Effects of Social Media

How does social media affect the average teenager? Social media is an app that teens use every day like tiktok and instagram those are things that teens can’t live without. One thing that social media does is make kids feel alone and cut off from the world. When asked, one teen said, “I felt alone and cut off from the world” (“Social Media”). Another big thing that social media does is influence the way teenagers interact with people in the real world. For example, “people nowadays prefer social media more than face-to-face meeting” (Singh). One of the bigger things about social media is that kids use it more than anything else. One survey found that, “forty-five percent of teens say they are online ‘almost constantly’” (Ohlheiser). Although social media is used by many people, social media can have negative effects.

Social media is something teens have grown up with their whole lives, and they do not know how to live without it. “They will not remember a world without YouTube, Facebook or Twitter…they’re certainly more plugged in than earlier generations because that’s the world they grew up in” (Black, Atseff, and Kaveney). Social media is something that teens have always known from a young age. Kids are stuck in front of screens and told by their parents to be quiet so they realy don’t know how to live without it .That is why without it teens wouldn’t know what to do. Social media is also one of the few ways kids know how to make friends nowadays. Beth Kaplan, a high school senior, is a good example “Charles East senior Beth Kaplan met her long-distance boyfriend of a year through social media. He currently lives in Scotland, but with the help of social media, they’re still able to frequently communicate with one another” (Black, Atseff, and Kaveney). Even though social media helps teenagers make friends, it also makes it even harder for people to keep up with those friendships because some of those friends that teens make live thousands of miles away so you can’t ever see them.

Social media can be one of the worst things for teenagers physical relationships. Social media helps adolescents keep track of what everyone is doing nowadays, but that is not always a good thing because it can make teens feel bad about their own lives .“The fear of missing out, also known as FOMO, is when you feel like you’re being left out. This is worse when combined with social media” (“Debate: Does Technology Make Us Lonely?”). The fear of missing out is never fun, but when teenagers mix that fear with social media it makes it worse because kids now know what they are missing out on. Social media is also affecting the way adolescents hang out with people. Nowadays kids want to spend more time inside and on their screens than they do outside with their friends. One person explained how social media began to take over their life: “Soon group meetings and gatherings were transformed into group chats; hanging out became texting for four hours” (Singh). The real world is slowly slipping away from people, and they do not even know it. The biggest thing social media does to friendships is give teens a fake idea of the friends they are hanging out with. One interviewer explained how that worked: “a 15-year-old girl, for instance, said that social media provides a ‘fake image of someone’s life’” (Miller). The 15-year-old girl pointed out that not everything teens see about people on social media is true; sometimes people write lies about themselves on the internet. Friendship is only one of the few things that social media affects. There are also other things that social media affects.

Teens are often more caught up in social media than anything else. “People begin to forget that social media isn’t a necessity to live” (Black, Atseff, and Kaveney). Lots of teens do not know how to do much else in life than use social media; it is like they can’t live without it. When in an interview someone said, “My fingers seem to be programmed to seek out the Facebook app every time I pick up my phone” (“Social Media”). Every time a person picks up a phone the first thing they do is seek out the social media apps. In current times people are on social media more than anything else. Teens now get outside less than they did before, and even if they do get outside they are probably on their phones. One pew survey found that, “In all, 89 percent of teens surveyed in 2018 said they were either online ‘almost constantly’ or ‘several times a day,’ with just 11 percent telling Pew they were online once a day or less” (Ohlheiser). Respondents admitted to using social media almost every day and most people that said they use social media said that they use it more than one time a day; they are on it every chance they get. Obviously social media has become a very big issue for teens nowadays.

Although social media is used by many people, social media has negative effects. Teens nowadays need to get outside and spend less time on their phones. One author pointed out how in 2011 he got pulled into social media: “smartphones arrived soon after and it looked as if everyone had been transported to a new world- a virtual world” (Singh). Social media is something that we should take a break from. Turn off your phones and put them away just like we take breaks from other things. We need to take a break from social media, too.

image citation “Automotive Social Media Marketing” by socialautomotive is licensed under CC BY 2.0.