Social Media and Teens

By: Caitlin Jensen

Social media is a website or an app that allows people to post and interact with other users in what is called social networking. There are many different social media companies. There are Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, Pintrest, Reddit. These companies allow people to post about many different things. Though each platform tends to specialize in a specific type of content. YouTube is more for longer videos about many different things, some people do video blogs, some do tutorials for practically anything, some just make funny videos for peoples’ amusement. TikTok is for short videos mostly for entertaining people. Facebook is more the family and old people social media platform.

Teens mostly use Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube. These platforms are where the “cool” trends come from. The cool thing that I last heard of were doing TikTok dances. On these social media platforms is where teenagers collectively agree on whether or not something is “cool” or a “trend”. Teenagers share and participate in these “cool” or “trendy” activities as a way to boost their social standing. The cool thing that many teenagers are trying to do now is become “TikTok famous”. They do all of the cool trends and are trying to get more people to “follow” them so they can reach the elusive standing of being famous and having that social standing for all of their peers.

Surveys show that ninety percent of youth ages 13-17 use social media. Of that ninety percent fifty-one percent of them use a social media site at least once daily. And on average our teenagers spend almost nine hours a day on the internet, not for homework1. That is almost half of the time they spend awake. This shows that most teenagers are very addicted to the technology that they are using every day. Addictions are hard to fight even as an adult that is why addictive substances are illegal until we reach a certain age. For drinking the age is 21, for smoking the age is 18. However, for technology which is highly addictive there is no age requirement. Children are given technology before they are even ten years old. Social media meets all the same qualifications for it to justify the same regulations as tabaco and opiate derived pain medication2. This means that it is highly addictive, and often teenagers are given uncontrolled access. Because of the addictive nature of social media teenagers often become addicted before their brains are fully developed to a place where they can actually fight an addiction properly.

Most teenagers won’t admit being addicted to their phone anyways. But if the phone is taken away most teens start having problems. They don’t know what to do anymore. They are bored and don’t know how to handle being bored. Before technology teenagers were able to find things to do to occupy their attention. Now technology has become the only source of entertainment that teenagers have. Teenagers no longer know how to go and play. They go and hang out and talk with friends but often technology is a major part of their hanging out. They go to the movies, or play video games, or they are just on their phones while hanging out with their friends.

Society has become this use then toss society. We all have to have the newest and biggest item when it comes to technology. Technology is always advancing. There is always something new coming out every year. Every year Apple comes out with a “new and improved” iPhone. And every year many teenagers are dying to have the newest version of the iPhone. It is like it holds a significant amount of importance in regard to their social standing. You can’t possibly be one of the “cool” kids if you only have an iPhone 6s. No, you have to have at least an iPhone X in order to fit into the “cool” group.  Last year in 2020 over 1.38 billion phones were sold worldwide, and of the 1.38 billion 201.6 million iPhones were sold last year.

It is safe to say that technology is a present part of every day in the life of teenagers. Ninety percent of teenagers own their own cell phones and have access to social media. Social media may give teenagers the ability to have contact with people across the country, however with technology there is always the scary side of it to. And with teenagers on social media the scary side often interacts with them. When on social media it is easy to hide one’s identity. This is scarier with teenage girls.

Especially when teenage girls decide to meet the guy that they have been chatting with online in person. Because it is easy for someone to hide their identity. Being online opens a door for child predators to gain access to your children. It is a dangerous game. Often the people who are contacting your children and coercing them into doing things that they should not do are not reported. It is something that happens. It is a very horrible, disgusting and revolting part of the world we all live in. I am sharing a video of a mother and a group of people who created profiles on social media to see how long it would take for these profiles to be approached by child predators. The video talks about the accounts that they launched for a fifteen-year-old and an eleven-year-old. It is disturbing to see how fast it took for predators to come and try to approach these girls where it was quite advertised that they were minors.

 https://youtu.be/dbg4hNHsc_8

Social media is a scary place especially for our teenagers. They are impressionable. They are still learning, making mistakes. As parents having an open line of communication is critical with teenagers. They need to feel comfortable coming to you and having difficult conversations with you. If they are not comfortable coming to you when they find themselves in a position that could be dangerous mentally, emotionally, or physically they many not come and ask for help. Teenagers fear judgement from others and will not come to you if they do not feel like they will be treated with kindness and respect. Especially with social media your teenagers need to trust you when they experience the types of horror that is in the world, they need to trust that you understand them, will not judge them, will not shame them. It is not their fault that there are terrible people in the world. It is not their fault that people approach them with these terrible and harmful manners. They are still trying to figure out their place. And as parents it is your job to be able to be a source of understanding. They should be able to come to you with questions, and approach you when they see the horrors of the world. Not so you can make the horrors go away but so that you can teach them how to best avoid them and manage and see the flags that can put your child into a place and position that could harm your child for life.


 

References

Aacap. (n.d.). Social Media and Teens. Social Media and teens. Retrieved November 27, 2021, from https://www.aacap.org/AACAP/Families_and_Youth/Facts_for_Families/FFF-Guide/Social-Media-and-Teens-100.aspx.

Rosenquist, N. J., Scott Morton, F. M., & Weinstein, S. N. (2021). Addictive technology and its implications for Antitrust Enforcement. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3787822

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Influence of Parents' "Phubbing Behavior" on Adolescents

  By Qianting Lu "When my mother and I were shopping, I was already very far ahead, and she was still walking slowly with her mobile phone in the back." "Whether it is before going to bed or waking up, Dad always holds the phone. I feel that the phone has become all of Dad's, and he will not be able to live without it."   Have you experienced or heard of similar complaints?       With the rapid development of mobile network technology, mobile phones have become an indispensable part of our lives, and the same is true for parents. Studies have found that parents spend between 0.5 and 7.5 hours on mobile devices such as mobile phones each day, of which 0 to 5 hours are used in front of their children. 2   Such "immersive" mobile phone use is extending the relationship between parents and children with an invisible force.      The behavior of parents bowing their heads will cause parents to withdraw and delay in giving feedback to their ch...
Read all

Effects with Friends, Couples and Siblings

By: Makenna Calderon               Back in the day, teens and families used to use technology for information and for entertainment, but now it is used for social media and keeping in touch with friends and family. According to Social Anxiety and Technology: Face-to-Face Communication Versus Technology Communication Among Teens, 85% of teens use some form of chat room, messaging, or email to keep in contact. This is an important statistic because this hows that more and more teens are spending more time on technology rather than spending time face-to0face with their family or the people they are talking to. Technology effects males and females in different ways, females will spend more time texting on their phone and on social media, while males will spend more time watching movies, listening to music, and watching random videos. Spending so much time on social media causes social anxiety because people re no longer talking...
Read all

Violence in Video Games

By: Makenna Calderon             Video games have such an impact on society especially in adolescence and teens . When you play a certain type of video game for a long period of time, you will start picking up habits from the game or the characteristics of the characters an that is not always the best. There have been multiple studies done on what effects video games have on teens and their aggression and how violent they are if they are violent. According to “The Effect of Violence and Competition within Video Games on Aggression,” violence brings out aggression and the more you see violence the more use to it you are and the more you think it is normal. There were 40 males and 24 females involved in the study and they were asked to play 2 video games that contain violence, 2 that are competitive based, with 2 that are win/loses. The two goals of this study were to use all the same video games to see what type of impact they h...
Read all