Benefits and Challenges of Social Media Use for Teens
Gray, Peter. 2023-11-19.
Vinklinger
-
Psykisk helse: Sosiale medier gir ungdommer noe de trenger: Et sted å møte hverandre uten voksentilsyn, noe de i stor grad har mistet i den virkelige verden.
-
Psykisk helse: Tenåringer opplever selv at sosiale medier gir dem mer verdi enn skade.
-
Avhengighet: Avhengighet er et dårlig ord å bruke om motivasjonen for å bruke sosiale medier. Det er helt normalt å ønske å knytte seg til andre mennesker.
In today’s post my focus is on what teens themselves say about their use of social media and on studies that look at the immediate effects of social media use on teens’ moods. Why do teens spend so much time on social media? What do they get out of it? What do they see as the positive and negative effects it has on their mental health? What individual differences exist among teens in the mental health consequences of social media use? And, finally, what precautions might teens (and the rest of us) take to use social media safely and reduce or remove risks?
Teenagers have always been attracted to public spaces where they can hang out with friends, find new friends, and talk endlessly with peers about matters that concern them, away from parents and other authority figures. This has always been true, across cultures and across time. It seems to be an essential part of growing up. In recent decades, however, teens, as well as younger children, have been increasingly deprived of opportunities to get together in physical space away from direct adult surveillance and interference.
Under these conditions, social media is a saving grace. It provides a substitute means for teens to keep in touch with one another.
Cyberspace is the new public space for teens. If we took that away from them, they would have no space—no way to engage in the intense and private (private from adults) communication that teens have always sought and needed as part of growing up.
In a study by the Pew Research Center (Anderson & Jiang, 2018), researchers asked 743 teens, ages 13 to 17, why they use social media instead of getting together with friends in person. The most common response (by 41%) was that they had too many obligations (too many scheduled activities) to find time to hang out with friends. In addition, 34% said their friends were too busy with their own obligations, 32% cited the difficulty of finding transportation, and 33% noted that it is just easier to connect with friends online than to try to connect with them physically.
n one set of questions the girls were asked whether the effect on their mood of using various social media platforms was primarily positive, negative, or neutral. For every platform, more girls said the effect was positive than negative. For TikTok, 43% said positive, 26% negative, and the rest neutral. For Instagram, these numbers were 38% positive, 19% negative; for Snapchat. 32% positive, 26% negative; for messaging apps 50% positive, 10% negative; and for YouTube, 65% positive, 5% negative. In another set of questions the girls were asked if their life would be better, worse, or the same if they didn’t have access to specific social media platforms. For each platform, far more said that removing the platform would make their life worse than said it would make it better, though many said it would make no difference.
Why, according to teens, does social media improve their well-being? In the Pew study (Anderson & Jiang, 2018), cited earlier, 81% of teens said social media makes them feel more connected to what’s going on in their friends’ lives, and roughly two-thirds said such communication makes them feel they have people who will support them through tough times.
On the possibly negative side, in the Pew study, many said they at least sometimes feel pressure to post only content that makes them look good (43%) or will get lots of likes or comments (37%).
One approach to understanding short-term effects of social media use on teens’ moods is to signal them at various times and, at each signal, have them report on their use of social media within some period (typically an hour) before the signal and their current mood.
In one such study, Ine Beyens and colleagues (2020) tested the hypothesis that passive social media use (where the person is just browsing and not posting) may have negative effects on mood. This hypothesis is generally founded on the belief that when one is just looking at others posts they feel socially excluded and envious of the others’ experiences. The results failed to support that hypothesis. In fact, the researchers found that 46% of the teens tested over many such sampling trials felt better, on average, after such browsing and only 10% felt worse.
A very similar finding has since been reported in another study (Valkenburg et al., 2021)—which also showed that only a small percentage of teens felt worse after passive browsing; most either felt better or were unaffected. Beyens and colleagues also found, as had others, that active use of social media—that is, sending messages, posting or sharing on social media—regularly produced a boost in teens’ feelings of well-being.
Those who used social media more showed greater improvement in mental health—less depression and fewer suicidal thoughts—than those who used it less or not at all.
In another longitudinal study, Stephanie Fredrick and colleagues (2022) sampled social media use and depression at four time points over two years for 800 teens who were 13 to 15 years old at the start of the study. The findings were complex, but one finding that stood out was that for girls, more than for boys, higher levels of active social media use predicted lower levels of depression. This finding runs counter to the belief that social media is especially bad for girls. In this study it seemed to be especially good for girls.
Teens regularly admit, when questioned, that they sometimes spend more time with social media than they would like. They acknowledge being drawn into it and becoming so engrossed that they lose track of time, which may cause harm by subtracting from the time they can spend on other activities.
A problem is that the smartphone is always with us (I’m including all of us, not just teens), regularly alerting us that some interesting message may be coming through, and once we get involved with any given message it may be hard to leave. This is what leads some to use the word “addiction” to describe the result, but I hate that word in this context. It implies pathology rather than something quite normal.
We all (and especially teens) like to communicate with others, and we are all quite naturally curious about what might lie in that next message. I (like boyd) much prefer to call it a time-management problem. “Addiction” sounds like something that would be hard to cure, but “time management” sounds like something we should all be able to handle if we wish. Spending lots of time on social media is not in itself bad, but it may take away from time that would be better spent on other endeavors.
One of the worst effects of smartphone use is sleep loss when teens (or any of us) use it late into the night or let its beeping wake us.
In her interviews with teens, boyd found that they did not think bullying online was as big a problem as adults considered it to be. They felt that bullying in person, at school, was a bigger problem.
It is good to distinguish between public and private platforms, but keep in mind that even messages in private platforms can make their way out publicly. A good rule to keep in mind is don’t send anything into the Internet that you wouldn’t want a future potential employer to see.