Social media, throughout the past several years, has practically become the center of work, school, and the daily lives of adults and teens when communicating with their peers. Social media has indeed made communication and the spread of news faster and easier than ever before, with the streaming flow of instant messages, Facebook posts, and Twitter feeds. I believe, however, that social media poses detrimental effects to traditional face-to-face communication and emotional health, as the modern generation of youth grow up relying on their phones to text and communicate with their friends and family rather than developing essential conversational skills.
Social media, indeed, has enabled users to connect with the world around them and speed up communication at much greater levels than previous generations. But social media can cause severe emotional effects in teens and children. Many children and teenagers look to receive a certain amount of likes or retweets when tweeting or posting a status. If teenagers do not achieve these goals, they experience a depressing emotional downfall, a feeling of being rejected for social inadequacy or a lack of an appealing body image.
New York Times columnist Bruce Feiler acknowledges that social media users experience a considerable amount of joy and happiness from getting lots of likes or retweets, though they experience an even stronger sense of pain and sorrow when they feel excluded in the world of social media. Such feelings of “not being good enough for peers” influences those teenagers’ later stages in life, where they might lack the confidence in creating bonds with coworkers or making leaps in careers because they will obtain, within themselves, a sense that they are, and will be constantly, ostracized by others in their surrounding environment.
Not only does social media break down users self-esteem and emotional health, but it prevents children and teenagers from developing traditional social skills necessary at work and, even more so, throughout a person’s life. The beauty of life rests on individuals establishing strong relationships with others around them. The central aspect of a relationship is communication. So, as children and teenagers grow up with social media as the center of their lives, they cannot develop essential skills of traditional, face-to-face communication if their primary method of interaction involves typing text messages in electronic devices.
The disadvantages these young adults face play into their working lives as well. How can one receive a job or worker’s recognition if they lack the fundamental skills necessary for a job interview or a routine employee examination?
Moreover, a lack of traditional communication not only separates people from others around them, but also prevents them from being able to self-reflect on their daily conditions and routine thinking systematics. Taking part in a lifestyle that only involves technological usage will eventually reflect a character devoid of any emotion or knowledge of surroundings, whereas constantly socializing with everyone around builds a sensitive state of mind that is self-aware of itself as well as its surroundings.
Social media, also, can lead to drastic societal consequences caused by severe emotional delay. The rise of cyberbullying within the past few years has affected countless numbers of children and teenagers nationwide, along with several other nations throughout the world. According to the MLive-Jackson Citizen Patriot Editorial Board, “38 percent of seventh-graders and 44 percent of ninth-graders and 11th-graders said they’ve read an email or web message that spread rumors about another student at least once in the last year,” while a considerable amount of the same group were targets of cyberbullying themselves.
Although school teachers and staff members do everything they can to eliminate cyberbullying and its severe effects, bullying others through the use of social media is practically unstoppable because of social media’s easy access and the speed of which hurtful messages can potentially be distributed. All too often, threatening or embarrassing messages lead teenagers and young adults to severe depressive moods that sometimes even trigger suicidal thoughts and actions. Such effects, clearly, impact entire communities if cyberbullying goes too far and leads to the loss of lives.
Most of us will readily agree that social media has vastly improved efficiency in distributing messages in a timely fashion. The controversy, though, lies in the question of social media’s emotional impacts. Whereas some are convinced that social media has done little to harm users’ mental state, others maintain that social media prevents the ability to develop skills for traditional conversations. I believe that social media, throughout the past several years, has harmed the human population much more than it has helped it, as users become more alienated to their peers and much less socially active in the traditional sense.
