Despite the great rise of social media in recent years, it’s probably the time to access the impact of social media on youth. Social media has given the world the power to communicate instantly with anyone from any geographical region of this world and hence, these platforms have impacted our world hugely especially the youth (12-30 years of age). Today’s generation Y and social media (like twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube etc.) are almost inseparable. No matter what hour it is, where anyone is, youth is engaging themselves on social platforms to communicate, share feelings, exchange knowledge, opinions and ideas with their friends, families and other acquaintances. This has the dual advantage: it kills free time as well as users can get to learn and understand from the views and opinions of other peoples.
Social media is also increasingly becoming a platform for the youth to represent their talents to rest of the world and earn from the same. No matter if the user is a musician, photographer, painter, artist, choreographer or even an illustration artist, users can impress the millions of people around the world by simply sharing of their work on social media and can help you in accomplishing your goals. But if not handled carefully, there is impact of social media on youth. Spending too much time on social media has few negative sides too, which we are going to discuss via this article:
According to a survey done by Kaiser Generation kids/youth media survey, in 1999, when an average youth used to spend three hours on all social media networks combined, they spend a minimum of eight-ten hours in 2010. Another analysis done by same survey source found the negative impacts of social media on youth:
- Becoming anti-social: Confused how social media is making us anti social? Well nowadays teens and young people prefer more to be in a virtual relationship than the real world. This is because they can pretend to be anyone when they are behind the curtain of your desktop/laptop screen. They can be shy and reserved in the real world but can act to be a confident leader in social media. This is making close relations to die and making us anti social.
- Fear of confrontation: In the world of social media, if somebody annoys the user, they can block that person and forget them but in the real world, face to face discussion and confrontation are needed to solve the problems. Spending more time online reduces the ability to confront and discuss issues peacefully.
- Lack of time: Spending too much time online means less time for other fruitful work and exercise, which can cause weak eyesight, obesity, weaken immunity, stress, lower productivity in schools/offices and less time for family.
- Violence: Some of the research studies done in social psychology concluded that spending too much time playing action games, watching action movies, violent videos, visiting hate or satanic websites can induce violent/criminal behavior in people who watch same videos/site.
- Phobias: Another research study concluded that a large chunk of the social contents are pure rumors: “if you won’t send this to 10 people, you will be haunted”, “if you won’t reply to it, you will die”, this induces phobic tendency in users which adds to their mental stress.
- Episodic memory: FMRI studies proved that spending lots of time aimlessly in social media can lead to frustration and episodic memory (memory loss after passage of a certain time period).
- Cyber bullying/harassment: There have been millions of cases where images/videos uploaded on social sites were used by others for illegal/inappropriate contents or were harassed while chatting or became a victim to hacking of their social IDs. This is the major problem that is floating around with the rise of the relationship between youth and social media. here , we can see definite impact of social media on youth.
As previously stated, every coin has two sides. Where users can learn or earn via social media, inappropriate use or spending too much time worthlessly will definitely show the impact of social media on youth. This can also cause lots of health and image issues, hence it is to be used wisely!
Author: Vibhuti Bhargava
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