For children growing up in the 2000’s, social media, to some degree, has been a part of their lives for as long as they can remember. Social media over the past two decades has boomed in popularity and has woven its way into societies daily functions, it seems. With as much information it provides these young people is there a possibility that growing up with this new way of communicating can cause developmental delay or damage to their social abilities? Personally, I grew up during the 2000’s era, and while social media did not pick up as much attention then as has within the past ten years or so the other children I grew up with as well as myself seemed to be the first generation to experience social communication for the most part online. Studies have shown that because the past two generations have grown up with this way of communication, it shows the negative effects of the way we view ourselves, how our in-person interaction skills have diminished or have not been improved due to social anxiety and has altered our view of reality and how we perceive it. Children that have grown up in the past two decades and the children that are going through their development stages currently have potential to be delayed or could have a future delay in the social and developmental skills that they need to have in order to succeed as an adult. While the idea of social media does serve a good purpose, it has the potential to have detrimental effects on a young person’s life.
To understand how social media affects the development of a young person, we must first understand how social media originated. Even though the first known internet social connection was conducted by the military agency ARPAN in 1969, social media did not pick up much popularity until the early 2000’s. In an article written by Irfan Ahmad, he creates a timeline that shows the outline of how different social media cites came to be. He says in 2003, Linked In had been developed (Ahmad, 2018, para.8). Linked In is a website primarily used for job hunting and creating networks for finding these jobs and internships. Then, a year later in 2004, the website GMAIL created by google was used as an email server to connect people (Ahmad,2018, para. 9). In the early 2000’s, email had become the staple of how people communicated electronically. Over the next five to six years, companies such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat have been developed and have taken over the social media world. These are the social media outlets that I feel as if have had the most impact on the younger generation.
The young people of these generations have been reported to have developed some very harmful perceptions on how they view themselves. In an article published by Raise Smart Pre-teens and Teens, it lists a report published by IZA Institute of Labor Economies saying that, “Spending one hour a day chatting on social networks reduces the probability of being completely satisfied with life overall by approximately 14 percentage points. This is not a trivial effect – being three times as large as the estimated adverse effect on wellbeing of being in a single parent household and is also larger than the effect of playing truant (McDool, Powell, Roberts, Taylor, 2016, pg.22).” For example, Instagram is comprised of pictures and videos that are posted all day everyday by various people to share their life with the world through pictures. This is theory is an amazing idea, but it is often accompanied by people especially the younger generations feeling as if they are not good enough, young women especially. Seeing all of these diet advertisements and women who are glorified for their “perfect” bodies and editing skills has the tendency to alter ones view of themselves. They tend to think that they have to be as perfect as the people who they see on social media. This also goes for young men as well. The perfect image for men is portrayed as a muscular guy who seem to have the whole package. Social media seems to create this image of a person that they have the perfect life which for young adults who are growing up and trying to figure out who they are and what they want to be tend to feel like they should strive to be like the “perfect” people they see which can be detrimental to self-esteem and self-value.
Another way that social media can affect the development of youth is by taking away the necessary communication skills that are needed for face to face communication. When using social media outlets, all someone really has to do is type up a message and send it or send the post. If a child grows up relying on instant messaging as one of his primary ways of communicating with their peers, then this can inhibit the growth of necessary communication skills that a child learns as they grow up. In an article written by Nicholas Dantuono, he says, “Social media is severely limiting interactions between children, and most importantly, during a crucial time in their lives (Dantuono, 2015, para. 2).” Later in the article Dantuono goes on to talk about a two-year study that was conducted to observe the negative and positive internet effects. He goes on to say, “If social media is used correctly as in this case of preserving relationships, adolescents’ social skills should not diminish as much. Having strong relationships with friends may adjust problems with social skills among adolescents (Dantuono, 2015, para.3).” If a child does not develop the necessary skills to communicate with others at the young age, then they will have long lasting effects of social anxiety or delays in communication skills in the future.
Social media tends to have a bad habit of presenting what I would consider a “false reality.” People tend to want to have the best-looking profile, most adventurous profile, or even the profile with the best content posted on it. Now there are some individuals who honestly are just that attractive or go on all of those crazy adventures or even believe in the things that they post, as the years of social media have gone on some individuals seem to want others to see the world the way that they see it. In theory this is not a harmful, but it is often used to manipulate other people’s views of reality to gain followers. These people will say and do anything to keep their feeds flowing with eager followers and unfortunately, the younger generations have a tendency to believe almost everything they read or see. This can affect their perception of how the world really is and can harm their own values and morals because of someone on the internet has a viewpoint that sounds good enough to be believable. Even when I was a child, there were things that I read on Facebook that the world was ending and that on a specific say I believe it was December of 2012 the world was going to end. I remember being terrified that whole day that the world was just going to end. The articles that were posted by people that I knew and pages that I followed altered my sense of what was real and what was not real, and I am sure other young people have had similar experiences. This can lead to young people blindly believing in things and events that are not true and can ultimately change the way that they think about the world. While growing into a young adult these viewpoints are crucial to how the rest of your values and viewpoints are formed.
Even though I believe social media has some harmful effect does not mean I think it is a total waste. The media world has the potential to have incredible qualities. Young people have the opportunity to explore cultures and people from all around the world at their fingertips. Social media has a way of connecting people in ways that make people more comfortable than if they were in person. Kids are being prematurely exposed to things that are probably not beneficial for their young minds but at the same time they are constantly learning things about how our world works and how amazing it can be. But while it does have amazing qualities it comes at the expense of diminishing their social skills with others, and how they view themselves, others and reality. To me, I think if there was a way to have a media channel specifically meant for children and young adults to connect with each other without the sense of feeling like they need to be perfect and something that they are not and can help them interact with each other on a level other than behind a computer screen then I am all for it. Kids and young adults already have a hard-enough time trying to figure themselves and the whole world out, social media shouldn’t make it harder for them to be their own person.