The Me In Media

✾⚘𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙍𝙚𝙖𝙡 𝘿𝙚𝙖𝙡⚘✾

It had been an awesome ride living in a virtual world and interacting with others virtually. It was the most enthralling thing ever. (◉‿◉)

I learned to fight for what was right even though it seemed like evil was more dominant.
Things were going great with Zeph. We made plans to meet in some months. It was completely unbelievable how this happened. I often asked myself if that would have been possible without my gadget. It was an incomprehensible question.

One morning, I answered a call from my Mom in the living room. I hurried downstairs and I met a lady and a man, seated on the living room couch. I greeted them and I was instructed by my mother to sit.

"I am Phoebe, and this is my partner, George," the lady proceeded, "we are from an organization called 'The Next Gen,' and we are out to impact the lives of young people like you the best way we can."

"Oh, okay." I was slightly confused about their presence.

"You see, I and my team for a long time now have been educating young people about the impacts of social media as this is  increasingly becoming a problem for young adults."

"So..." I turned again to give my mom a quick stare, then the lady and the man; I was muddled. ಠᴥಠ

"I met your parents a long time ago, during that church program 'Technology and your Teen— T&T' and we had a series of conversations."

"Aisha's mother invited them over," my mom interfered.

"During the interactive sessions, so many parents spoke of how they deprived their kids from gaining any access to a phone, or having access to a phone but no access to the internet, or having access to the internet but being aware of their every deed on that phone. This produced a rowdy argument between everyone. The whole argument was leading to one question: whether social media has layed positive impacts in the lives of youths today or negative."

George took over from her, "Your mother happened to be one of the parents who mentioned that she hadn't gotten you a phone yet because she wanted to be very sure that you can handle it."

"I told them that I know my daughter and that you wouldn't be able to handle it, that it would distract you and change you. I wanted to protect you from evil as much as possible even here in the real world where there's just too much evil. I never wanted my child to be corrupted, that's why I don't let you have too much friends, I don't let you go out and I monitor every single thing you do and watch you very, very, very closely." Can anyone please help me define an extremist?!

"We told her that she was wrong to an extent. After a series of arguments, we came to a conclusion saying that the only way to profoundly finalize our deep studies on the impact of social media on young people was to get the parents who deprived their kids from having phones, to actually get them a phone and allow us weigh the results. While some disagreed, a lot of people did agree, one of which was your Mom."

"We created a little group chat for this and asked them to closely watch your behaviours and inform us about it every minute. We thought it was a little too extreme, well not until the research was going really well and it was kind of fun. We realized that you and the other teenagers had so many things in common regarding your behaviours towards social media and gadgets, especially being newly introduced to such."

George continued, "We had to keep this process going on for a long time so that your inability to succeed on the internet would not be ascribed to your recency to it. We had to keep waiting and watching to see if you would outgrow certain things.

"When that immoral video went viral, it took heaven and earth to make your parents calm down. We had to hope for the best since there was nothing they could do, not even taking away your phone could fix it. But when they saw that you had, by yourself, steered clear of social media after the incident, we knew we were on the right track. It took vehement efforts and conviction to get your parents on our side. Parents were willing to take the risk even though they almost gave up at some point. When some of them saw how much good it distilled in the life of their kids, they were willing to ignore the negative side for the main time just to help us gain enough knowledge to make conclusions. Presently, we are left with twelve standing teenagers out of thirty, you included.