The Impact of Social Media on Teenagers
The Impact of Social Media on Teenagers
Social media plays definitely a vital role in todays’ generation lives. The huge question arises: has the impact of social media been positive of negative on teenagers’ lives? Social media can create many problems, however, at the same time this could be use as weapon to solve those problems. Although, social media has many positive parts such as social networking, arguably it has more negatives, which will be discussed further in this paper. Social media overall has negative influence on the today’s teenagers’ lives.
Being a teenager, I can be the first to say that our generation has major addiction to social media, which has been posing risk to most of the users, particularly teenagers. The article "The challenges of preventing social media crimes" portrays the risk of social media with some real crime committed through it. The article looks at how crimes are committed through social media including United States Vs Lori Drew, United States, Ayer and United States v. Cassidy. These twenty pages article shows means of criminal activities involved with social media, which is gathering information about victims, which can be used for modern crimes such as identity theft or traditional crimes such as burglary. This looks at different cases involved with social media crimes such as United State v Lori Drew. In this crime, Lori Drew created a Myspace account with the picture of an attractive fictitious 16-year-old boy to learn whether her daughter's friend (Megan Meier) was spreading rumors about her daughter. Shortly after, this caused Megan's suicidal death in her closet bedroom. This case has taken to the court as a serious crime. "Although the jury found Lori Drew guilty, the judge found that such application provided insufficient guidelines to law enforcement as they attempt to enforce the law (Hoffmeister, 7)." From this case, they found that it is hard to prevent crimes on social media because social media is unreachable, problems with identification, and most importantly hard to define crime type by lawmakers. Although there are many negative aspects can be discussed, if we use social media responsibly with the understanding, it will result positively in the world. These social media tools could be helpful to everyone in this happening world. Another article by Agosto which gives tips to use social media for students.
In addition, social media and behaviors of teenagers are related to each other. The social media makers will take advantage of users' behavior. They properly research on users' behaviors, what they share in the social media and when they share or even where they share. Users of social media wish to share information with their friends about their thoughts, feelings and even they are having for lunch and dinner. However, they do not want to share these feelings or content with the whole world. The article "Sharing Privately: the Effect Publication on Social Media Has on Expectations of Privacy" by Mills explain this theory and states "The law is currently incapable of protecting those who share on social media from having their information disseminated further than they intend" (Mills, 4). Since we do not have the limitation of sharing only among the friends, this could lead to a serious crime and this phenomenon of sharing on social media presents a unique difficulty for Law, which is hard to prevent or stop because of its availability. Social media is not always bad because it has created new opportunities for the criminal justice agencies to solve the crime created be social media. People can post in the live feed of any incidents in the Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and other Social media, which makes police investigation easier.
On the hand, social media has lots of disadvantages like cyberbullying. Social media has become dangerous to the teenager's life because it has increased anxiety and lower self-teem. Instead of doing assignment teenagers are busy on their phone like chatting, face to face communication which looks like an aimless person. Another problem with this social media has redefined the meaning of "making new friends "Although there are many negative aspects can be discussed if we used social media responsibly with the understanding of social media and its impacts will result positively in the world. These social media could be helpful to everyone in the happening world.