Hello and welcome back to my blog! My Inquiry question for Semester 1 is: “How does continuous engagement with social media platforms, without regular breaks, influence the mental health and academic performance of high school students?”
I chose to do a topic regarding Social Media for my Inquiry Project as this subject affects every student’s day-to-day life. By taking a deeper dive into how social media can affect the mental health and academic performance of high school student’s, I can learn how to study more effectively without having the distraction of a digital device. School has taken a shift when I was in grade 5 to becoming more reliant on technology by having new platforms introduced such as Microsoft Teams. The majority of the assignments I complete nowadays are submitted onto Microsoft Teams for my teachers to mark, instead of handing in an activity on paper. With technology advancing, new social media platforms are being created, which can lead to a lack of engagement when student’s have an assignment to complete. I find Social Media fascinating, but with technology being so new, are we actually benefitting ourselves from consuming so much information on these platforms? I will look further into this subject matter in my next blog posts.
From being a student with technology so advanced, I can already see the lack of motivation from students when it comes to completing assignments as social media is very distracting and it takes much less work to scroll through Instagram than completing Science homework. I also find that scrolling on social media continuously, without regular breaks, can lead to shorter attention spans. This is a sub-topic that really interests me as the majority of people have a weak attention span, focusing on certain things for a limited amount of time. Educating myself on this topic will be very beneficial as most student’s rely on technology to complete schoolwork, myself included.
Thank you very much for reading, and I hope that this topic relates to a characteristic of your life that you find important!
— Vanessa Vukovic
This is such a fascinating topic! I completely agree with what you said about social media being both intriguing and distracting. The connection you made between continuous scrolling and shorter attention spans really stood out to me – I’ve noticed the same thing in myself and others. I’m curious, how did you notice that people have shorter attention spans? Was it something you observed in your own habits, or do you see it in classmates too?
By the way, I think you might find this article from Harvard Business Review really interesting. It dives into how multitasking and frequent social media use can impact focus and productivity: https://hbr.org/2019/01/why-you-should-stop-multitasking. Looking forward to your next post!