Summer Allen's article on Social Media's Growing Impact on Our Lives, focuses on researchers examining how time spent on social media is and is not impacting our daily lives. Particularly, they look into social media and how it affects relationships, teenagers' interactions, and risks of expanding social networks.
In the article, Social Media's Growing Impact on Our Lives, Allen shares his concern with whether time spent on social media sites is taking away from face-to-face interaction or known as social displacement. Allen looks to Jeffery Hall, a director of the Relationships and Technology Lab at the University of Kansas, for what he says about social media and its impact on relationships. Hall says, “No matter what the technology is, there’s always a cultural belief that it’s replacing face-to-face time with our close friends and family.” Hall had done a study to back up his statement regarding this and to his surprise found there was no difference in how people spent their time socializing with their strongest social ties, such as close friends and family. When looking at this, it makes sense that there wasn’t a great difference with stronger or weaker social ties. Many people use technology in order to interact with others, especially if distance is a factor. Social media provides us with a number of ways to communicate such as call, text, video, and the list goes on. So yes, it may impact on our face-to-face interactions but not necessarily weakening our social ties.
Allen also examines how teens balance their lives with social media, and technology. Hall references the work of Danah Boyd, who is a researcher at Microsoft and founder of Data and Society, where Boyd argues, “We are increasingly restricting teens’ ability to spend time with their peers, they’re turning to social media to argument it.” Instead of teens displacing their social face-to-face time through social media. While this may be the case to some extent, another way to look at this could be seen as making an excuse for our reliance on technology and it dismisses teenagers’ independence of how they can control their intake of social media. Teenagers still have the opportunity to spend time with their peers but some use social media as an excuse to not because they can hide behind a screen instead. In accordance with this, a 2018 Common Sense Media report discovered 81% of teens use social media and found a third using social media sites multiple times an hour. This number has risen over recent years due to increase in mobile devices (2018). This can be viewed as how teenagers may struggle with their reliance on social media but also can be viewed as how social media can benefit teens by expanding social networks and allowing them to continue to hold close social ties with their peers. This begs the question, is social media really impacting our lives in a more positive or negative way?
The answer? It depends on how you look at it. On one hand, several studies clearly show and state how much our reliance on social media and technology is taking over our daily lives but at the same token, it is benefiting us with our social ties. Although all of our interactions may not be face-to-face with our peers, those bonds are still strengthened through social media because it gives us more opportunities to reach out and communicate with one another.
With this said, social media platforms could help bring these percentages down by having stricter restrictions on what teenagers can and cannot do or watch. It is no secret social media algorithms are made to have things that interest you and have addictive features to make you constantly want to check into the app. If they were more transparent and had boundaries, this could help teenagers create a healthy balance between social media and teens social lives.
