Personal Experience: Social Networking Sites Can Affect Our Minds Negatively

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Last Halloween, my younger sister took one of my brother’s old black T-shirts, fringed the fabric, and tied it around the bottom half of her face as a makeshift beard. She went trick-or-treating that October as her favorite YouTube vlogger, Shay Carl. For five years, she has been following the “Shaytards” channel, and her devotion to the family is apparent from the Shaytards merchandise she owns, to her Twitter feed (consisting mostly of Shay Carl’s tweets), to how she will sing “I Got My Socks On” around the house as if it were a hit song she heard on the radio. Although my sister is not as radically fanatical as I have (mostly jokingly) made her out to be, she genuinely adores the Butler family. When she turned me on to the Shaytards, I could instantly see why – amidst all the noise and ruckus and wild horseplay, unfiltered affection permeates throughout the entire home. At the same time, however, I wondered what sort of an impact the Butler children’s lives would see, growing up in a household so saturated with technology and with sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter so accessible. Many celebrate social networking sites as natural results of an evolving society, tools that can be harnessed to make great bounds. However, I argue that the balance tips towards the negatives of social media, especially when children are involved, because of the deleterious effects a dependence on this technology can have on a developing youth’s relationships, mental health and self-esteem, and academic achievements.

Our family, friends, classmates, coworkers – the relationships we cultivate with these people contribute immensely to our overall satisfaction with life. In fact, Abraham Maslow set love and the need to belong as fundamental and...

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...dverse effects digital communication has on today’s younger generation as they enter adolescence and early adulthood. In what ways might ten-year-old Gavin’s relationships be influenced in the future because technology incorporates itself into every facet of his life? Will eight-year-old Avia have to experience problems in school she wouldn’t have had to face had vlogging and social media not been such vital components of her upbringing? What about six-year-old Emmi, who has already taken to making short vlogs of her own and daydreams of designing her own YouTube channel? For someone with an admirable passion for family, taking into account the deleterious effects of digital communication is paramount in ensuring the best quality of life for one’s children as they transition into adolescence, when their own use of such social networking platforms might increase.

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