#ICANHELP
LHS learns more about encouraging positivity on social media. Story by Paige Twenter The culture of bullying has gone from spit-balling and name-calling to shadethrowing and subtweeting faster than you can spell out your entire day using emojis. Bullying has cultivated over the past few decades to fit a new forum that can reach anyone and everyone: the internet. Recently, there has been an emergence of social media sites that feature the opportunity for anyone to connect. Unfortunately, social media also gives the opportunity for people to harass others behind the protection of a screen.
Deleting Negativity
Students filed into the new fieldhouse for the #ICANHELP assembly on November 8. They listened to the co-founder of the #ICanHelp project, Kim Karr, and gained knowledge to spread positivity online and maintain a forward-looking digital footprint. “The thought process of #ICanHelp was definitely getting the education out to just as many students as you can,” Karr said. “So I was talking to students, asking, what are the needs, what are the problems. I was then trying to get the support from the snapchats and the twitters and the instagrams.” The initial idea to have this non-profit organization come to LHS came last
06
March when a handful of StuCo members at the StuCo state convention heard the speakers there and decided our school needed to hear this message.
“I think we all just need to be positive and happy and love each other!” -Senior Drew Higgins
“The high school tries to bring in a couple of speakers each year to talk about important subjects,” StuCo leader Erin Ramsey said. “So much of our lives are lived online anymore that I think it’s really important that we talk about how to behave in a positive way online.” There’s more to just spreading positivity required to make that change online and that’s to delete the negativity. Just because a person doesn’t seek out mean posts
doesn’t mean there aren’t hurtful things posted. “It’s negativity that causes a lot of issues in society today, especially with everything that’s going on in our world,” senior Drew Higgins said. “I think we all just need to be positive and happy and love each other.” A gift and a curse with the anonymity that social media encompasses is the power teenagers get to type things they wouldn’t normally have the courage to say aloud. “It’s just one of those things that now you have a fear and now this generation has been called the generation of wimps because you have all these fears and it makes you not want to do things,” Karr said. In times of crisis, the world needs a leader. The same can be said for online issues regarding cyber-bullying. Accounts with a large following have a responsibility to post positively and shut down haters and trolls. “A digital leader is someone who doesn’t put anything bad on social media and doesn’t bully people,” Higgins said. “Someone that sticks out in my mind is always trying to uplift people instead of putting people down.”
Left: Students listen to speaker Kim Karr’s presentation. Right: Seniors Ethan Moore, Jenna Conard and junior Heather Shipley share shout-outs to various friends and teachers. Photos by Grace Buehler
News November 22, 2016
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