This term in Health we have been looking at online behaviors and how they can affect our personal lives. This mainly revolves around social media and how small things like a single comment can have a huge impact on not only you but the person you are replying to. In this unit there were 4 key areas that we learned about. Critical thinking, empathy, respect and responsibility.

Critical thinking

To be critical about your thinking is to think before your actions and question yourself “is this the right thing to do?” People nowadays just rush into doing things for there social media without thinking of the negatives it might cause by doing it. An example of this includes replying to someone’s post, people just don’t think about what they are actually saying and how it can hurt them while hurting another.

Empathy

For me empathy is a big one. To be empathetic means to be in someone’s perspective of view. You actually care about that person’s feelings and it feels comforting to know that. Like critical thinking, people online don’t always think of the person behind the screen and never think from there point of view. This is how nasty comments can come across after a post or comment as people don’t empathize with them.

Respect

To respect someone is basically to value someone as much as you value yourself. This means to respect everyone, even online. Unfortunately society at the moment doesn’t respect people as much online as they do in person. This is why we need to always think of the person behind the screen in every comment/post. An example of this is much like the video, when someone posts something and gets very negative reactions that become quite personal.

Responsibility

Being responsible online means to be wise and careful about your choices and actions. When you get social media, you essentially have a responsibility. I would say that this responsibility would really obey the units above. This responsibility can easily be broken my doing dumb, unsafe stuff and commenting hurtful things. You also have a responsibility for standing up for what is not right, like being a bystander in something not very pleasant like the video.

Overall, I enjoyed learning about this in Health because it is the most perfect time for me to learn about it, as I only just recently got access to social media. It is a real eye-opener to me about what I need to be aware of while I am active online.

Lucas