Ted Ed speaks on social media

The+Ted+Ed+club+kicked+off+the+year+at+their+first+meeting+in+which+they+discussed+social+media+and+its+effects.

Priya Nalliah

The Ted Ed club kicked off the year at their first meeting in which they discussed social media and its effects.

Maddie Aronson, Staff Reporter

Social media was the primary focus of discussion for the first meeting of Ted Ed club on campus, and provided a platform of communication for students to discuss and express ideas on the topic, and how it affects different aspects of modern culture and identity.

“I was definitely expecting a good turn out, like we had last year with the gun reform discussion,” Ted Ed officer Kaitlin Shin said. “I think that whenever people are given the opportunity to share their ideas they are really attracted to that, because there’s always ideas to share, so I had high expectations, and they were definitely met.”

Also based on last years meetings, the club officers decided that an open forum with little officer interference was the best way to run the first few meetings.

“I think that the set up was good first our first discussion of this year because people are definitely more cautious and nervous at our first discussion, and open floor is really helpful for that. They can speak when they’re comfortable, and listen when they’re not,” Shin said. “I think  in later discussions, we will definitely evolve the organization and structure of that to accommodate to more confidence and different types of discussions that might be more controversial and more complex.”

Substitute teacher Robert Kiro was a rather unexpected voice that spoke on the topic of social media use from a different perspective than the students.

“I think the most interesting part of today’s discussion was definitely when we got a little insight from our adult participant,” Shin said.”When he was saying his perspective as an adult versus our perspective as kids, and that really kind of threw the audience and participants for a loop and I think that kind of changed the direction of our discussion, and I love when that happens, because people get new perspective on what they said, and start thinking about the topic in a different way.”

Kiro came to the school with no knowledge that there would be a discussion in his classroom, but ended up adding insightful perspective to the conversation, and gave students a new outlook on the topic.

“I was quite impressed, and what really impressed me is that they relieve themselves that they need to monitored and they know themselves and that they will go over bounds and they need someone there but unfortunately, like I said, parents are unfortunately not always going to be there,” Kiro said. “The question is who will be, and that’s something I would like maybe students to have in that discussion. If the parents aren’t there to monitor, who will be there to monitor?  And maybe there’ll be websites that will be set up to monitor the students, when parents won’t be able to.”

Kiro also recognizes that because of the difference in age and time period, his and the students opinion will definitely differ.

“As an adult especially, at my age, there’s such a big generational gap, and it hard for me to monitor my child, and the way that I feel that we need to be. I’m really sort of giving that authority moreover to schools, and more over to maybe the people who my daughter is hanging out with, and trusting that they will be doing the right thing, based on the qualities I try to instill in my child, so it’s a hope more than anything else regarding social media.

Senior Cameron Steele participated in the conversations, and saw it as a positive platform for student expression.

“It allowed us to express our opinions, and them share them with other people which was a lot of what the discussion was about,” Steele said, “It let us express ideas about how social media portrays itself, and how we perceive the media.”

Students like Shin believe that conversation is essential to progression and productivity in society.

“I think the value of discussions like these is just making these topics more talked about, because without these kinds of discussions, you can’t guarantee there’ll be talks like this at lunch, or when you hanging out with a friend. We don’t talk about these in our daily lives just naturally, so I think just having a discussion makes these talks more prevalent, and after these discussions, people might continue to talk about it, and talk about it with friends that weren’t there, and that spreads the awareness, and spreads the thoughts that’s going around,” Shin said. “I think that what our society needs is to learn more about the people sitting next to us and learn more about ourselves.”