Honors 102-Fall 2022-Persuasive Blog Posts

  Phone with notifications  A New Generation- How Social Media Affects Today’s Youth   Today, nearly everyone has or uses some form of social media. Whether it's Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, etc these social media platforms have taken the world by storm, and continue to make themselves a part of people’s everyday lives.  Social media is a way for people to share content and connect with other people. You can post pictures, videos, and messages for people to see. You can meet other people online too who might have common interests or enjoy your content. Social media is extremely popular among younger individuals. Over 90% of teenagers in the United States use some form of social media. Social media plays a large role in its users' lives. It influences their lifestyle, appearance, personality, and their decisions.  With this heavy influence of social media on the youth comes a darker tale. While social media has numerous positive effects on...

  An  American prison cell in Georgia,  VICE . Inmates Cry for Help, The Sad Reality of Health in Prison                Four walls and a bed are all you get for the next few years. You are forced to live in close contact with thousands of people from many different regions. You have minimal contact with the outside world, including your family and friends, for making a mistake. You are treated horrifically by the officers and are subjected to abuse every day.   This is the harsh reality of living in prison. Prison overcrowding is a growing issue in the United States that gets easily overlooked. With the enormous number of people placed in a single prison cell, it is impossible to get personal space.      With the close proximity of the inmates, it is recognizable that illness spreads quickly. Illness, however, is not the only health issue that is infecting the inmates. Mental health problems within...

What Social Media is Really Doing to the Youth Teenage girl looking at her phone from  “No phones at the dinner table!”  Is this a phrase you find yourself uttering often? Children of America find themselves engrossed in their personal devices. A sense of concern arises when a parent witnesses their child get trapped in the internet realm with cat videos and celebrity content. The truth is social media platforms have a way of targeting innocent youth through a carefully calculated algorithm. The content algorithm favors posts that users will be more interested in, instead of displaying content in chronological order. Through this, social media users are in a constant cycle of seeing content that they find entertaining. Video-sharing platforms – TikTok and Youtube– and photo-sharing platforms– Facebook and Instagram– are able to offer their young audiences a perfectly crafted lineup of posts that keep them scrolling.   A study on social media revealed that some social s...

Students protesting outside of Parkland high school after a school shooting Are you okay hopefully just know, i love you I love you too forever and you’re the best brother We’re gonna get out of here I promise sam Yes are the cops here my teacher died …               That was the text messages of Sam Zeif, 18 year old senior, and Matthew Zeif, 15 year old freshman, during the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. This left people devastated and proposed the question: Why do school shootings happen? There is no one answer to this. All we know is that school is supposed to be a place of learning where every student feels safe. It is a place where parents drop their children off and have to trust they will be okay. Tragically this is not always the case. US government has let American parents down; they have let the whole nation down. Something must be done to change this nati...

  LGBTQ+ Youth Need Your Help                                       Image of people protesting for action during the AIDS crisis, CNN Throughout the decades, there has been an ongoing issue of poor representation of the LGBTQ+ community in the world. This misrepresentation of this group always starts in either the media or in families. This has been a prominent issue since the 80’s with the AIDS crisis, where HIV/AIDS was labelled as a “gay disease”, adding an insurmountable amount of fuel to the fire of homophobia raging around the world.             Since the 80’s we’ve seen representation of LGBTQ+ people only get marginally better. Some shows, such as Netflix’s “Heartstopper”, a coming-of-age series based on the comic books of the same name, or “RuPaul’s Drag Race”, which has been highlighting the stories of drag ...

Should we be worrying about the Earth's rise in temperature? Thirty-four years have flashed by, along with seven different presidents, since climate change has been flagged as an emergency. You’d think by now we’ve had enough time to realize climate change is a natural process. Keeping tabs on Earth’s climate is important but has become that one annoying song you hear on repeat. Despite all the claims to fame warning against the Earth’s rising temperature, what’s happening may simply be the result of something quite natural. It’s a known fact that the Earth naturally changes temperature. That’s why the Earth has ‘ice ages’ and ‘interglacials’. According to the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), “Earth has experienced cold periods (or “ice ages”) and warm periods (“interglacials”) on roughly 100,000-year cycles for at least the last 1 million years”. Since the last ice age was roughly 20,000 years ago we’re nowhere near another ice age, which makes sense due to...

  Social Media is Dangerous for Our Children and Grandchildren                                                              An image of a child who is distressed while using her iPad.                                                        Social Media, what’s the deal with that? Why are children and the younger generation so obsessed with it? What happened to board games, playing outside, and reading books or newspapers? As time changes, so do people and technology. Seeing how technology advanced can be very interesting to some and even more confusing to others; however, it seems that children seem to und...