Blog Post Week 6

I enjoyed reading the two readings this week. In particular, I found Pittman and Reich’s article on loneliness as an epidemic to be particularly interesting. To start, I was immediately drawn in by the comparison to loneliness, a feeling, to an epidemic. As someone who is now currently living in a pandemic, I believe that I have a different understanding of the word in general. I believe this did shape the way that I looked at the article and the paper. Furthermore, the authors remarked on how loneliness was being compared to obesity in terms of how prevalent it is in the world today. Personally, I have always been very interested in mental health. However, I have not seen many articles connecting social media to mental health. I believe this really added to my understanding of the seriousness of this issue, as well as what we can do to fix this issue. I know for many kids in my middle and high school, social media was an outlet. I had many friends who when questioning their sexuality, became very active on tumblr and twitter. For them, this allowed them to find communities who not only understood what they were going through, but could give them advice. Furthermore, I believe that nowadays, with so many avenues of media and electronics, it can be harder to connect with the people around you. Personally, I find it hard to think about what to talk about, even with my friends. It is much easier to connect with writers online and discuss the writing process than try to discuss the intricacies of my plot with even my family. I believe that this article truly emphasized the good that social media can do, particularly for teenagers. I feel that many articles and studies focus on the negative aspects of social media, not the positive affect it can have on the world as well.