Social Media made its big debut when the first email was sent in 1971, it kicked off the new trend of staying connected through online media. Soon after came the first blog post, then around 2001 instant messaging, Myspace, Facebook and twitter kicked off our social media today. Now social media is no longer a trend, it is our society’s main source of communication. Between Instagram, Facebook and twitter, we know what everyone is doing and where everyone has been up to in the past couple of hours. We feel connected to our friends and family.  

Teenagers today, post about everything, who they are friends with, what this person said to this person and so forth. It is all over the internet for everyone to see. Social networking plays a vital role in broadening our social connections whether it helps us connect with people from school, work or extracurricular activities.According to Pew Internet and the American Life Project, teenagers and young adults make up the majority of social media users. Today, 90 percent of teenagers use social media. That is 78 percent higher than teenagers who used it in 2005, only 12 percent of teenagers were on social media. We make up 75 percent of social media users. (Pew, 2015) Through Facebook and Instagram we have a sense of connection with everyone we know whether it is from school or work or maybe a sports team. But how is it really effecting teenagers today?

Social media effects teenagers and young adults in both positive and negative ways. It allows for us to be creative, to interact with one another and to learn. It allows us to stay connected with friends from other schools or on previous sports teams we no longer participate on. We can share similar interests with the people that are around us or in a different state. Social media has proven that it allows children to come out of their turtle shell and be who they want to be; 28 percent have said they have become more confident and love themselves more after posting a picture on Instagram or Facebook and receiving a positive comment. (Wallace, 2014) Those are just a few of the positive effects. But what about the negative effects of social media?

Social media effects teenagers and young adults across the world with being pressured into participate into sexting, susceptibility to peer pressure, sleep deprivation, lowering of grades, a disconnection from reality and of course, cyber bullying. The act of sending nude pictures to a boyfriend or girlfriend isn’t something that used to be popular, but among teenagers and young adults, that has been recently changing. According to National Campaign to Support Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, 20 percent have participated in some form of sexting whether it be on the doing the action or receiving the pictures. (CNN, 2014)

Research shows that 39 percent of teens have admitted to some type of cyber bullying whether it is receiving nasty text messages, threatening or aggressive emails and IM’s, it happens to many of them. It is easier to hide behind a phone screen or a computer screen and say nasty things to someone because we are not directly in front of them and cannot see their reaction. (Pew, 2015) Those mean, hurtful threatening comments take up more than half of the type of cyber bullying that is spread throughout the internet, how would that make one feel? 

                                                    

Social media has both its positive and negative effects on teenagers and young adults. We are a part of society where we need to feel connected with each other, we want to know what is going on in our friends and families lives all the time or what is going on with our favorite celebrity, social media has allowed us to do have that connection.