People love to hate on the up and coming generation. Our parent’s generation grew up as rebels and revolutionaries and have now turned around and blamed our generation for everything that is wrong with the world. Millennials receive a lot of backlash from the mainstream media and from older generations. We are lazy, always on our phones, obsessed with social media and those Kardashians and don’t care for anything but ourselves. We are always complaining and we just don’t know how to “talk” anymore.

From my experience as a millennial and from the millennials I have known, these stereotypes aren’t completely true. Yes, we love our smartphones, who wouldn’t? This thing can play my favorite song while giving me directions to a new brunch place that Siri told me about and then text those directions and an invite to some friends.

Technology is not killing our sociability, it's enhancing it. My phone plays a key role in allowing me to communicate effectively with my friends and family. You can keep in touch with someone hundreds of miles away or send a text to your roommate upstairs to you bring you down some shoes. My phone also a plays a key role in distracting me from homework and other responsibilities, but hey they’ve made technology to fix that too.

The older I get, the more I see this generation using technology and social media to raise awareness and to spread ideas. If someone feels something is wrong, they tweet about it or make a Facebook post. If other people agree, they share it, like it or make their own post about it. I have seen countless injustices in the media get called out on social media, by millennials. And the most powerful thing about it, the companies and top execs listen.

Don't let people tell you that any social media is a waste of your time, they are only trying to lessen our control and soften our voices. We have power and we can use it to shape the world we live in. Our opinions matter and our actions matter.

Our generation desperately wants to change the world, but we also want to be smart about it. Learning about disasters and injustices makes us feel helpless unless we can enact change around those issues. We are fed up with the "bad" news and are ready to make systematic changes to make news "good." We have the power to make those changes, but we are still young. I can't wait to see what we become when we grow up.