Social Media and Teenagers

The most basic concept of Social Media is a website on the internet that allows for some kind of contact. Many such blogs and web pages have recently appeared and are now burning like wildfire across the forest. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Imo, Whatsapp, 2go, LinkedIn, and Google Plus are only a few examples. Social networking has brought a lot of positive, but it has also been a source of continuous pain and anger for millions of people, especially teens (Ahn 1435-1445). According to the research that was conducted at the University of Maryland, teenagers become restless, depressed, anxious, and traumatized whenever they are away from Social Media. This was done by the researchers taking their smart phones and iPhones away from them for twenty four hours, they were then allowed to have their phones back and told to share their experiences on the class blog. Most of them almost three quarters of the entire population gave feedbacks of being traumatized and never wished to have such an experience again.

This is what Social Media has turned teenagers to. Teenagers are now addicts of being on phone texting, posting pictures, sharing irrelevant posts that are not bound to help develop their intellectual capacity. This is the reason for the continuous rise of robots with flesh and blood (teenagers who have to be told most things) because they have little to no time of personal reflection, meditation and self-assessment. This makes them unproductive and less impactful and innovative (Madden et al. 2-86.).

Risks of Using Social Media

About seventy percent of those using Social Media are adolescents/teenagers/youth. This makes Social Media a riskier bet for most people who use Social Media in one way or another. These risks fall into various categories such as the youth having problems with their fellows, having problems with the management of these Social Media platforms due to misunderstanding their policies especially the privacy policies, third party interferences. Let us consider some of these risks.

Cyber Bullying. This is where a particular person or a group of people are harassed by bullies who they met online or those friends they know but they suffer in silence over one or two things these friends posted or said to them and people commented harshly. This is also online harassment. The term online harassment and cyber bullying are used to refer to the other yet they do not necessarily mean the same thing. The online harassment is not common like the physical harassment (Barker 209-213). This means that most teens with Social Media accounts might not be harassed by their peers but on the other hand they may be bullied through the derogatory statements and comments made by their peers. Cyber bullying often leads to chronic psychological problems such as depression and anxiety and this could graduate to more serious health issues if not handled in time and has led to many cases of suicide (Barker 209-213).

Immorality has also sky rocketed as a function of teenagers on Social Media. Many pornographic companies have opened sites that have become interaction points for those looking for quick sex and also those who do not mind selling their bodies. Take for example, Instagram, there are very many pages that have on them pictures and videos of fully naked or half naked women twerking and to make this a wonder, this kind of accounts have millions of followers. This shows in black and white how the teens in this society are corrupted and evil minded. Applications such as Whatsapp and messenger have made it easy for teens to flirt and sext.

Sexting is where there are two or more people sharing images and videos of their own private parts via devices such as cell phones, laptops, tablets or ipads. Before the introduction of applications such as the Whatsapp and Viber and even Facebook, this was a very rare occurrence, but now, it is easy to send such multimedia messages at a very affordable rate. This encourages promiscuity and prostitution is growing at an alarming rate. Teenage prostitutes now use this to charge people money in order to send them naked pictures some who are old enough to be their grandparents. Apart from the immoral concept of sexting, it leads many teens to depression and stress especially when they get mocked about the size of their private parts.

Distorted communication/barrier to clear communication is another sickening bit of Social Mediaon teenagers, especially in written communication. Social Media has made most youth to be lazy in typing whole words and use short forms of such words to make their points, example; “abty” instead of “ability” This adversely affects them in school and most teens are unable to pass certain examination because of their spelling errors. To add onto this, they are also unable to communicate directly as most of the time th