By E’Yanna Davis
Many times college students’ priorities lie within social media. Campus students appear to be endlessly liking, taking selfies and tagging others in posts.
Reagan Ryan, a freshman at Louisiana Tech, said she stays on social media longer than she would like.
“I would say I’m on it for a solid three to four hours daily,” Ryan said.
Ajaya Miller, a senior at Grambling State, said she spends most of her social media time on Instagram, logging two hours daily.
“Sometimes I try to catch myself before I get over an hour because I have other stuff to do, and I need to get to it,” Miller said.
Experts have found that the correlation between college students and their use of social media often has damaging effects on students’ mental health.
“Technology can be wonderful, and it can be terrible,” said Johnette Magner, an assistant professor of communication and media studies and executive director for external affairs at Tech. “Everybody has these devices and nobody’s had any training on how to use them.”
Magner teaches a class called Digital Wellbeing at Tech that she said she hopes will inform students on how to effectively use social media and form intimate relationships with their family, friends and peers.
“One of the most important things you can do is if you have people who are posting trash, I would remove them from my feed,” Magner said. “You don’t have to read junk just because you know the person who sent it.”
