Social medias toll on adolescents

Annie Byrd
News Reporter 19

Social media: a construct since the late 90s that has been flooding the minds of about 2.3 billion
users in total. 75% of American teenagers alone spending roughly 27 hours weekly lurking the
interwebs as of 2015. In a recent statistic from the Statistics Portal, the specific networks that are
used among American teenagers and other American adults are Snapchat, Facebook, and
Instagram followed by other forms of networking.

According to CNN, in a survey that was conducted of more than 1,000 teenagers, 28% of them
believed that social media made them feel more socially confident while 5% opposed the
opinion. 28% is reported to be less shy with social media, while 3% opposed the opinion as well.

Pew Research has shown that most communication takes place among teenagers online rather
than physically, and with constant communication online, there are possibilities of hindering
ones own physical communication skills and overall interpersonal skills needed for both
personal and professional life such as verbal communication, eye contact, and basic mannerisms.

Psychologist Kristin Carothers from New York Citys Child Mind Institute mentioned that when
using social media often, those who often use the networking mostly fail in social situations
when trying to understand people or just a situation in general.

Considering academic performance, students who typically use social media compared to those
who rarely engage in it tend to have lower GPA scores and are susceptible to irregular sleep
patterns, depression, and anxiety. Typically if teenagers are not doing their homework, they are
on social media.

Teenagers who attend social media while trying to study typically score roughly 20% lower on
test grades according to psychologist Paul Kirschnera who has also found that frequent users get
a GPA of 3.06 with those who do not use social media attaining a GPA of roughly 3.82.

From Brown Daily Herald, a study that has kept track of college women using social media and
the specific sites they use, this conclusion has come to be: women who used less social media
mentioned that they had a small amount of academic conviction while those who did spend more
time on social media reported to spending less time in their studies.