Dear Ms Samantha Taylor,
I disagree with your interpretation of the girl who tells you she texts “about 250 times a day, or something”. This girl most likely only feels like she texts this many times, but I personally doubt it. This one teenage girl also does not represent the entire teenage generation, so your claim about social media affecting all teenagers is unfair and invalid. In my experience, the adult generation are just as bad; many adults spend a majority of their free time on social media so cannot be said to set a good example. Some parents even encourage their children to go on social media.
I agree with your opinion on social media sites about how they can make relationships hard to distinguish between the real world and virtual world moreover they encourage casual short term relationships online with strangers, inhibiting our ability to socialise in the actual world. Social media can be a dangerous place for some people who are vulnerable and tend to take things that happen on these sites to heart. It can also become a great distraction for many students who try to multitask social media and studying; a wide range of research research shows a drop in academic performance when they do this. Social media puts a lot of pressure on teenagers to be available at any time of day or night. Many teenagers feel like they should be available to reply at any time making them lose sleep over social media. A study from 16/9/15 shows that teenagers can end up losing over 2 hours of sleep per night leading to anxiety and depression if they don’t respond straight away.It seems that even if a teenager wakes up in the middle of the night instead of trying to go back to sleep they will go on their social media instead – a study showed 1 in 5 teenagers will do this as a normal habit.
On the other hand, social media allows people to get in touch with old friends. As well as widening your circle of friends it’s also a place many teenagers can go to go for advice on sensitive topics which they may not be able to discuss with their family, school or friend. For example suicidal feelings, loneliness, gender identification and so on. Social media enables teenagers to arrange events with friends easily allowing them to go out as a group and meet up and do extracurricular activities. Rather than stopping people from meeting up it actually does the opposite. It even helps to cross racial and cultural barriers between mixed groups of people although even with all these benefits the danger of meeting dangerous characters outweighs the benefits.
Social media’s influence on political events can rapidly change the predicted outcome, allowing people to share their opinions in real time with each other. This can open people’s eyes to what really happens in politics and allows them to have a voice and respected opinion whereas before younger people were not allowed to express the opinion of the majority and not just agree with the government’s view on things. The Arab Spring of 2011 was when the suicide of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia led to an uprising of an entire country through social media these benefits need to be managed to allow people to do it safely.
Social media overall has become a part of human society and nowadays it is always taken for granted by the younger generation and at the same time is put down by the older generation. As Samantha Taylor said, it does take some control of teenagers’ lives, however I personally doubt social media will disappear any time soon. As much as social media is flawed it does have many practical uses and does help, and in many cases it brings people closer together rather than minimizing their people skills we need to educate and regulate how young people use social media.
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