Social Media: How it Affects the Life of a Teenager

Social media has started to become an extremely significant part of the average teenager's life.  95% of teens are online in some way - whether on Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, etc.  While these things are definitely fun, and can keep people our age updated on what's going on with the region, not many people seem to think of the negative effects social media can have on teens.  Social media lessens a teen's ability to communicate with people in their society face-to-face.

     Many teens admit to feeling uncomfortable when they don't have their phones on - or close to - them; I see this as a result of fearing a lack of communication between a teen and their friends online.  Talking to people online can be easier than speaking to someone in real life - it means they don't have to be self-conscious about the way they look, and they have time to think everything through before they say it.

     In a face-to-face confrontation, a person is under pressure to give an answer or response to something in a limited amount of time before it becomes "awkward" or "weird."  Constantly communicating with people online lessens a teen's ability to think fast, or to put together the ideas they want to convey without word-vomiting.  Being online is comforting because they can go back and correct their mistakes, or erase and we-write the words they say before they send it.  The reality is, this luxury isn't granted in real life.

     As well as communication issues, social media leaves us with a severe lack of emotional connections to the people around us.  Even at restaurants, when families are sitting together at a table, you're likely to catch them all on their phones if they're not eating their food.  Social media distracts us from what's right in our faces - the people that matter most.  We allow our own personal worlds to steal our attention away from the people we care about, which can lead to lacking or destroyed relationships between teens and their families or friends.

     Social media also distracts us from what's going on globally, and not just in their country or in the life of a famous person.  On a weekly basis, teachers will mention something in class about a problem happening somewhere in Africa or India, and we will never have heard of it before.  Despite these problems being all over the news, teens' social medias lean toward news that ultimately don't affect the world, such as Justin Bieber getting arrested or rumors of a break-up between Kim Kardashian and Kanye West.  Social media doesn't let us focus on problems that need to be fixed in order to save lives or reputations.

     On a different level, social media can also be the cause of anxiety in teens.  If a teenager has one bad experience with the internet, getting notifications or messages from any social media websites can tend to make a person nervous about looking at it (Will it be something terrible again?).  The resulting anxiety leads to a teen developing distrust in the physical world around them - causes them to think that people could possible be so cruel in person, too.

     The truth of that one is:  Most people don't have enough guts to say something cruel to someone else's face, which is why they use social media to hide behind.

     Sometimes I wish that Instagram, Twitter, Flickr, and everything else had never existed - we'd be better off without them.  I no longer see this as a fixable problem - the damage has been done, and there's no way to convince any company to shut down their websites when they're making so much money off of them.  Social media has affected the life of teens in a terrible way, and definitely in more ways than I've tried to explain.  And while it's understood that social media is a fun way to waste time we have nothing else to do with, I'd rather we sacrifice that than our communication skills, or our emotional connections.