Social media is an integral part of everyone’s life today, especially the youth of today. It impacts them both positively and negatively. It is easier to make friends on social media sites. In fact, it has changed the entire idea of making friends. It allows the youth to make friends with others, all over the world and talk with them for unlimited hours, whenever they want. Nowadays, even video chatting is free of cost. A social site like Facebook has allowed contact with long lost friends in an instant. Indeed, social media has been a blessing for extroverts and introverts, students, penpals, and all social adolescents.
Since we can connect to friends anytime now, we can share all kinds of experiences with them and they can do the same. This makes the relationship and bonding between the friends stronger. Friendship teaches youth empathy, an emotion that is important in growth to adulthood. Socializing also makes them relax mentally after school and helps them get through tough situations.
The youth today lives in an extremely busy world of school, homework, and sport. There is sometimes hardly any time for anything else. Social sites give everyone a chance to communicate effectively and quickly for many different reasons. People can talk to many friends at the same time. Social networking sites not only allows everyone to get in touch with old friends, but it also helps them develop a new network of friends and other contacts who might help them at various stages of their life.
Educationally, social media plays its valuable part. Never before have students been able to help each other in such an instant way with educational queries, school tips, project advice, and exam preparation.
On the other hand, social media can have a negative impact on youth as well. As with games and TV, it’s quite possible to become addicted to these sites so that they become glued to the internet for hours, checking their account or accounts, neglecting their study. This extreme use of technology can affect productivity, mental, and physical health.
Where unfortunately there are bullies at most schools, there are bullies cyberbullies too. As in normal life, children should be monitored and complaints looked into.
Dangers can arise in many guises: teenagers can use this platform for stalking other people, harassing them in different ways with texting, and sending objectionable content.
Many website policies make the account information public and youths can often not be aware of that when they blindly allow and permit access. Irresponsible behavior can lead to privacy breaches and unacceptable sharing of content. Rarely, though serious consequences can lead to hacking of their social media accounts and sometimes bank accounts as well.
Youth today have a habit of putting countless minutes of their lives into these sites in the form of images, post updates, and map updates. It makes them easily trackable and can aid criminals in committing terrible crimes such as stalking, kidnapping, and murders. Although these crimes are rare a parallel can be seen with the real world. In short, the real world is policed and safeguards are carried out to try to protect our youth from harm. Now serious safeguards and education need to be in implemented for proper use of the internet and social sites.
Social media has both good and bad impacts on youth. It is vital that information on the internet must be used and shared with responsibility. As beneficial it is, it can be harmful as well if not used wisely. Social media can be both a boon and bane to the youth. Individual responsibility is key within a regulated set of rules. Youth today must be educated about how to use it and taught about the positive and negative impacts of their actions.
