This is a difficult topic to write about, as so many of us enjoy engaging in social media usage, particularly as a means to connect with friends and family who live far away or who were part of our lives in the distant past, but this is not necessarily how our children (or most adults) use social media. Interestingly, we hear from as many parents who are concerned about their children’s social media interactions as we do from parents who are happy that their children are interacting in a way that they deemed socially “typical.” As we have been doing in our past blogs on technology, let’s take a look at the current research and general concerns amongst social scientists concerning social media usage.
Some scientists suggest that our constant use of technology, and social media in particular, may be considered a sign of discomfort with being alone. Solitude used to be viewed as a path towards self-understanding and self-identity. Now we turn to others to do that work for us. Without this internal work of setting a personal standard, we frantically look to our friends’ posts and measure our worth against their seemingly perfect lives. However, if you are comfortable with yourself, you develop empathy, the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. As a matter of fact, research shows that people who use social media the most struggle to read their own and others’ emotions. Moreover, those who use social media a lot feel less accepted by their peers. Social media can even affect our moods. Facebook did a study that showed users’ moods were altered by the types of posts they were exposed to. Users tended to post happy content after being exposed to happy messages and negative posts after being exposed to negative messages. It should be noted that Facebook received a lot of flak for this experiment as they did not request participant permission, a blatant example of social media manipulation.
Social media may also increase social anxiety. Without the ability to plan what you are going to message, children and young adults often fail to talk to their “friends” at parties and school events. They don’t know what to do to maintain and expand topics in real time, so they go home and message the same peers that they ignored in person. The good news is that we learn how to be interested in what other people think and feel through family conversations, so please put your own devices away during family time, and institute a media-free dinner hour.
According to Sherry Turkle, the author of Reclaiming Conversation, social media encourages performance instead of authenticity, putting on your best face instead of vulnerability, and what goes into an effective broadcast instead of learning how to listen. In other words, social media does NOT teach you how to read people, but how to get people to “like” you. Many teens believe that their social skills are just fine, thank you very much, because they have a high number of friends on social media. However, there is a world of difference between weak social media ties, usually casual acquaintances, and strong friendship ties, those people you know well and trust and with whom you’ve had many face-to-face conversations. Although strong friendships can have social media ties with each other, social media “friends” rarely lead to strong friendships.
According to research, social media decreases self-control and increases self-confidence, traits that can have unpleasant consequences when combined. Social media may allow us to think about people as objects without emotions because we are unable to see and hear the person we are talking to. Thus, people tend to be more aggressive and vulgar online than they are in person, hence the term “online bullying.”
What about FaceTime? Aren’t our children having in-depth conversations on this app? The downsides to FaceTime versus face-to-face conversations are that you can always leave when you don’t know what else to say, and you can interact with social media at the same time. This only teaches us that attention to others is not important. Snapchat, and now others, allows you to send pictures and texts that disappear, making “conversations” one-sided and temporary. I’ve also been reading several stories about people who’ve been confronted with Facebook’s “highlights” reels, photos with balloon and other happy graphics. People who had been confronted with death and disaster over the past year were now unexpectedly faced with horrid memories attached to contradictory happy graphics, causing them to feel outrage and sadness.
Finally, we need to recognize that social media is NOT private. Information on what you are interested in, your political leanings, your purchases, your current location, your poor choices, are available to marketers, job recruiters, potential romantic partners, etc. Persons with executive function deficits, those who have difficulty making considered plans toward a future goal, are in danger of ramifications from their social media posts.
This blog is really just an overview of the dangers of participating in social media automatically, without conscious thought. In my final technology blog post, I’ll discuss ways to engage with technology in a thoughtful, more deliberate manner.
LeeAnne Fura, MS, CCC/SLP