Positive Effects Of Social Media's Influence On Adolescents?

Social media is a big contributor to the way adolescents think. Social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr can all influence adolescents whether they realize it is doing so or not. Children and teenagers alike both use social media daily to interact and socialize with their friends and family members. Some of the effects social media has on adolescents are the way they develop and maintain relationships, how well they are doing in school, and how they seem to manage their time. Social media can be a bigger problem than anyone has thought it would be. Social networks can affect the way adolescents have relationships with peers and significant others. “. . . Adolescents are possibly the most essential time for social

“As social media sites continue to grow in popularity, it is our belief technology is a vital part of today’s student success equation.” (Wang, Chen, Liang). This statement may seem like it is positive towards social media, but it is quite the opposite. Social media plays an offset part in the equation. “Students who are heavy social media users tend to have lower grades.” (ProCon.org). It is statistically proven students who use social media abundance are more likely to have bad grades. This is not good at all for the school system. “…Our findings indicate that electronic media use is negatively associated with grades.” (Wang, Chen, Liang). There has been plenty studies on the effects of social media in student’s grades and most of them have come back with the same result of the negative effects. It is definitely not a good idea for adolescents to use social media as often when it is affecting them enough to have lesser quality work in school. Which leads me to the next effect of social media, which may or may not be directly associated with bad grades; time

Teenagers who use social media a lot tend to have bad time management skills; they spend too much time on social media and forget the tasks on hand. “When alerted to a new social networking site activity… users take, on average twenty to twenty-five minutes to return to the original task.” (ProCon.org). Many users of social networks will get easily distracted when they receive a new notification on social media. A ton of adolescents have ADHD also known as attention-deficit/ hyperactive disorder, which means that they have a lower attention span already. When the amounts of children and teenagers have this disorder it makes social media a higher risk. Adolescents today are so addicted to social media they spend a ton of time on the sites. “40 percent of eight to eighteen year olds spend 54 minutes a day on social media sites” (ProCon.org). So basically, on average teenagers spend at least an hour on social media daily. That is a lot of time they could use doing something else. “…According to a study by online PhD, students spend roughly 100 minutes per day on Facebook” (Wang, Chen, Liang). This is just on the social network site Facebook what about other sites such as Twitter or Instagram? The time that students waste they could be doing something about the lower grades they have due to social