Health Concerns of Social Media Addiction
What are the health concerns of social media addiction to adolescents?
Many people think of addiction as a simple concept, something that does not require much knowledge or thought. However, addiction is a brain disease and it is exhibited by compulsiveness despite the harmful consequences. Usually, when people think of addiction, they think of substance abuse, but there are many different things someone can be addicted to, and social media is one of them. Being addicted to social media is a form of addiction that can be detrimental to your mental health.
Back in 2011, it was suggested that there are health concerns for the wellbeing of young users that used social media sites in excess. These effects had an impact on many aspects of their lives, including real-life relationships and academic achievement, which was argued are signs of addiction. Over the past five years, there have been continuations of studies showing the negative impacts of social media on health. Dr. Kuss and Dr. Griffiths together discovered that for a minority of individuals there were psychological problems associated with social media such as anxiety, depression, loneliness, Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), and addiction (Griffiths 2018). Social media addiction causes negative physical, social, emotional, and cognitive effects on adolescents.
A lot of people joke about being addicted to their phone or addicted to social media, but how many of them are actually addicted? Parents are probably the people that complain the most about social media, saying their children are addicted to their phone, but is this behavior really considered addiction. The two things parents are concerned about when it comes to social media addiction is how much time their child spends on screens and their child’s refusal to cut back on the screen time (Miller). Even children and teenagers themselves call themselves addicted to their phones, but the difference is they are using it colloquially instead of literally. It is tempting to call this addiction, especially since our devices stimulate the reward centers of the brain in a similar way to substance abuse, but there are also key differences. Matthew Cruger, a neuropsychologist explains that with addiction you have a chemical that changes the way we respond, that leads us to be reliant on it for our level of functioning. That’s not what’s happening here….We don’t need more and more screen time in order to be able to function (Cruger). On the other side, Mark Griffiths, Daria Kuss, and Zsolt Demetrovics believe that internet addiction exists. They have looked at anecdotal case studies that show that addiction to social networks may be a potential mental health problem for some users (Griffiths et al.). Not much research has been done on social media addiction, but scientists from the Netherlands have invented their own scaled to identify if there is addiction. They call it the 9-item SMD-scale, SMD standing for Social Media Disorder. There were online surveys conducted among 2,198 Dutch adolescents from the ages of 10 to 17, and it showed that the short 9-item scale is a psychometrically sound and valid instrument (Eijnden et al 2016). It suggests that higher levels of media multitasking is related to deficits in cognitive control and also the ability to have a greater attention span. This instrument has been a good way to determine whether or not the average adolescent is addicted to social media.
Adolescence is such an important stage in development. This is the time where teenagers learn about themselves and create meaningful relationships, and social media has become such an integral part of every teenager’s life. Social media is able to influence children physically, cognitively, and socially in their development because it changes how people communicate with each other and allows them to be connected at any part of the day (Bryant 2018). Adolescents can go from talking with their friends at school to going home and continuing the conversation on any form of social media. Constant use of social media use can have the allusion of being wonderful — you can stay connected to all your friends and at all times — but the constant use and psychological harm can make it dangerous. There is also the issue of cyberbullying where the child cannot get away from their bullies because every time they open Facebook or Twitter or some other social media website they are right there to continue the torment. Cyberbullying is not the only detrimental effect social media has on the youth, but how every aspect of their time is spent on the phone disconnected from reality. If you are being bullied at school, the bullying can continue even when you are at home or someplace other than school because of social media. Bullying through social media has been taken to a whole new level where “it is impossible to quantify how many deaths have been caused or contributed to in this country by the negative elements of social media” (Bohan 2013). Knowing this, it is important that we understand and fully explain to adolescents the types of effects this side of social media can have on themselves and their peers.
Adolescents that grew up in the first decade of the new millennium came of age during the digital revolution. Older media of television, movies, radio, and magazines were all changing and being swapped for new media such as social networking sites. Research patterns of use and effect on adolescents’ health and well-being have not been able to keep up in this new age of social media and technology, even though they are trying. Everyone now uses social media at all times, but adolescents are the ones that use it the most as studies have shown. Constantly being connected and using social media can have an adverse effect on the physical, social, emotional, and cognitive development of adolescents. For many social media sites, you need to be a certain age to be able to make an account or use them, but children can still make an account and simply change their birthday to make them old enough. Facebook, Instagram, and others have no way of regulating this, meaning that young children are able to access these sites. It is important to emphasize the risks and possible harm that can occur through the use of social media if a child is too young to be using it.
The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) is a law that was passed in 1998 that protects every child under the age of 13 from having their personal information collected, and the operators of the websites and online services must provide notice and permission from parents if it was going to occur. (Bryant 2018)
If children under the age of thirteen are still continuing to access social media, then they are at risk of having their information leaked. This can cause numerous ethical issues since private information is more available to the internet, not to mention the companies can be liable themselves if anything happens. So many children can be taken advantage of just for the sake of being connected on social media to their friends, who do not fully understand the risks of what they are doing.
All people hear about is how social media is bad and how it rots your brain, and how it has negative effects on you physically, mentally, and emotionally; however, people rarely talk about the good side of social media. According to Robyn Treyvaud, a globally recognized expert in online safety and digital citizenship, it is worthwhile to consider and look at the positive effects social media has on teenagers. 68% of teenagers say that social media gives them support during the time they need, 46% of teenage girls say that social media empowers them and gives them the courage to speak out about what they care about, and 83% of teenagers say that social media makes them feel connected to their friends (Treyvaud 2017). These statistics show how there can be positive outcomes from using social media. There are seven ways Treyvaud goes into about how there are positive effects of social media on teenagers.
The first way is spreading kindness and social awareness. Teenagers have this desire to discover new information, new ideas, and express themselves all the while staying interconnected and this all has a huge impact on their social media engagement. They use social media sites, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to give a voice to those who feel voiceless, and many of them use this as a way to spread kindness and social awareness. The second is educational benefits, which is shown through teenagers using social media platforms to complete collaborative assignments. Social media itself can also be an educational resource, such as Wikipedia. The third is real-world skills, where teenagers learn confidence in interactions with a whole array of social contexts online and can be very essential to their digital development. The fourth is enhancing creativity, where it is shown that social media encourages teenagers to think outside the box and use creativity in how they engage with and talk to their audience and friends. The fifth is independence, where teenagers who engage in social networking sites can be a whole new adventure for them to discover the different skills needed for different social interactions. The sixth is interconnectivity and identity. This one shows how social media can build and extend a teenager’s personal and their collective identities In the online world, teenagers can feel the freedom of self-discovery through trial and error. The last one is tolerance and diversity, in which social media encourages teenagers to connect with other people from all over the world and teach them tolerance and acceptance.
There are many negative effects of social media, however, and it is important to address them as well. Around 40% of the world’s population uses online social media and it is averaged at about 2 hours every day (Brown 2018). BBC Future reviewed some of the findings of how social media affects our lives and the first area they looked at was stress. A lot of people use social media to vent, but in doing so there is an endless stream of stress and negativity for everyone to see all the time. The social media site that caused the most stress was Twitter, even though it was also seen as a coping mechanism as well. There was a survey of women and men and the results showed that women were more stressed than men because Twitter increased their awareness of other people’s stress. However, the same women also said that using Twitter made them feel less stressed. Another area that BBC Future looked at was anxiety and how general anxiety is provoked by social media. A study that was published in the journal Computers and Human Behavior showed that people who reported using seven or more social media accounts were more than three times as likely to have high levels of general anxiety symptoms compared to people who used 0–2 platforms (Brown 2018). That being said, it is still unclear how social media causes anxiety because the results were pretty mixed, and it was concluded that more research needed to be done.
Even though there is a debate on whether or not social media addiction is something that is real or not, it is still a well-known fact that social media has more negative effects on adolescents than it has positive ones. There is much research that proves social media is negative in both adolescents and adults in social, physical, mental, emotional, and cognitive areas. Some of these effects even have an impact on many aspects of teenager’s lives, including real-life relationships and academic achievement, which was argued are signs of addiction. However, Treyvaud made a good point when he talked about the seven ways social media has been known to affect people positively. However, while social media does have certain positive effects, such as confidence and enhancing creativity, the negative impacts outweigh the positive ones.
Works Cited
Bohan, Christine. “TD says social media bullying has contributed to deaths.” Thejournal.ie. TheDailyEdge. 6 Jan. 2013, https://www.thejournal.ie/social-media-bullying-political-parties-743140-Jan2013/.
Brown, Jessica. “Is social media bad for you? The evidence and the unknowns.” Likeminded. 5 Jan 2018. http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180104-is-social-media-bad-for-you-the-evidence-and-the-unknowns.
Bryant, Aaron. “The Effect of Social Media on the Physical, Social, Emotional, and Cognitive Development of Adolescents”. Merrimack College. Merrimack ScholarWorks. Spring 2018.
Eijnden, Regina et al. “The Social Media Disorder Scale.” Computers in Human Behavior. ScienceDirect. Aug 2016. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563216302059.
Griffiths, Mark. “Addicted to Social Media?: What can we do about it problematic, excessive use?”. Psychology Today. 7 May 2018.
Griffiths, Mark, et al. “Social Networking Addiction: An Overview of Preliminary Findings.” NeuroImage, Academic Press, 21 Feb. 2014, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780124077249000069.
Miller, Caroline. “Is Internet Addiction Real?” Media and Tech, Child Mind Institute, https://childmind.org/article/is-internet-addiction-real/.
Treyvaud, Robyn. “The Positive Effects of Social Media on Teenagers.” Family Insights. 23 Nov 2017. https://familyinsights.net/advice/positive-effects-of-social-media-on-teenagers/.
