When I was phoneless at school, I always felt left out and excluded from my friendship circle (Picture: Getty)

I was born in 2006, two years after Facebook was founded, and I grew up in the midst of the rapid rise of social media.

As a 12-year-old girl, I am not ashamed to admit that I have been a slave to social media.

Although I’ve never been cyber-bullied, I have many friends who have been.

One of my friends was being threatened by an anonymous user and she never told anyone. This person had pressured her for five months. One day I saw a menacing and intimidating remark pop up on her phone. When I asked her what it was and who it was from, she tearfully told me that she was getting these texts for almost half a year.

I was disappointed that she didn’t tell anyone, but she said that the unknown user had told her that if she reported his texts to anyone, he would do something ‘that will make her regret ever opening her mouth’.


Nevertheless, I persuaded her to tell this to our teacher who then helped my friend get through this horrible situation. Yet, even now, a year later, she has not and will not forget that damaging episode.

On Instagram you can call yourself anything and be confidential when sending messages, so nobody knows who that user is.

Sometimes in desperate attempts to get ‘more popular’ we add people we don’t really know just to increase our followers. This is what happened to my friend, but we have all learnt a lesson from her experience.

These days, the more followers and likes you have, the more ‘popular’ you seem to be. Some kids feel so anxious about not getting enough likes and followers that they try hard to impress other people by posting inappropriate content.

Selfies are 38 per cent more likely to receive likes so many insecure teenagers, worried about the minimal amount of likes they are receiving, start posting mirror selfies with a minimal amount of clothes on.

This can lead to an unhealthy obsession, where someone is so concerned with how many likes and messages they are getting, that they are constantly checking their phone. This can be distracting in class, when instead of concentrating on the topic, they are thinking about their account.

When a couple of my friends and I ‘achieved’ 1,000 followers on Instagram, we were ecstatic. All we did for weeks was sit and wonder in class how many more likes and followers we were getting.


But when I fell out with my friendship group, not one of my thousand followers came to my aid. I then knew that I had to start over and make other friends in real life. Now I realise that online ‘friends’ don’t matter. It’s the friends we have at school that we see every day that are important.

This is a lesson parents sometimes try to teach by taking our phone away from us, but this can be counterproductive, leading to us becoming ostracised at school, when our friends are talking about what someone had shared online last night.

My parents have taken my phone away a number of times, which has been difficult for me. When I was phoneless at school, I always felt left out and excluded from my friendship circle when they started talking about what was going on in their digital life.

Luckily, my parents understood and we came to an agreement that my time on social media would be controlled and limited. I wasn’t too keen when my parents first suggested it, but I soon saw how much calmer my life became. I wasn’t stressed about missing out anymore, and I wasn’t worried that I was getting too addicted. The balance was just right.

I now see that these apps are designed so that they never come to an end. Even though we might tell ourselves, ‘five more minutes,’ something new pops up when the page is refreshed, and suddenly five minutes turns into much longer. So I have been trying to convince all my friends to try and set boundaries on their screen time.


Moving up to year seven was a huge leap for me. Joining secondary school isn’t easy because everyone is trying to fit in. In primary, not many students have social media and so everyone is friends with the people they see at school every day. However, in year seven, many kids became friends through social media sites such as Instagram and SnapChat.

Technology is great, but the real wonders that lie in front of us as children are the ones you need to feel and experience IRL.

Although we all know there is a law that states that under 13s are not allowed to use these platforms, many people, including parents and schools, seem to turn a blind eye. Almost everyone I know, when moving into year seven, gained access to social media through their smartphone. It is not a great example that one of the first laws we came across as 12 year olds is so easily bypassed.

The other problem is that everyone seems to exaggerate when they’re hidden behind their screen and so when talking to other people, they can amplify their true personalities.

When I was in year seven I was messaging a girl from another class in my school. Over messages, she made me laugh and I loved talking to her. We became so close that we decided to meet the next day at school.


Except we couldn’t seem to find a topic to start a conversation with, and the time we spent together was very awkward. I was so disappointed that someone who I thought I had such a great connection with was nothing like me and we had absolutely nothing in common when we spoke in real life.

As a young girl who is about to become a teenager, I am excited that my classmates and I are the future. But I am also fearful because if our future generation becomes too absorbed in virtual lives, where will that lead?

What adults will we become if real life is too complicated for us to confront? How can hiding behind a screen so bright suddenly seem so dark? Technology has been created to develop an easier future, but somehow has made it a lot more difficult.

My belief is that parents, politicians and the social media companies need to come together and take action. Not to get rid of social media for young people, but to restrict it.

While adults still have control, they should limit the amount of time young people spend on their phone and make sure that we are aiming to achieve something in their life.

I have found that I enjoy myself more and find myself more content when I am not being bewitched by my phone all the time. By having these limits on my screen time, I can both keep up with all of the gossip while also not watching my phone at every opportunity.

Technology is great, but the real wonders that lie in front of us as children are the ones you need to feel and experience IRL. In real life.

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