Young Wrexham Lives
Young Wrexham has teamed up with students from Coleg Cambria in Wrexham to give an insight into the lives of young people in Wrexham. Over the next few weeks we will be showcasing their articles that include ‘The life of a football reviewer, ‘Thoughts on Brexit’ for young people, ‘A trip to the moon’, ‘How to build a computer, ‘My favourite album’, ‘My favourite gig’, ‘Things I would change in Wrexham’, ‘Things I love about Wrexham.
In the project you can talk about most things (nothing rude, lude or crude) and it can be carried out by writing/video or animation. If you would like to take part in the ‘Young Wrexham Lives’ project then please contact us.
The way technology affects young people in Wrexham.
This essay is about the way technology and social media puts pressure on young people. Social media is the perfect way to contact friends and family but there can often be an unhealthy influence from other users on how to look, act and what they should do in certain situations.
People like Kim Kardashian posts photos that people look up to everyday. However, before they post the photo they can pose and edit to make themselves look ‘perfect’ so that the photo is up to the standard of social media. All these fake photos are making the standards that people try to live up to continuously harder and even impossible to achieve, this makes people begin to dislike their own features and make them feel uncomfortable in their own skin.
This affects wrexham personally as some of the outfits worn by the celebrities on social media can add up to thousands of pounds, money that the average person doesn’t have, especially the young people who are most influenced. This can cause pressure to save and buy clothes that are worth lots of money. It could also make people who can’t avoid these clothes feel ostracized and not good enough as they don’t have the money to be able to fit in with the other people.
This can also cause a lot of rifts in between groups as people who have more money may consider themselves a higher standard of person than people who don’t have money meaning that they could start to develop a narcissistic personality. The pressure for expensive clothes could also mean that bullying is more likely as there is a “reason” for them to be bullied.
This can also be the case with technology with people upgrading phones every year to follow trends of the celebrities. This can also cost thousands of pounds for the latest iphone costing over £1000. If people don’t have the latest phone, this causes similar issues to the clothes of bullying and the person who doesn’t have the latest products feeling inferior and worthless.
Not only is instagram an issue, other social medias like Snapchat can cause issues for the youth of wrexham. This is through cyber bullying. Life as a youth in Wrexham is already pretty difficult, nevermind not being able to get away from people. There is constant pressure over what you post on your story, what you send to people and the risk of something you say being shared to everyone and causing lots of issues. This can lead to the youth feeling trapped and unable to escape which could lead to them trying to escape or get away using coping mechanisms which aren’t necessarily good. The rates of suicide in the youth are higher than in another age group. This isn’t helped by the influences of social media and all of the unrealistic standards.
Overall, social media’s impacts on the youth is possibly detrimental to their wellbeing, however, it does allow people to express themselves and find people similar to themselves. There is a need to make sure that the youth are educated on social media and how to use it properly without impacting themselves or others negatively.
