Social Media: How does it affects teens?

以社交网络和微博为代表的社交媒体不仅占据了互联网的半空间，而且还融入到了人们日常生活中。然而，社会媒体带来了许多社会问题。特别是对青少年来说，使用社交媒体已经成为他们的日常必修课。本文举例说明负面新闻对青少年的影响，同时提醒大家树立正确观念，加强对社会媒体的监督管理。

Introduction

Represented by social network and micro-blog, social media not only occupies the half space of the internet, but also is integrated into people’ daily life in its humanized way. However, lots of social problems have been brought by social media. Especially for teenagers, using social media has become their everyday required course. Related negative news begins to come out. A 16-year-old teenager from Sichuan used Weibo to commit live suicide and finally died. The subsequent news reports that during the process of committing live suicide, he once showed that he wanted to give up suicide. However, this obtained ultra words. Some net friends even left the message that he must die as quickly as possible (China Daily). Besides, at the end of 2013, when a high-school girl was shopping at clothes store, she was suspected of stealing, which led to net friends’ crazy cyber manhunt and abuse. At last, the girl chose to drown herself in a river since she can’t bear the heavy pressure from the public (Zhu and Chen 340). Those days, such negative news emerge in endlessly. As a result, social media negatively affects our personal and social lives especially for teenagers. Therefore schools should assist teenagers to build correct concept towards social media and teenagers’ parents must spend more time accompanying and communicating with their children. Besides, the supervision and management of social media platform should be enhanced by the government and teenagers’ spare lifestyle must become rich and healthy.  

Three problems caused by social media towards teenagers

Generally speaking, social media refers to the new online media to give users greatly involved space. Blog, wiki, podcast, forum and social network etc. are all the concrete examples of social media (Brooks 30). Following, it would demonstrate three problems caused by social media towards teenagers personal and social lives. To begin with, social media becomes the obstacle of teenagers’ thinking and action. Information collection and share is one of the major theme behaviors for teenagers when using social media . Any interesting and fresh picture, website, news and video could be shared with friends through social media such as social network and forum. But, among the social media, the personalized culture would easily make teenagers’ value view deviate. And too much individuation would lead to teenagers’ persisting their old ways in thoughts and behaviors, the decrease of their social responsibility and even the deviation of social legal system and morality (Lawson and Cowling). On the other hand, because of the generic information of network information transmission, when using social media to spread information, teenagers would not give enough rational thinking towards those information. During the process, most teenagers would be more concerned about the attention degree of information transponded in their social network circle and what they need is to get instant gratification (Kaur). Then frequently transponding and evaluating various information would let teenagers not think any more about the source, authenticity and completeness of those information. As a result, teenagers’ thinking and action would be blocked, which is not good for their future growth. 

Secondly, social media makes teenagers’ become solitary and interpersonal emotion turns indifferent. Being used to social networking way would hinder teenagers’ realistic social expression. They would be accustomed to conveying their life state to the outside world through the social network such as recounting state and friends comments. Some of them would even form their own characteristic network language (Lawson and Cowling). But these language expression would only be familiar and used by the small social network they are in and it is difficult for people in reality to understand their meaning. Hence long-time communication in the social network makes teenagers have the language barrier. Gradually they would become solitary. Then they would more exceedingly rely on network so as to get rid of realistic world and their social realistic habits would be replaced by social networking habits. Teenagers would more and more prefer to use social network to solve the realistic social problems. And they would automatically ignore the true communication among people. Thus a kind of vicious spiral appears and interpersonal emotion turns indifferent. 

Furthermore, social media threatens teenagers’ individual information safety and also physical and psychological health. While fond of social media, they seldom realize the disclosure and risk of individual private information. Their related self-protection awareness and measures are lack. For example, some teenagers directly show their family address and telephone numbers etc. on personal homepage, which face to the public. Then some people with bad motivation would conduct infringement behaviors towards those them. In addition, the rapid development of social network makes the spread of cyber-violence and pornographic information faster (Barnett, et al.). Such illegal and harmful information would seriously harm teenagers’ mental health.  

Four related solutions 

Due to the above three problems, next it will present four related solutions. At first, schools should actively guide teenagers to build correct concept towards social media. School educators must make full use of all kinds of opportunities and carriers to strengthen the general education of social media (Nam, Redeker and Whittemore 304). Traditional exam-oriented education can’t guarantee teenagers’ balanced development in each aspect. Just focusing on school records distorts the essence of education. Thus to help teenagers fully and accurately understand social media, practically setting up specialized school courses would be the good way. Meanwhile, the comparison of positive and negative instances could assist teenagers to evaluate the function of social media. Teenagers could realize that due to its virtuality and anonymity, social media is lack of lots of advantages owned by traditional social communication such as more emotional and affinity communication media including voice, body language and eye contact (Klein, Ahlf and Sharma 328). However, this solution has certain shortcoming. Most of the time it would be easily become a mere formality. Besides, practically setting up specialized courses would cause great change to the school education curriculum and then it takes some time to actually carry out. 

Secondly, teenagers’ parents should truly spend more time communicating with their children and listening for their inner ideas and aspirations. Studies have shown that the reason why teenagers would be excessively addicted to the social network, the virtual society, is closely related with their love deficiency and distortion of values and outlook on life from families (Valentini 174). Thus parents’ company and communication is really needed. Besides, while accompanying their children, parents would also guide them to correctly use those internet products of social media and better regulate their children’ online time. At this moment, their children would be more willing to accept their parents’ opinions and form the good habit of using social media. However, this solution still has some deficiency. In realistic life, most of parents are really busy with their everyday work and don’t have much time to truly accompany their children. What’s more, because of the limit of some parents’ own cultural level, they know little about social media so that they couldn’t conduct effective guidance and regulation towards their children. 

In addition, the government must enhance the supervision and management of social media platforms. Specifically, general improvement of the real-name authentication system of social network works, which can avoid certain teenagers’ getting to unhealthy network information or excessive network addiction (Tench, et al. 244). However, within current social network operation, although most operators actively adopt the real-name authentication system, there is the following shortcoming. The authentication process is lack of reasonable and comprehensive validation and specifications towards teenagers so that social network still has relatively big contact risks. 

Finally, teenagers’ spare lifestyle must become rich and healthy. The fact that teenagers’ leisure activities after class are insufficient and the related entertainment venues and facilities are also lack greatly causes teenagers’ addiction of social media (Georgescu and Popescul). Then lots of them spend their after-school life on internet to satisfy their own interests and habits. Thus the whole society should be responsible to take various measures to enrich and provide teenagers’ leisure activities. What’s more, strengthening the construction of internet content and developing abundant and beneficial internet products is needed as well. However, most internet product developers are not willing to study certain advantageous but free products since they want to obtain great commercial profit.

 

Conclusion

Nowadays, modern lifestyle tend to be networked. As a kind of convenient way of building and maintaining social relationship, social media are welcomed especially by teenagers. Due to its advantages including open contact way, low cost communication costs and rapid information update etc., it indeed brings many serious disadvantages to people’s personal and social lives especially for teenagers, therefore certain effective solutions should be adopted timely to promote teenagers’ healthy growth.

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