American Girls: Social Media And The Secret Lives Of Teenagers

Unfortunately, children are being exposed the most on social media and are oblivious to it. From the moment children are born into the world of technology, their lives are being shared on social media. In Nancy Jo Sales’ book, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers, she went around the country conducting interviews, researching the impacts of social media, and observing different social situations. According to many studies done by internet security firms, thousands of pictures of a child will be posted of them by age five. Almost ninety-five percent of kids will have pictures surfaced of them by age two. Never before have the ups and downs of growing up been present for everybody to see (Sales 32). Every monumental

Anything somebody says in a personal message to somebody can be screenshotted or forwarded to another person. No conversation is private anymore, nor are photos. Messages and photos can be shared without the other person knowing. A message can also never be completely erased after it is sent. This can lead to issues within friendships, romantic relationships, and

When talking online, you do not see nonverbal reactions. Research done by the University of Michigan found that the students’ level of empathy had lowered forty percent between 1979 and 2009. When people do not understand things completely when communicating, they will lack empathy (Sales 136). Empathy is the ability to feel for somebody else when they are going through something. The tone of one’s voice, facial expressions, and body language are essential parts of communication. When reading a message online, the tone of the text can be interpreted in any way since there is no way to tell how the sender meant it. This can lead to arguments and major miscommunications between two people. In Catherine Steiner-Adair’s book that she wrote with Teresa H. Barker, The Big Disconnect, she interviews many kids and teens on their experiences with social media. When she asked teens about communicating through social media she found that, “not having to see the other person’s response made it easier to stay connected to their own reactions without feeling silenced or activated by the other person’s visceral and verbal reactions” (Steiner-Adair 202). While communicating online does allow people to think more thoroughly about what they say, this is not realistic. Consequently, people are not learning how to react to face-to-face conversations because they are used to not