Impact of Social Media on Youth

 

 

 

 

 

  In today's world, all of us are experiencing this thing that social media is developing day by day. Most people around the world are using social media. This is very popular among the young generation especially.

 

 

 

 

Social media refers to all applications and websites or blogs that enable people around the globe to interconnect via the internet, chat, and share content. Some of the common and widely used social media platforms include Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Snapchat many among others. Social media has become a very important part of life for many young generations in today's world. Even though almost everyone in the community is connected to at least one social media platform, the youth and teenagers are the leading and most fanatic of these social platforms.

Here are some statistics that were done on social media.

01. The average time spent by people per day on the social network is 1.72 hours.

02. For teenagers, the numbers are much higher which is up to 27 hours per week.

Many young people keep on engaging themselves with social media without even caring to think about what would be the impact of Social Media on youth. The effects can sometimes be positive and sometimes negative but mostly they are negative if it is not integrated with a business or professional goal.

Positive Impact of Social Media on Youth

01. It keeps connected to their friends when they are not able to see each other always when they want to

02. Social media keeps you updated about the important things that are going across the globe currently or maybe in your locality. It is a great benefit to know about everything just by the simple click of your finger.

03. The youths have the perfect place to express themselves in such a way in which they won't be allowed to do it in public. This is something which makes the youth feel better about them and they hold some position in society.

04. It helps you in developing social skills and the best part is that several friendships can begin from the social website. Youths generally like to make new friends and know about others as much as they can. All of this is possible with the social media platform.

05. One more interesting impact of social media on youth is that it feels fun to interact with peers rather than talking to them face to face.

Educational Aspects

The students have free as well as easy access to the resources that are online and gain all the information.

Political Aspects

1) The participation of the voters has increased. The users of the platform of Facebook have admitted that they get the inspiration to vote in an election when they see online their friends have voted too.

2) Social media gives birth to the idea of change in politics. Social networking gives the social movement cheap as well as a quick method for distributing the information and make the people come together.

News/ Awareness

→ More than 50% of people in the world nowadays get breaking news from a social media platform.

→ Social networking sites provide the benefits of academic research to the people along with the online access. This helps the people to get access to the resources that were unavailable before.

Negative Impact of Social Media on Youth

01. People of today's generation give so much importance to social media nowadays that it has become their priority. They love being on social media sites and forget about all the things that should come first for them like family, sports, and schools.

02. In the platforms of social media, we can only see the virtual side of the person. This means we can only see the side which they want they want to show us. Many people try to portray themselves to others which they are not at all. 

03. Young people have this habit of bullying their peers which is ok to some extent. But when it comes to cyberbullying, it affects a lot of the other peer as this can be on the newsfeed of any person and can go viral easily. Sometimes such things can lead to depression as well as suicidal thoughts.

04. some young people are very easy to get influenced. They may feel the need to change their appearance physically and compare themselves to every next person they see on social media.

05. There is a very strong temptation in social media. It can become an addiction for the youth and begin to side-track them.

Work/School

1) The social media platform affects the productivity of the employees to .51%. These workers are generally between the age of 25-34 and check their social media during work.

2) If social media is used on a light scale, it will help the students to improve their grades. However, for those students who are heavy users, their grades tend to fall incredibly.

Lacking Privacy

1) One thing that is seen common among young people is they often get too open in the public and share their personal information. Most people don't read the privacy policies and are unaware that their information that information is read by the insurance companies, advertisers, and the IRS.

2) They expose themselves to governmental and corporate intrusions,

Cyber Bullying

1) One of the very prime negative impacts of social media on youth as some of the negative-minded individuals use it for bullying someone.

2) People use it for sending intimidating messages to others that sometimes create trauma for others as well.

3) Misinformation or false propaganda is another negative impact of social media on youth.

 

conclusion

In conclusion, social networking has been proved to have both positive and negative effects on our youths. Individuals should make a conclusion whether to go on using the sites or stop or even moderate their usage. Parents should guide and advise their children on current matters like the usage of social media and warn them of its negative impacts when misused or overused. The education curriculum also should be revised so that it can include social media studies in its disciplines so as to alert students that they need to be careful in their social media usage.