How Social Media and Digital Culture Are Harming Youth

Introduction

As the world has become increasingly digitized, more and more young people are turning to the Internet for information, entertainment, and socialization. Social media now serves as the most popular platform for young people when it comes to getting news, sharing ideas, and communicating with others (Doster; Wood, Bukowski, and Lis). Young people create profiles, cultivate followings, and carefully manage lists of accounts to follow. They develop a public image of themselves and even build personal brands. They treat social media as a virtual world to inhabit and develop, often while neglecting their own personal growth in the real world. As Sampasa-Kanyinga and Lewis demonstrate, teens who rely heavily on social networking sites exhibit poor psychological functioning: they struggle with face-to-face communication, misunderstand real-world socialization, become addicted to their mobile devices, and feel inferior due to constant comparison of their own social media popularity with that of others. Accordingly, social media usage has been linked to depression, jealousy, and poor self-esteem (Appel, Gerlach, and Crusius). This paper argues that 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 childhood.

Communication Skills and Social Media

Person-to-person communication skills are essential for young people to develop. Without these skills, they cannot perform well in job interviews, they cannot develop emotional or social intelligence, and they cannot interact effectively with peers or colleagues. The development of communication skills depends significantly on lived experience. Many young people today are not getting enough of that experience. They spend their free time on the Internet, and their socialization takes place entirely in chat rooms, instant messaging, and responding to posts on platforms like Twitter. They are not learning or refining real-world social skills, preferring that all exchanges take place on a social media platform.

This is problematic because the real world is not a social media platform. In the real world, people are expected to handle complex and difficult situations as they arise. They must navigate various challenges, manage aggressive or hostile remarks, and know how to influence others through speech, non-verbal cues, and body language. They must learn to show respect when addressing others in person and to put people at ease — skills that cannot be developed by sending messages online all day.

Communication is something children and teenagers learn by being around others who communicate effectively. As Vygotsky's zone of proximal development demonstrates, social interaction with more experienced communicators is critical for nurturing skills like socialization and language use (Wertsch). This is how young people become confident in talking with others: by observing real interactions and learning what different conversational approaches produce. They learn what shocks or offends, what creates goodwill, how to be supportive, and how to conduct themselves in a variety of social contexts. They learn to reflect on their own behavior and on conversations they have had. They learn what is appropriate and what behavioral styles should be avoided in different settings. None of these lessons are available to children and teenagers who spend all their time on social media.

Media Exposure and Unhealthy Content

Social media is not the only source of concern. Media in general — whether TV, radio, streaming platforms such as Netflix, HBO, Amazon Prime, or YouTube — exposes children and teens to a great deal of content that can negatively affect their emotional and psychological development. Sexually explicit material, for example, is readily accessible to young users online, and such exposure can lead to the formation of unhealthy habits, including consumption of pornography. There is no prevailing moral standard in contemporary media production. If anything, the opposite is true: the more pornographic or violent the content, the more it tends to be celebrated. The television series Game of Thrones serves as a representative example. The show is filled with graphic violence and sexual content inappropriate for young audiences, yet it is referenced so pervasively in popular media and online discourse that it reaches children regardless.

As Bandura (2018) shows, youth are highly impressionable by peers, social groups, and media. Young people are therefore likely to respond to whatever content reaches them online, and even if a given program is not intended for them, they will be tempted to engage with it. This means they may be influenced by adult-level depictions of violence and sexuality, which can negatively affect their development. Stylized portrayals of sex and violence can distort their sense of reality and lead them toward harmful attitudes and behaviors — yet another way in which excessive media exposure disconnects young people from authentic experience.

Even when young people are not watching inappropriate programs, they are subjected to advertising that frequently features unrealistic and hyper-sexualized depictions of men and women. This can foster distorted thinking about body image, sex, and desire. Young girls may grow up believing they must look like advertising models. Young boys may internalize the idea that only women who conform to those same standards are worth their attention, or that extreme physical fitness is a prerequisite for self-esteem. As Wood et al. demonstrate, excessive media consumption affects the emotional development of young people and alters their perceptions of themselves and of society.

If young people are to develop well, they need an education that helps them understand themselves and the real world. They need a culture that is authentically theirs — not one manufactured for passive consumption. Horkheimer and Adorno's concept of the culture industry is instructive here: they argued that what is produced for mass public consumption is not always in the public's best interest but is instead a mechanism of social control. They objected to most media content — television, film, radio, newspapers — viewing it as having an unhealthy influence on people's minds. Since their time, the culture industry has only grown more decadent, more sexualized, and more violent. A constant stream of indecent content is now available at any moment on a device that fits in a child's pocket. Young people are continuously bombarded with this material whenever they are online, and that bombardment is deeply damaging to the formation of their characters, minds, and values.

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 traps them in a cocoon of artificial life. They should get the chance to simply be children — to live away from the screen and to develop insight and understanding through their own direct experience. They need a break from the culture industry, and they should be allowed to preserve their innocence for as long as possible.

Because today's children are effectively raised on media — consuming hours of it each day — a life lived on social media feels entirely natural to them. It is all they know. They aspire to become YouTubers and social media influencers. They want their own channels, their personal brands, and the lifestyle they see celebrated online. They want to turn private lives into public performances, and they have been so thoroughly acclimated to media's depictions of sex and violence that they no longer register them as problematic. They have been corrupted by media culture. They have not been given the opportunity to be innocent children. They have never developed the communication skills needed to navigate the real world. Instead, by the time they reach adulthood, many retreat back into artificial virtual worlds where they can remain safely sheltered from reality.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." Stardom and Celebrity: A Reader 34 (2007).

Appel, Helmut, Alexander L. Gerlach, and Jan Crusius. "The Interplay between Facebook Use, Social Comparison, Envy, and Depression." Current Opinion in Psychology 9 (2016): 44–49.

Bandura, A. "Toward a Psychology of Human Agency: Pathways and Reflections." Perspectives on Psychological Science 13.2 (2018): 130–136.

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 Review 1.2 (2016): 163–173.

Yale University. Out-of-Wedlock Births Rise Worldwide. Yale, 2017. https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/out-wedlock-births-rise-worldwide