In this digital age, social media plays such a significant role that it can also be
called the heart of this dual influential age, if social media is called the heart then
it would only be right to call the most active users on social media, the young
people also called the digital natives the brain, I am your herald Sarankshan K. and
this article is about how are students/youngsters the most influenced by social
media and prior to those evidences is social media a good influence for young
people or not.
Social media plays a significant role in the digital life, about 95% of young people
use social media, more than half of that percentage of teens use it every day,
whereas only 80.8% of adults use it making young people the most influential and
influenced by social media, According to the WHO “young people” are considered to
be from age 10-24, and they make up 24% of the world population (unfpa.org),
that’s about 1.94 billion people and 95% of that is as massive as 1.843 billion young
people, they use social media. (Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi)
Influence on young people by social media:
Positive Influences:
○ Identity exploration: Identity exploration is a major factor in using
social media, personally I also have experienced this, I got to know
that I have different personalities, I am quite different from when I
am talking IRL than talking to someone digitally, I started helping
depressed people online whoever ready to leave life any second and as
someone who wants to pursue medical, you tend to become happy when
you save someone from something as worse as depression that could
possibly lead to suicide, I got my doctor instincts from social media, I
even learnt how to quickly change personalities depending on the
person I am talking to. It’s a really helpful skill especially when you
are being interviewed.
○ Social Activism: Social media can be a platform to spread awareness
about important social issues, in fact it can help youngsters to get a
job, there are millions of people who also have YouTube channels that
talk about these social issues, it’s pretty wholesome. It manipulates
people into becoming activists and standing up for their opinion. It can
also assist in learning new things.
○ Getting creative: Social media platforms provide multiple tools to
show one’s creative selves, it can help people improve their creative
skills, in terms of people below 18, their brains aren’t developed yet so
they would easily grasp things.
Negative influences:
○ Mental health: Social media is affecting teen’s mental health, and
according to a research study of American teens ages 12-15, teens
who use social media for over 3 hrs a day encountered twice the risk
of being prone to depression and anxiety. ( Katella, Kathy)
○ Addiction: Now this is one of the biggest drawback which is not only
limited to young people and social media, addiction envelopes the whole
human species, Every single human would have some kind of addiction,
good or bad, in this case the parent companies of this social media
websites purposefully make them addicting so people do not tend to
get bored and leave outta full boredom, because of this young people
instead of engaging in important activities such as sleeping, completing
homework and working they be more inclined to scrolling through their
small screen.
○ Promotes bullying: If there are rays of light, there must always be
shadows along with it, social media is the home of several bullies, so
one could also argue that social media promotes cyberbullying, an
example is, if I insult someone online the insult can spread like a
wildfire and possibly spread in the whole school, the person who got
insulted could literally die of embarrassment or possibly even lead to
suicide.
For the counter argument, In the Influence on young people by social media
section, a counter argument could be that under Identity exploration, I said how I
could help depressed people well there is a negative influence to that too, at times
when I used to help extremely depressed people, it used to backfire and I used to
feel the same depression they are suffering from so each positive influence has
it’s own negative influence,
Conclusion: I think social media is good for young people such as 15+, as if one is
younger than 15, I don’t think they have that much of an understanding of social
media they would be more likely to be targeted if there were scams going around
and more stuff, I think 15 is a good age where people start to understand how
dangerous the world around them is. I am saying social media is good because you
see nothing is perfect in this world, utopia is just a word used for fiction and let’s
just leave it where it belongs, everything has its pros and cons and the cons can be
avoided if people just focus on the pros. I think every one should get the taste of
our digital age’s poison and think of it as a medicine.
Citations: Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi. "Adolescence." Britannica.com, 8 May 2024,
www.britannica.com/science/adolescence. Accessed 8 May 2024
unfpa.org. United Nations population fund,
www.unfpa.org/data/world-population-dashboard. Accessed 8 May 2024.
Katella, Kathy. "How Social Media Affects Your Teen's Mental Health: A Parent's
Guide." Yale Medicine, 8 Jan. 2024,
www.yalemedicine.org/news/social-media-teen-mental-health-a-parents-guide.
Accessed 8 May 2024.