The piece below is the winning collegiate essay in the Network of Enlightened Women’s 2025 essay contest.
When I was first allowed to have an Instagram account, my parents put strict boundaries around my app use: limited screen time, accountability in who I followed and who followed me, and specific standards on what I could or couldn’t post. It was fun to have an account, but I felt restrained. I couldn’t understand how something so fun could be as bad as my parents said.
Then, as I got older, the boundaries became hazy, and I discovered the darker side to social media. Short-form media allows for bite-sized information, but more significantly, it is resulting in decreased attention spans for undergraduates. As an undergraduate now, I wasn’t exposed to short-form content until around late elementary school to early middle school, and still, I struggle with focusing my attention after times of consuming short-form content. How much worse will things get for those younger than me?
The Left easily takes advantage of the younger generation’s propensity to be on social media by making short clips and claiming they represent truth. This was abundantly clear during the Black Lives Matter push of 2020, where short clips of police brutality were taken and posted on social media, completely ignoring context and background, to support liberal ideologies and to bring people to the cause. Because of this lack of critical thinking, the next generation consumes highly abstract ideologies that go against what has made our country great: hard work, diligence, and integrity.
Watching conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s interactions with undergraduates at various universities is a striking example of just how uninformed a supposedly hyper-informed and intelligent generation is. Whenever Kirk tries to have an educated discussion with young leftists, it’s as if they try to scroll past it like just another clip in their feed.
The short-form content epidemic has produced a generation of individuals who cannot have civil arguments, and those from my generation who work hard to push against the pull of simple, uncritical thought seem to be the only ones who produce knowledgeable, coherent arguments. This does not simply extend to the online world. I get along best with those who are not always glued to their phones, can take a joke, and enjoy discourse without turning it into an attack against their worth or identity.
In my past year as an undergraduate, I have discovered just how much of academia, from colleges to clubs, relies on social media. I realized I was addicted to Instagram, so I worked to offload the app from my personal devices to focus more on face-to-face interactions and schoolwork. But school administration relies not just on email or bulletins but on social media platforms to communicate with the student body. Student life organizations rely on Instagram and texting to communicate with the student body about events and public announcements. Some clubs and activities exclusively communicate through Instagram, and as someone who often has Instagram offloaded from her phone, I am regularly left out of the loop in my clubs.
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If my Christian club wants to promote an event, leadership relies on posting on Instagram more than communicating internally and extending invitations in person. I can feel left out even among my friends, with their heads constantly bowed, looking at their feeds, and their eyes darting from me to their phones in conversation. Though social media was made to connect people, it causes greater division in reality.
Social media is a cesspool for pornography, human trafficking, violence, and comparison. I would caution any young woman who desires a social media presence to look for platforms that focus more on long-form content or, better yet, to put down her phone and look around.
Anna Meverden is a student at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.