You see, I really do take requests and write on them. My friend believes it’s foolish for teenagers to express themselves on the internet. I shall discuss the topic on her behalf.
Journals and diaries once used to be the primary methods that adolescents and children used to express their feelings. With the rise of the internet, everyone quickly realized it was stupid to keep opinions to themselves; web logs (later to be called ‘blogs’) were thus born. As blogging became the established form of personal, unrestrained expression of opinion, many companies attempted to innovate or capitalize on such human demands for expression. While Facebook and Twitter may be social networking sites, it finds a comfortable niche in blog-like services: microblogging through 140-character “tweets,” briefly expressing oneself via the Facebook status update, or displaying your lengthier opinions and musings with Facebook’s Notes application. One blogging platform, Tumblr, has stood out for its ease-of-use and borrowing of tried-and-true social networking tactics such as “liking,” as some critics have observed Tumblr’s slight similarity to Facebook. Teenagers in particular enjoy the blogging service; an entire culture, replete with subcultures, has subsequently developed within the platform.
...and with teenagers, one has to expect emotion, instigated by hormonal surges or the unique peer pressure that surrounds you. Tumblr’s “Dashboard” feature is original for a blogging platform because posts from other blogs you “follow” are displayed smack-dab for your viewing pleasure, as it is eerily similar to Facebook’s News Feed. With this, you have no choice but to revel in amazement or reject in disgust at what others are thinking about. Thus, when one teenager creates an emotional posting about the nature of love, hundreds or even thousands may respond in the form of “liking” the post or “reblogging” it, essentially copying the post to the person’s own personal blog for others to see. This incredibly addicting feature allows practically anything to be proliferated on a mass scale, as long as your content strikes a chord with the rest of the adolescent audience. For this reason, my blog posts receive little attention.
Arguably, this “unrestrained expression” I note is good for most people, who should let out emotions in order to alleviate stress, but such activities become potentially self-destructive among teenagers. The reason for the volatility is associated with the tendency for adolescents to disproportionately describe the nature of their problems (read: exaggerate). This has been attributed to fluctuating levels of estrogen and progesterone in teenage girls, which easily explains why girls take up the lion’s share of emotional/sappy/all of the above posts on Tumblr. Guys are more influenced by sudden fits of anger due to a hyperactive amygdala...
So, if you want to avert a self-induced bout of adolescent depression, it may be best to tone down those Tumblr posts. Express emotions at your own risk, or when you have a grasp of your own emotions. For most, that won’t happen until one graduates college. In the meantime, have fun reblogging, ranting, sobbing, trying to be philosophical, or being lovesick.
SAT Vocabulary:
1. Niche – n. a place, employment, status, or activity for which a person or thing is best fitted
2. Instigated – v. to provoke
3. Proliferate – v. to increase rapidly in numbers
4. Volatility – adj. changeable
5. Fluctuating – v. going from one degree to another without stability
6. Amygdala – n. region of the brain primarily responsible for regulating emotions
7. Avert – v. to turn away or aside
