After interviewing a multitude of Riverside Secondary’s students and teachers, the most significant and popular trends of the past semester involving not only social media, but modern life in general became quite clear.

Anything from behavioural trends to online trends such as ever-growing social media platforms, there are a wide variety of day-to-day trends that have taken over modern media and many people’s lives. Directly from six Riverside Secondary teachers and a multitude of Riverside Secondary students, here are the biggest trends of the first semester:

Unsurprisingly to most people, the most common trend mentioned was TikTok, with one of the six teachers and a shocking 80% of the students mentioning it as a top trend of the first semester.

The incredibly viral, music-based application utterly took over 2019 with its wide range of audiences, easy-to-use interfaces and rapidly growing landscape, one could write an entire article about the top trends only on TikTok.

On the topic of if the trend would last though, most did not give the app a very long shelf life. With some saying it would last maybe another year and a few even saying it would die out in the next few months.

Although the students mostly spoke of the app and social media in a positive life, Mr. Mackenzie, a French teacher at Riverside, linked the abundant usage of social media by students to the decline of students’ mental health.

“Social Media and cell phones continue to have a huge impact on our day-to-day functioning as a school. The decline of mental health of students is another. I think the two may be related,” said Mackenzie when asked about the biggest trends of the past few months.

Along these lines, several teachers spoke about behavioural trends.

Mr. Barazzuol, a New Media teacher at Riverside, when asked about the biggest trends of the semester mentioned how social media had become much more utile for learning, commenting that he’d seen services such as Snapchat go from being purely entertainment based to being used to communicate among groups throughout his classroom.

Other interesting trends mentioned by students and teachers were the decline of Champion clothing in fashion, mentioned by Mme. Lo, the rise of Disney + towards the end of the decade, and the use of AirPods in many ongoing memes and jokes surrounding one’s social status.