Research paper
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Kaycee Bilke
Professor Ott
English 1A / Research Paper
14 December 2017
Anything But Social
If we ask adolescents of 2017 who their best friend is, it should not come as a shock if
they say their loyal and trusty iPhone. School hallways and cafeterias are crowded with bright-
eyed teenagers, but the likely source of light in their eyes is coming from a screen in their hand.
The use of mobile devices and social media has become such a significant issue that high school
teachers and college professors have to list consequences in their syllabi for using a phone during
class time. Every public place where adolescents can be spotted will more than likely have free
Wi-Fi, suitable lighting for Instagram pictures, and a socially acceptable background that will
gain likes from perpetual followers on the internet. No matter if the site is Facebook, Instagram,
Snapchat, Twitter, or one of the other hundreds of social media outlets, adolescents are always
going to be looking for a thumbs up or retweet for acceptance from peers even if they may not
know them personally. Social media may connect adolescent users to each other, but the negative
effects on cognitive and psychosocial development tend to outweigh the positives.
Social media can impact and rewire the brain in ways adolescents do not fully
understand. Every time they check their notifications or refresh the page, pathways in the brain
are formed and the neurons associated with these pathways are strengthened. In “Teens: This is
How Social Media Affects Your Brain,” Susie East, a health writer and editor for CNN,
describes how different studies have found that social media and cell phone use can ultimately
change the brain. East frequently discusses Dr. Iroise Dumontheil’s findings at Birkbeck
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University in London where he is currently the director of educational neuroscience. East shares
her findings and how they can potentially affect the daily lives of adolescents. She states that
“Dumontheil does concur that social media is affecting our brain, particularly its plasticity,
which is the way the brain grows and changes after experiencing different things” (East). While
social media can encourage the brain to grow and adapt to new concepts, the material and
content on the different sites can negatively wire the brain. Instead of doing homework and
studying, an individual would probably want to spend their time refreshing their pages on social
media and watching their follower count grow. This can lead to obsessing over these apps and
spending all free time staring at a screen.
Mental health can also be negatively affected by adolescent technology use. Children and
adolescents who use multiple public sites can start to experience symptoms of mental health
disorders by spending excessive amounts of time on them. The American Academy of Pediatrics
is an organization dedicated to providing advanced mental and physical health services for
children and adolescents. Gwenn Schurgin-O’Keeffe, the CEO of Pediatrics Now, and Kathleen
Clarke-Pearson, a North Carolina Pediatrician, illustrate the risks of using social media in their
article “The Impact of Social Media on Children, Adolescents, and Families.” O’Keeffe and
Clarke-Pearson state:
[R]esearchers have proposed a new phenomenon called “Facebook depression,”
defined as depression that develops when preteens and teens spend a great deal of
time on social media sites, such as Facebook, and then begin to exhibit classic
symptoms of depression. The intensity of the online world is thought to be a factor
that may trigger depression in some adolescents.
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The authors further describe how depression linked to social media “can cause profound
psychosocial outcomes including depression, anxiety, severe isolation, and, tragically, suicide”
(Schurgin O’Keeffe and Clarke-Pearson). Mental health cases due to social media use can be
found everywhere and the prevalence of depression and anxiety have skyrocketed. Although
depression, anxiety, and OCD are diagnosed due to other underlying causes, stressors that
adolescents experience through technology use can be enough to bring out symptoms necessary
for identification of mental health disorders.
Self-esteem and body image can be damaged through social media as well. The Child
Mind Institute offers children and adolescents evidence-based care from well-trained clinicians
in various settings to help manage any disorder a client may have. In her editorial entitled “How
Social Media Affects Teenagers,” Rachel Ehmke examines how low teenage self-esteem is
directly correlated to social media. In the article, she gives examples of how the internet can lead
to an adolescent having negative self-concept, ways peer acceptance can drive an individual to
overuse social media, and what parents can do to help and prevent their children from developing
low self-esteem. Ehmke writes about what happens when young people “scroll through their
feeds and see how great everyone seems” and, she continues, “We’re used to worrying about the
impractical ideals that photo-shopped magazine models give to our kids, but what happens when
the kid next door is photo-shopped, too? Even more confusing, what about when your own
profile doesn’t really represent the person that you feel like you are on the inside?” These models
and seemingly perfect people may only be pictures to most people, but seen through an
adolescent’s phone screen this is what society expects from them. Turning on the television to
find that the model or actress in some commercial looks like the one from Instagram is enough to
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make an adolescent want to take the extra step to lose weight and change themselves to mirror
what they see on the internet.
When it comes to the overt effects of social media and technology, behavior in
adolescents is also altered. The growth and wiring of the brain due to today’s technology
advancements and cell phone use changes the way people interact with the world around them.
In the same article, Rachel Ehmke quotes Dr. Catherine Steiner-Adair, a clinical psychologist, by
stating that “there’s no question kids are missing out on very critical social skills. In a way,
texting and online communicating—it’s not like it creates a nonverbal learning disability, but it
puts everybody in a nonverbal disabled context, where body language, facial expression, and
even the smallest kinds of vocal reactions are rendered invisible” (Ehmke). By communicating
primarily through text and other electronic options, adolescents are missing out on important
human interactions that serve as the foundation for future friendships and relationships.
Adolescents may not communicate with adults and teachers as well as they could because of the
amount of time they spend daily looking at their phone when they could be experiencing their
environment.
Parent and family relationships and communication are deteriorating due to the presence
of technology. Siblings are now following each other’s accounts on public sites rather than
simply walking 20 feet and speaking to one another. Although looking through friends’ and
followers’ photos online may be fun, adolescents of today’s generation are missing out on
important time with family members and building relationships with parents that will support
them throughout their lives. Psychology Today’s Jim Taylor, a professor at the University of San
Francisco, argues in his article “Is Technology Creating a Family Divide?” that families are
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becoming more and more distant from each other to the point where parents do not even know
their children anymore. Throughout his work, Taylor states how:
New technology offers children independence from their parents’ involvement in
their social lives, with the use of mobile phones, instant messaging, and social
networking sites. Of course, children see this technological divide between
themselves and their parents as freedom from over-involvement and intrusion on
the part of their parents in their lives. Parents, in turn, see it as a loss of
connection to their children and an inability to maintain reasonable oversight, for
the sake of safety and over-all health, of their children’s lives.
Because of social media, parents no longer have control over who their children talk to and have
no idea with whom they spend their time. Instead of spending time connecting with parents,
siblings, and other family members during Thanksgiving and other family holidays, teens devote
themselves to checking Instagram to see where friends are and what they are doing. While social
media can improve some aspects of communication, it can also diminish the strong connection
between parent and child.
Peer relationships are also greatly affected by extensive use of social media. Instead of
looking six inches up from the phone screen to see who is directly in front of them, adolescents
take more interest in those they cannot see. Social media may claim to bring people together, but
users are frequently missing valuable social skills that are necessary to survive in the real world.
The days of playdates and sleepovers are gone, and now they are replaced with the strangers
being a screen on Facebook and Twitter. Meeting others through social media sites is not always
a horrifying instance, but it takes away from the time spent with the friends made in real life.
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Some children are online so much that their online friends, in some ways, become their
superficial real life friends.
When these issues and other related to the internet are being discussed, cyberbullying is a
substantial topic tied to adolescent users. Multiple movies and television shows are based around
teenagers who are effected by harassment and online bullying by individuals they know and do
not know. In his essay, “Influence of Social Media on Teenagers”, Suren Ramasubbu—the
creator of Mobicip, a parental control and internet filtering service for technology—discusses
how adolescents are at risk for experiencing the negative effects of social media use.
Cyberbullying is at the top of the list. He writes, “According to Stopbullying.gov, two kinds of
people are likely to be cyberbullies — the popular ones and those on the fringes of society; the
former resort to such activities to stay popular or to feel powerful, while the latter troll to fit into
a society or to get back at a society that excludes them” (Ramasubbu). Teens tend to think that
the hurtful words said behind the keyboard will not have the same effect if they were spoken in
person, but they absolutely do. Cyberbully has become just as much of an issue as traditional
bullying in the upcoming generations. Attacking people behind the safety of a screen does not
excuse the fact that it is still unkind and wrong.
Adolescents face the possibility of many harmful consequences of being avid social
media users. Mental health, disconnect with friends and family, and parts of the brain are only a
few characteristics of a child’s life that are at risk when talking about technology use and social
media addiction. If adolescents and teens are given support by parents, teachers, and other role
models in their lives, they can overcome the obstacles they face online and in real life.
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Works Cited
East, Susie. “Teens: This is how Social Media Affects Your Brain.” CNN.com, Cable News
Network, 1 Aug. 2016, www.cnn.com/2016/07/12/health/social-media-brain/index.html.
Accessed 7 Dec. 2017.
Ehmke, Rachel. “How Using Social Media Affects Teenagers.” ChildMind.org, Child Mind
Institute, childmind.org/article/how-using-social-media-affects-teenagers/. Accessed 7 Dec.
2017.
Ramasubbu, Suren. “Influence of Social Media on Teenagers.” Huffington Post, Oath, 26 May
2015, www.huffingtonpost.com/suren-ramasubbu/influence-of-social-media-on-
teenagers_b_7427740.html.
Schurgin-O’Keeffe, Gwenn, and Kathleen Clarke-Pearson. “The Impact of Social Media on
Children, Adolescents, and Families.” AAP Publications, American Academy of Pediatrics,
Apr. 2011, pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/127/4/800.
Taylor, Jim. “Is Technology Creating a Family Divide?” Psychology Today, 13 Mar. 2013,
www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-power-prime/201303/is-technology-creating-family-
divide.