronavirus?
People with comorbidities - age, overweight, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, kidney disease, - they got the most sick first. But really healthy people with no apparent health risks became extremely sick also. Some people with terrible risk factors got slightly ill but recovered quickly. We tried to predict to the best of our ability who the virus would attack, but at times our best guess was not enough.
A vaccine was developed. We know the vaccine reduced the severity of the disease if the disease was contracted. Many people got the vaccine and still got the virus, but their illness was much less severe. Many people didn’t like the vaccine or how politically the vaccine protocols were handled, but the efficacy for those inoculated versus those who were not stands proven by researchable data.
Many other measures were taken to try to lessen the spread of the virus such as masking, social distancing, and shutdowns, but these measures divided the country even deeper than we already were. Debate still rages on the effectiveness of these mitigating measures and people will dig in their heels and die on their hill over their convictions; however, the general consensus in reputable medical resources appears to support basic virology information. Masking is only effective if a surgical grade N95 mask is consistently used without removal in the presence of others even for brief periods of contact. Social distancing measures are ineffective due to aerosol and droplet contamination. Shutdown measures only work if outsiders who come into contact with others are not permitted into the shutdown location. (Source: Doximity online)
A review of the last two years. Did anyone really need to relive that? So how can that compare to social media use?
We know the people who created the algorithms that run our media did not understand the extent of how effectively artificial intelligence would grow and understand our media use. By the time they grasped what had been created, the genie was out of the bottle - the virus was on the loose. The creators did not anticipate the ramifications of their creation or the rapid rise in world wide use and access to media. The Netflix Documentary, The Social Dilemma, interestingly documents the early origins of these algorithms.
We understand that people with comorbidities have a much higher risk of catching the infection. But how do you know if you or someone you love possess a comorbidity that will make you more susceptible to depression or anxiety or lack of productivity related to media use? Or what if you are a completely healthy individual with no risk factors but suddenly find yourself on Tik Tok two hours a day? How do you vaccinate yourself against this? Do you mask up? Do you just distance yourself? Do you shut down completely? How do you know what works for you?
This is what makes viruses such complex organisms. What put my husband in bed with 103 fever for three full days and left a nasty, lingering cough for weeks made me feel the yucks for about 48 hours. Each individual undergoes their own transformation when exposed. And just like coronavirus, I am suggesting there are levels of media addiction.
I literally am unsure if I ever have had the coronavirus. I only had mild symptoms from my vaccine. Who knows what makes me not as susceptible to this particular virus. And I only caught the Omicron variant of social media use. I had a mild case. I put down my phone for a few months and picked it back up again with no apparent lingering side effects. But Omicron is the most contagious variant.
Omicron may be mild with few symptoms or maybe you are asymptomatic and don’t even realize you have it at all. Yet the bug still exists.
Are you scrolling each night before bed and limiting the interaction with your significant other and exposing yourself and your brain to damaging stimulation and harming your sleep? Are you allowing your child to do the same? Do you spend too much time on your phone, but justify there is really no harm. You deserve this time to relax, right? Do you get a bit melancholy when you see certain people’s posts because sometimes you don’t feel like your life appears as together as their life does? Have you ever neglected an important or necessary task because you simply didn’t want to get off your phone? Have you ever hidden from your family so you could sneak in some phone time? Does your child or your spouse pay more attention to their phone than you…and sometimes you don’t care?
Odds are you or someone you love has the Omicron Variant of Media!
But if we’ve learned anything about this mystery virus, we must acknowledge that we underestimate the power it wields. I knew something was “off” and I was simply getting in a funk that I could not articulate. Removing my daily dose of media cured that feeling of oppression.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)'s first criteria of addiction is impaired control. What does that mean? A person turns over control of his/her life to something else - that doesn’t mean it has to be alcohol or drugs. Having the Omicron Variant of Media means you have reached the threshold of turning your life over to the media. Media now controls some aspect of your life.
If we have learned anything from Covid, the virus is a nasty unpredictable little bug. If you think your case of Omicron is harmless - no long term consequences here - how easily can your symptoms slip into a case of the Delta Variant or full blown Covid?
Come back to TheClassroomCounts.com as I continue to discuss social media use…
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