Social Networking Sites

How Teens Use Social Media Sites
– Teens engage in a wide range of activities like chatting and instant messaging, commenting on their friends’ posts, and posting their own status updates
– Nine in ten teen social media users do each of these activities.

Overall, the median teen social media user takes part in six of the seven activities

How does it Affect Adolescents?
– Social networking now plays an important role in contributing to adolescent self-esteem, identification and self-perception.
– As usage and participation on social networking sites continues to grow at a rapid speed, so does adolescent dependence on these platforms to conduct their everyday lives.
– Prior to the digital era, identity and self-perceptions were informed primarily by factors offline including education, occupation, traditional media, relationships, socio-economic status, religious beliefs and ethnicity.
– Now, social networking features including number of Facebook friends, status updates, check in’s and photo albums publically display and inform adolescent’s online identity, often directly translating to their offline self.

Positive and Negative Consequences
Social media has the potential for positive social consequences:
– Shy adolescents, social media can actually enhance their ability to connect with others and form positive relationships with peers.
– Social media have the potential to allow all children to interact with more thought. It’s much harder to stop and think before responding to a person standing in front of you than to take some time before you reply to a text or Facebook message.

There are also a host of potential negative consequences:
– Information can spread extremely quickly. This can be good, if a piece of news needs to be disseminated quickly throughout a school community, for example, or bad, if what is being spread is a piece of harmful gossip or an inappropriate photo.
– Because these activities lend themselves to multitasking, they bring with them a loss of concentration. There is no such thing as truly effective multitasking. Your child won’t do as good a job studying for a test if they are also sending text messages or chatting with friends online.
– More time on social media means less time on other activities, including academics.
– Social media make it very easy to impulsively share private information.
– Teens are much more likely to report that using social media has a positive impact on their social and emotional lives than a negative one.
– Many more teens report a positive impact of social media use on their emotional well-being than a negative one. Most teens don’t think their use of social media affects their social and emotional well-being one way or the other. But there are some teens who think that using social media does affect how they feel about themselves and their social situation.

TV

How Teens Use the TV
– For all the time teens spend staring at small screens, it’s still the television screen that gets most of their attention.
– Currently, teens watch almost four hours of television a day.
– Teen TV viewing is increasing at the rate of 2.5% a year.

How Does It Effect Adolescence?
– 70% of all shows popular among teenagers contain sexual content.
– More than 60% of TV programming contains violence- see an estimate of 10,000 media violence each year
– Nearly 10% of commercials are for beer and wine- and for every public service announcement discouraging alcohol use, adolescents will view 25-50 ads for alcohol
– What came first the chicken or the egg?
– It is almost impossible to say for sure whether media exposure genuinely effects adolescent development. Ex: Studies have found that adolescents who spend more time playing violent video games got into more fights and arguments than do their peers, but it is difficult to know whether playing such games makes adolescents more hostile or whether adolescents who are more aggressive to begin with are more likely to begin to play these sort of games