OA Students have very busy schedules with juggling class workloads, club and school sports, jobs, extracurriculars, and much more. However, when they are able to find uncharted time how they spend it varies heavily between students…
“In my little free time, I enjoy spending time with my friends and watching good shows/movies” -Benjamin Turner, Class of 2021
Activities that students prefer to dedicate their own time with involves methods of destressing and unwinding from their captivating lives include “working out” -Ryan Moore, Class of 2022, “playing guitar” -Antonia Ginis, Class of 2022, and “listening to music and spending time with family or friends” -Caroline Botelho, Class of 2021. Although across the board, an activity that is common for most teens at OA is scrolling through the mesmerizing social media app, Tiktok.
With the intense and continuous popularity of Tiktok, we must ask ourselves, are we getting addicted to Tiktok? In fact, Niko Nguyen a writer from The Cornell Daily Sum, released an article on his own experiences with the app that arguably many individuals can relate to.
“I can’t let this consume my life. I’m stronger than this; I can beat this. It needs to end. Now…Does it have you sucked into its addictive grasp?”
Nguyen, Nicholas. “NGUYEN: The Terrifyingly Tantalizing Trend That’s TikTok.” The Cornell Daily Sun, Cornell University, 9 Feb. 2020, cornellsun.com/2020/02/09/nguyen-the-terrifyingly-tantalizing-trend-thats-tiktok/.
Partly a reason why Tiktok has gotten so used is the incentive to become “Tiktok famous” due to its fairly simple way the app’s algorithm allows people from all across the country and world to connect based on similar interests. Once a user’s video does go somewhat viral on the app it gives them this addicting desire to continue creating content so that the validation they receive from ‘blowing up’ never halts.
Although, for many of OA’s student’s it has probably not gotten that extreme, the influence of this app has reached the majority of Easton’s teenagers and become a way for them to spend their free time.