Scholarship Award Winners Target Use of Social Media

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Spreading Positivity
Spreading positivity through caring essays.

Unified Caring Association (UCA) loves helping people of all ages. We see this each year Unified Caring Association holds scholarship contests to help college bound students. This year for one of the scholarships we asked high school juniors and seniors to write short essays responding to the question, “If you could change one thing in the world to make it a more caring place, what would you change?” We received hundreds of applicants and noticed a trend in some of the responses. Many scholarship award winners targeted the use of social media. 

These impressive teenagers want to help make the world a better and more caring place by limiting social media exposure. Their common drive is to help prevent the spread of negativity and cyberbullying.

Cyberbullying is similar to bullying seen outside of social networks. When we Google search the word ‘cyberbullying’ the definition is, “the use of electronic communication to bully a person, typically by sending messages of an intimidating or threatening nature.” 

Not all online pictures and interactions are negative. There are a fair amount of positive and caring posts online. It is as Cameron M Russell states at the beginning of his essay, “The portrait social media paints of the world can be a beautiful and elegant painting or could be a gruesome and unjust picture…” And this is echoed by Eva McCauley when she states that “… it gives zero insight to how someone’s life actually is.” When there is a disconnect from reality, which we see through the facade of social media and the lack of interaction with people and peers, there is a delay in mental and emotional development that allows for a person to treat others with compassion. Many of the essays submitted also give a remedy for this: true face-to-face connection over digital interaction. “Social media affects one’s identity and empathize (sic) face to face interaction” (Adamaris Cruz Santiago), this is a way we can share our own authenticity. 

In recognising the authenticity of others as well as our own we begin to see others as human. We will begin sharing human experiences. We believe that Isabella Peluso says this in a wonderful way. This movement  “…would allow the world to be a more caring place through people connecting more in the real world and catalyzing a shift towards change instead of just acknowledging that it needs to happen.” In this positive and caring shift we would see people promoting and celebrating kindness, and caring in all forms of communication. We would also see an increase in celebrating diversity. Kassandra Ruiz mirrors this in her essay. She states, “This is why I believe that if we teach students different cultural traditions and morals, they will understand that everyone is unique and that they must accept each other in order to become successful.”

Acceptance of everyone’s individuality is a key to making the world a better, more caring place. And this shows why acceptance is so important. Through this we will all become more successful and happier people. This is achieved through caring acts and words, personal interactions, and supporting and celebrating diversity. With all of these in mind, things like cyberbullying will be reduced or even eliminated. What a wonderful world we can make! And this quote from the last part of Cameron M Russell’s essay exemplifies how was this caring consciousness can be, “…every step I take and every post I’ll make is to feed my positive energy to the world and my job as a human is to take care of my home and the humans on it.”

We are so proud and moved by all of the essays that were submitted for the scholarships. Thank you to everyone who submitted their essays. If you would like to read more of the submissions for this scholarship, visit our Unified Caring Association’s website. Then click on the Scholarships tab to read scholarship submissions. For further reading about UCA scholarships, we have a blog titled, UCA & Scholarships. Or to read more about making the world a better place, check out our other blogs on caring: How to Improve the World By CARING and It All Starts with Self-Care.

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