Marena Beale
Professor Shelley
English Composition 110
December 7, 2023
Unfortunate Fortunes (final essay)
Being a freshman when COVID-19 first struck our world makes being a college freshman now much different. There are a lot of things we need to balance, however we were not taught how to balance them, making this year incredibly difficult for a lot of new students. Some articles that demonstrate how hard it is for incoming students are “The Limits of Friendship”, by Maria Konnikova, “The Empathy Diaries” by Sherry Turkle, and “I Don’t Feel Like Buying Stuff Anymore”, by Anne Helen Petersen. Though all of these written pieces tackle different topics, like our friendships, our social life, and the economy in general, they all have one common tie, which is how students are affected.
First, we will talk about “The Limits of Friendship”. Konnikova illustrates the idea of how the Dunbar number works, as well as how children now are being raised in a virtual world. The Dunbar number is “…the theoretical number of friends we can really have, and the ways in which social networking is affecting not only this number but also socialization itself” (Emerging, 190). However, now these numbers might be shrinking because of our relationships forming on social media rather than in person. Nicole Ellison, a researcher from Michigan State University, surveyed a group of random undergraduate students about how they use Facebook. “…she found that while their median number of Facebook friends was three hundred, they only counted an average of seventy-five as actual friends” (Konnikova, 192). These “friends” we have on social media are not solid relationships. They are more of a following; people we know through other people.
Next, we will bring “The Empathy Diaries” into the conversation. Turkle explains how we are so used to technology that we are losing our person to person skills, including empathy. “We hide from each other even as we’re constantly connected to each other. For on our screens, we are tempted to present ourselves as we would like to be” (Turkle, 344). Even though we are able to contact each other at the touch of a button, we are still disconnected. Turkle also discusses how she was invited on a retreat with the Holbrooke School in New York. The dean of the school said they were watching their students make acquaintances, but not real connections. “It is a struggle to get children to talk to each other in class, to directly address each other…And one teacher observes; the [students] sit in the dining hall and look at their phones” (Turkle, 345). When these students stare at their devices instead of having conversations with each other, they are preventing themselves from being able to make meaningful relationships in the future. In order to get well paying jobs, or even get into a good school, you need to have social skills. Being able to make true, deep connections with people will help everyone grow, and we will adapt as a society.
Last, we will discuss “I Don’t Feel Like Buying Stuff Anymore”. Petersen discusses how after the strike of COVID-19, our economy struggled. This relates to the other two articles because they talk about how things like relationships struggled after the pandemic as well. In her article, Peterson describes that a large source of tension in America was how life would return to normal. Is, however, may itself be a flawed way of thinking as this “normal” may not be whats best. She claims that this normal was “an economy that, even before COVID-19, was built to a form of consumption that felt compulsory, with household dept as normalized as the exploitative work conditions that made those daily consumption habits possible.” This proposes the question that if what we are used to is clearly not what’s best, how can we use COVID-19 as a learning opportunity to promote a change for the future, rather than reverting to our old flawed ways. Talk about how aspects of the “old” ways of friendship making and friendships may be bad and how we can use covid as a learning opportunity to rethink our ways of friendships.
Overall, COVID-19 had a big impact on all generations, especially those in school. However, they are able to overcome the difficulties and thrive in their own ways.
