Social media's effects on youth development

Introduction
As the world has become more and more digitized, more and more young people are turning to the Internet for information, fun and socialization. Social media now serves as the most popular source or platform for young people when it comes to getting news information, sharing ideas, and communicating with others (Doster; Wood, Bukowski and Lis). They create their profiles, their followings, their list of people to follow. They cultivate a public image of themselves and even develop their own personal brands. They view social media as a virtual world to inhabit and develop while meanwhile neglecting their own personal development in the real world. As Sampasa-Kanyinga and Lewis show, teens who use social networking sites lack proper and appropriate psychological functioning: they cannot communicate well in face-to-face communications; they do not understand real world socialization; they become addicted to their mobile devices; and they feel inferior and lack confidence as a result of too much comparison of their own social media popularity to others’. Thus, social media usage has been linked to depression, jealousy and poor self-esteem (Appel, Gerlach and Crusius). This paper will show how social media is corrupting youth by preventing them from acquiring effective communication skills, exposing them to unhealthy content, and causing them to miss out on their childhood.
Communication
Person to person communication skills are important for young people to develop. Without these skills they cannot interview well for jobs, they cannot gain any sort of emotional or social intelligence, and they cannot interact well or communicate effectively with peers or colleagues. Part of the process of development of communication skills depends upon experience. The problem that many young people are having is that they are not getting enough experience in communication. They are spending all their free time on the Internet and their socialization takes place entirely in Internet chat rooms, instant messaging friends, and responding to Tweets on Twitter. They are not learning or refining any real world social skills. They prefer all exchanges to be made online on a social media platform.
This is bad because the real world is not a social media platform. In the real world people are expected to be able to handle and confront complex circumstances in which they are presented with different and difficult situations. They must be able to navigate various problems, know how to deal with aggressive or hostile remarks, be familiar with ways of influencing people with speech, non-verbal communications, body language, and so on. They must learn how to show respect for others when addressing them in person so as not to cause offense and they need to learn to put people at their ease, which cannot be done by sending out Tweets all day.
Communication is something that children and teens have to learn by being around others who communicate effectively. As Vygotsky shows, the zone of proximal development is critical for nurturing the development of skills like socialization and communication (Wertsch). This is how they become confident about talking to others: they learn to do so from observing others in the real world. They learn what types of methods of talk produce what kinds of reactions in others. They learn what shocks or offends, what produces good feeling, what to say to be supportive, how to say things, how not to say things, and more. They learn from being around others and being in situations. They learn to reflect on their own actions and on their own behaviors. They learn to reflect on conversations they have had and how they made them feel. They learn how to conduct themselves around certain types of people, what is appropriate and what sort of behavioral styles should not be used. These are all lessons that are not learned by children and teens who spend all their time on social media.
Media Promotes Unhealthy Content
It is not just social media that is the problem, of course. It is media in general. Whether it is TV, radio, Internet, Netflix, HBO Now, Amazon Prime, YouTube or any of the other platforms that stream media, children and teens are exposed to a lot that can negatively impact their emotions and minds: for example, there is a great deal of sexually explicit content that can be accessed by youths online. This exposure can cause them to form unhealthy habits, such as looking at pornography. There is no moral standard in media productions today. It is quite the opposite. The more pornographic or violent the content can be, the more celebrated and embraced it is. The online show Game of Thrones is one example. The show is filled with violence and sex and is not appropriate for youths, but in popular media it is used everywhere one looks. People reference it online constantly to such a degree that it would seem that everyone is watching it.
Youths being highly impressionable by peers, groups and media, as Bandura (2018) shows, are going to respond to whatever information is coming at them online, and so even though such a show is not appropriate for them they are going to be tempted to watch it. That means they be influenced by adult-level depictions of violence and sexuality, which could negatively impact their development. Stylized sex and violence can warp their sense of reality and lead them into perversion. It is the same issue with social media all over again: too much media prevents them from getting experience with reality.
Even if they are not watching shows they should not be viewing, they are subjected to advertising which often features unrealistic and hyper-sexualized men and women. This can make people think unrealistically about body image, sex, sexuality, and desire. Youths especially are vulnerable because they do not have much experience with reality. Young girls may grow up thinking they have to make themselves look like the models they see in advertising. Young boys may grow up thinking the only women that matter are ones that look like models, or they may think that they have to look like they live in a gym to have any self-esteem. As Wood et al. show, too much media is going to affect the emotional development of young people and alter their perspective on self and society.
If young people are going to grow up well they need to be given an education that will help them to understand themselves and what the real world is like. They need to have a culture that is theirs—not something that is manufactured for them to consume in the culture industry as Horkheimer and Adorno called it. They showed that what is manufactured for the public is not always in their best interest but is actually produced as a means of control. Their view of the culture industry was such that they objected to most content in media—TV, film, radio, newspaper. They viewed it all as having an unhealthy slant that was bad for people’s minds. Since their time the culture industry has only gotten more and more corrupt. It has become far more decadent and sexualized. It has become far more violent and scandalous. There is nothing but a steady stream of indecency constantly available at one’s fingertips online. Youths are literally hammered with this all the time when they are on the Internet and that is very bad for the formation of their characters, minds, hearts and attitudes.
Missing Out on Childhood
Childhood used to be a time of innocence. Now it is a time of corruption. The culture industry leaders know that if they can get children hooked to their content at an early age, they will have them for life. It is the same thing that one can see with the Disney stars, who are groomed from childhood to be celebrities and when they hit puberty and begin to change into adults they are sexualized and turned into sex symbols. There is no real childhood or innocence in their lives. What the children are seeing is what they are turning into.
Youths used to spend more time outdoors, playing sports and games and just bicycling around the neighborhood or getting after school jobs. Nowadays all the jobs have gone online because of e-commerce giant Amazon. There are no more Mom and Pop stores let. Newspaper routes are a thing of the past. Paperboys are no longer seen. Even kids simply riding bikes is no longer an everyday occurrence. Parks are empty. Kids are afraid of going into their neighborhoods because they are deemed unsafe. There is so much violence on TV and on the Internet that kids think everywhere they go they may be attacked by a psychopath.
There is not much room for innocence among today’s children as their lives are so saturated by media that is consumed with sex and violence. Children should not have to deal with issues that they cannot understand. Adult issues like sex and violence are for adults. Children want games, they want to feel comforted. They are curious about their world but they need simple ideas and explanations. Much of the culture industry today aims at promoting promiscuous sexual behavior. Few people, except on family shows, are depicted as having monogamous relationships, let alone as waiting for marriage before having sex. Marriage is not even viewed as something that is common in media. Having children outside of wedlock is the norm as shown on media, and statistics back up that finding, as Yale University shows.
Conclusion
Children need time away from media in order to learn to play with others, develop social skills, and explore nature and reality. Too much media can cause them to be trapped in a cocoon of artificial life. They should get a chance to be kids, to live away from the screen, and to gain insight and understanding on their own. They need a break from the culture industry, and they should be allowed to live in their innocence for as long as possible. Because today they are basically raised on media, consuming hours and hours of it each day, having a life on social media is second-nature to them: it is all they know. They want to become YouTubers and social media Influencers. They want to have their own channels, turn themselves into a brand, and live the kind of lifestyle that they see and hear about in the media. They want to turn their private lives into public lives, and they see nothing wrong morally speaking with the sex and violence that pours over the airwaves. They have been corrupted by media and social media. They have not been given the chance to be innocent kids. They have never developed communication skills needed for getting ahead in the real world. Instead, by the time they reach adulthood, they just want to retreat back into their artificial virtual worlds where they can feel safely entrenched in unreality.
Works Cited
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Appel, Helmut, Alexander L. Gerlach, and Jan Crusius. "The interplay between Facebook
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Bandura, A. (2018). Toward a psychology of human agency: Pathways and reflections. 
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Doster, Leigh. "Millennial teens design and redesign themselves in online social
networks." Journal of Consumer Behaviour 12.4 (2013): 267-279.
Sampasa-Kanyinga, Hugues, and Rosamund F. Lewis. "Frequent use of social
networking sites is associated with poor psychological functioning among children and adolescents." Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 18.7 (2015): 380-385.
Wertsch, James V., ed. Culture, communication, and cognition: Vygotskian perspectives.
CUP Archive, 1986.
Wood, Megan A., William M. Bukowski, and Eric Lis. "The digital self: How social
media serves as a setting that shapes youth’s emotional experiences." Adolescent Research Review1.2 (2016): 163-173.
Yale University. Out-of-Wedlock Births Rise Worldwide. Yale, 2017.
https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/out-wedlock-births-rise-worldwide