Essay

   Do You Think Social Media is Good for Teens?

Social Media plays a very important role in today's life, especially In this modern globalization era. In today’s society, the use of social media has become a necessary daily activity. Social media is typically used for social interaction and access to news and information, and decision making.  It is a valuable communication tool with others locally and worldwide, as well as to share, create, and spread information. As a teenager myself, I find it simple and effective because of how fast and easy you can access the internet these days, and how compatible the media are, but surely everything has a positive and negative impact.

The advantages of social media for teenagers is to stay in touch with their friends. Teens have always talked after school, long before social media. It is an important part of socialising and connection in the modern world. Not only for communicating, social media can be a vehicle for doing good, especially in this pandemic situation everything is online based used, we need social media to access lessons example ebook, posting assignments on Instagram/Youtube, and also there are many online platforms these days to help teenagers learn such as online courses (ruang guru, pahamify, etc) surely these online courses doesn’t cost much more than regular offline courses, so this could be an effective shortcut for us to keep up with the lessons. Teenagers and social media use is increasing, the benefits they will get is to increase creativity, explore identities and character development, collaborative learning, digital media literacy and also collaborative learning. 

On the contrary, there are also disadvantages of social media for teens. In a 2018 study, 14 to 17 year olds who used social media seven hours per day were more than twice as likely to have been diagnosed with depression, treated by a mental health professional, or taken medication for a psychological or behavioral issue during the last year. This was compared to those who used screens only about an hour a day. Teenagers on social media spend much of their time observing the lives and images of their peers. This leads to constant comparisons, which can damage self-esteem and body image, exacerbating depression and anxiety among adolescents. Social media could also decrease face-to-face communication time and skill if they spend too much time on it.

In conclusion, social media has a lot of advantages for teenagers especially in this modern era. Social media eases many teenagers' needs, for example when they do research for their study or to communicate with someone who’s far away from them. Nevertheless, there are also disadvantages from social media for someone who didn’t use them wisely. So, to optimize social media benefits for teenagers, we should be able to sort the dos and don'ts when we use social media.