Social media usage has skyrocketed over the past decade and a half. In 2005, only 5 percent of U.S. adults reported using social media platforms; today that number is about 70 percent.
With the increasing number of people using and time spent on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and other social media platforms, the impact of social media on our lives is becoming increasingly important to policy makers, teachers, parents, and clinicians. There is growing interest and concern among physicians. and spiritual well-being.
The research is still in its early stages, and Facebook itself is only 15 years old.th Birthday of the Year — Media psychology researchers are beginning to understand how time spent on these platforms is, and isn’t, impacting our daily lives. Masu.
social media and relationships
One particularly pernicious concern is that time spent on social media sites is eroding face-to-face time. This phenomenon is social ostracism .
Anxiety about social ostracism has been around for many years, as old as the telephone, and perhaps even older. “This eviction problem has been going on for over 100 years,” said Dr. Jeffrey Hall, director of the Human Relations and Technology Laboratory at the University of Kansas. There’s always been a “cultural belief that no matter what the technology is, it’s replacing face-to-face time with close friends and family,” Hall says.
Hall’s research questions that cultural belief. In one study, participants daily recorded the amount of time they spent on 19 different activities during weeks when they were asked to refrain from social media use and during weeks when they were not asked to do so. During the weeks when people cut back on social media, they spent more time browsing the internet, working, cleaning, and doing housework. However, during these same periods of abstinence, there was no difference in the amount of time people spent socializing with their strongest social connections.
Result is? “Thinking about my own work and reading the work of others, I tend to believe that there is little evidence that social media directly replaces meaningful interactions with intimate partners.” Hall says. One possible reason for this is that we tend to interact with our loved ones through several different means, including text, email, phone calls, and in-person time.
What about teenagers?
When it comes to teenagers, a recent study by Dr. Gene Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University, and his colleagues found that high school seniors entering college in 2016, as a cohort, “active for 1 hour per day. was found to be decreasing. Compared to high school seniors in the late 1980s, they have fewer “in-person social interactions,” such as going to parties, movies, and riding in cars together. For the group as a whole, this decline was associated with increased use of digital media. However, at the individual level, more social media use was positively associated with more face-to-face social interactions. The study also found that adolescents who spent the most time on social media and had the least in-person social interaction felt the most lonely.
While Twenge and colleagues argue that increased time spent on digital media may be reducing teens’ overall face-to-face interactions, Hall suggests that the relationship may be moving in the opposite direction. He says there is a possibility of progress.
Hall cites the work of Dr. Danah Boyd, principal investigator at Microsoft Research and founder of Data & Society. “she [boyd] says that teens are not taking away their social face-to-face time through social media. Instead, she argues, the causal relationship has been reversed,” Hall says. “We’re increasingly restricting teens from spending time with their peers…and they’re turning to social media to enhance that.”
According to Hall, both phenomena may be occurring in parallel—restrictive parenting may encourage social media use, and social media use may directly bring teens together. But focusing on the latter places the blame on the teenager and ignores the forces of society. are also playing.
The evidence is clear about one thing. That said, social media is popular among his teenagers. According to a 2018 Common Sense Media report, 81% of teens use social media, and more than a third report using a social media site multiple times per hour. . These statistics have increased dramatically over the past six years, likely due to increased access to mobile devices. These statistics have led to increased interest in the impact social media has on teens’ cognitive development and psychological health.
“What we found is that, in general, social media presents both risks and opportunities for young people,” said Dr. McConlogue, a developmental psychologist, professor at California State University, Los Angeles, and associate director of the Los Angeles Children’s Digital Media Center. Dr. Kaveri Subrahmanyam says: .
Risks of social network expansion
Social media benefits teens by expanding their social networks and keeping in touch with peers and distant friends and family. It’s also an outlet for creativity. Common Sense Media’s report found that more than a quarter of teens say “social media is ‘very’ or ‘very’ important for expressing themselves creatively.” .
But there are also risks. According to a study by Common Sense Media, 13% of teens reported being cyberbullied at least once. Social media can also be a conduit for accessing inappropriate content such as violent images and pornography. Nearly two-thirds of teens who use social media “often” or “sometimes” encounter racist, sexist, homophobic, or religiously-based hate content on social media. replied.
Considering all these benefits and risks, what impact does social media have on cognitive development? “What we found at the Children’s Digital Media Center is that the use of many digital communications, especially social media “It appears that the use of is associated with offline developmental concerns,” says Subrahmanyam. “If you look at the literature on youth development, the core issues facing youth are sexuality, identity, and intimacy,” says Subrahmanyam.
Her research suggests that different types of digital communication may be associated with different developmental issues. For example, she notes that while teens often talk about sex in the Chat Room, her media use on blogs and social media seems to be more concerned with self-expression and identity construction. discovered.
In particular, exploring one’s identity appears to be an important use of visually focused social media sites for adolescents. “Whether it’s Facebook or Instagram, there’s a lot of strategic self-presentation going on that seems to contribute to identity,” Subrahmanyam said. “I think the gray area is that we don’t know if this is necessarily beneficial or harmful.”
remaining questions
“It’s important to have a consistent identity,” she says. “But in the context of social media, if it’s not clear whether people are necessarily expressing their true selves, but often their ideal or false selves, is that a good thing?”
There are also more questions than answers about how social media influences the development of adolescent intimate relationships. Does having a wide network of contacts increase superficial interactions and inhibit intimacy, as is often the case with social media? Or, perhaps more importantly, “Is the support available online as effective as the support available offline?” Subrahmanyam thinks. “We don’t necessarily know that.”
Based on her own research comparing text messages to face-to-face interactions, she says: Emotions are quickly lost compared to face-to-face interactions. ”
However, she notes that today’s tech-native teens may be less attached to the online/offline binary. “ We tend to think of online and offline as separate, but young people need to realize that. . . “There is much more fluidity and connection between the real and physical, offline and online,” she says.
In fact, growing up with digital technology may be altering teenage brain development in ways we don’t yet know about. And these changes, in turn, could change the way his teen interacts with technology. “We have to keep in mind that because exposure to technology is happening so early, there may be changes occurring at a neural level due to early exposure,” Subramanyam says. “The way young people interact with technology may be qualitatively different from the way we do.”
In Part 2 of this article, we’ll look at how social media impacts psychological well-being and ways to use social media that are likely to increase its benefits and reduce its harms.