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Parenting

The benefits and/or dangers of social media to teens in America

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The benefits and/or dangers of social media to teens in America

Social media is a collection of online communication media platforms that enable users to connect, share audio, photos, text, and video media, and interact in many other ways through the internet. Social media has become a group of several distinct platforms that include Facebook, What Sapp, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, and many others (Heins 82). These platforms enable users, especially teens, to interact, share and communicate with each other using proprietary modes of communications and interaction.

BENEFITS OF SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media’s ability to reach hundreds of millions of people or even billions at the same time has continued to enable teens promote their entrepreneurship skills and brands. Such users can communicate with each other over large geographical distances in order to share ideas on different market dynamics as demonstrated in the film ‘The Social Network’ (Fincher). Such communications allow these teens to respond appropriately to the challenges and opportunities their brands and entrepreneurships’ promotional teams face due to differences in taste and demand.

Additionally, social media enable the teens to interact with their customers, both existing and potential. Such interactions enable the organizations to pitch new products without the need for expensive promotional campaigns. In addition to pitching new ideas, the same social media companies can assist teens collect feedback instantaneously in school-based research as demonstrated in the film ‘The Social Network’ which recounts the foundations of Facebook (Fincher). Such speed of interaction enables the teens to make the required changes to lifestyles and also social survival and coping strategies.

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Social media has truly bridged the geographical gaps that existed before its introduction. Using video-enabled social media platforms such as Whatsapp, teens can interact with their peers faster and in real-time without the need for expensive television and print-media-based avenues coming into play.

The role of social media in enhancing the interactions between teenagers benefits the social innovation function through feedback loop completion. Using specialized platform resources such as group dynamics, webinars and even crowd sourcing, teens can request for and receive feedback about their offerings from the partners and mentors (Heins 82). This ability to interact and engage the peers assists many teens learn new ideas, their innovation product market dynamics earlier than before and therefore respond faster to innovation pressure for better performance.

The society benefits currently from innovative uses of social media avenues to motivate and even counsel each other. Teens who need advise on life and career matters or even counseling services no longer need to go to physical professionals. Remedial activities such as team building exercises can be suggested and executed without prior meetings as can other group activities (Herring and Kapidzic 150). Teen self-help and social development groups use social media to garner the power to demand for better living and study conditions from the local, state and federal governments without divulging their identities thus improving their performance in social betterment and social effectiveness.

Social media enables millions of teens to give candid feedback and even complain about certain companies’ products or services. Such information is an important avenue for the business heads and owners to identify potential gaps in the products and correct them to tap into the large teenage market. Additionally, it enables the business to identify where there may be problems and rectify them at the earliest opportunity. Certain companies have also benefited from suggestions made by potential and existing customers, a large number of whom are teenagers.

DANGERS OF SOCIAL MEDIA

One of the main problems of social media just like most other resources that depend on digital technology and the internet is that it is very dynamic. One strategic application of social media may be useful and even effective this year for teens in America but gets redundant and useless the next (Sumner 100). Therefore, one challenge among highly dependent consumers such as American teens for social media companies is finding the right manpower to adequately reap the strategic and innovative benefits of social media. While most innovative social media sites employ full time social media engineers and content developers, the extent to which these personnel perform to meet teen needs is also usually governed by their ability to keep up with social media, its technology and how best to apply it to their lives.

While social media provides the American teen society with an innovative avenue to create or increase awareness or innovation, that is not enough utilization of the full potential of the ability to reach and interact with billions of potential and existing content developers (Shannon 36). Most social media companies have in place a solid social media policy that seeks to make the resources available to teens in the country but there still remains a large gap in utilization especially in highly innovative platforms such as Whatsapp. However, most businesses find it hard to marry social media’s dynamic development with their slower social development plans meaning teens are left out of American social media development. Such discordance sometimes results in embarrassing applications or even liabilities.

In terms of security, social media poses the problem of unauthorized access especially among more careless teenagers in America. This security concerns are associated with hacking, spamming, and phishing. In the recent past, many hackers have targeted social media platforms used by business organizations due to the fact that they contain a lot of personal and actionable intelligence. Therefore, the registration process of most social media platforms’ requirement of personal information predisposes businesses to unauthorized access by hackers and spammers.

Another danger of social media for teenagers in America is social engineering. Social networking has enabled hackers and other illegal organizations to craft ways of maneuvering employee habits into divulging personal or organizational information because such criminals can easily conceal themselves in the millions of users of such platforms. Therefore, social media users among American teens who expose their systems to social media and allow them to be used by hackers and scammers thus create another security risk due to social engineering issues (Herring and Kapidzic 148).

Ethical dangers also come up with teens that use social media in the United States. This danger comes in the form of unwarranted collection of user information. While most social media companies collect feedback and customer sentiment the old-fashioned way, others discretely use social media avenues where many people post and share information freely (Picard 837). However, these practices pose another ethical concern because such covert collection of user information is tantamount to spying.

 

Works Cited

Heins, Marjorie. Not in Front of the Children: “indecency,” Censorship and the Innocence of Youth. 2nd ed., Hill and Wang, 2001, p. 82.

Herring, Susan C., and Sanja Kapidzic. “Teens, Gender, and Self-Presentation in Social Media.” International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2015, pp. 146-152.

Picard, Robert G. “What Social Media Are Doing and Where They Are Taking Us.” Handbook of Social Media Management, 2012, pp. 835-841.

Shannon, Perry. The Overlooked Generation: Parenting Teens and Tweens in a Complicated Culture. Carpenter’s Son Publishing, 2013, pp. 34-43.

The Social Network. Directed by David Fincher, Perf. Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Armie Hammer, Max Minghella. 2010. Columbia Pictures, 2010.

Sumner, Stuart. “Social Media and the Dangers of Over-Sharing.” You: for Sale, 2016, pp. 89-106.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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