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This are now sentences we have become accustomed to: Teens and adults continuously live social media activities in their daily lives.
They know people, they relate to them, they use social networks as a showcase, often even to meet potential partners. Sometimes in a rather compulsive way.
The social impact that this had in the last few years is of massive proportions. In the meantime, all over the world where social networking has now developed in its most urgent forms, most of the government and educational bodies question the short/long-term consequences. Particularly among young people, which are defined as iGeneration, millenniums or even digital natives.
According to Larry D. Rosen, professor of psychology at California State University
If nobody can deny that Facebook has altered the panorama of social interactions, particularly among young people, we are beginning to see, through psychological research, the positive and negative sides.
Because obviously there are both, it would be naive to think otherwise. For example, they are actually a great way to socialize for young people with so-called virtual empathy.
It is as if social networks were safety wheels for life in several different ways: they teach how to express empathy and show how others respond. They teach you to develop your “sense of self”, “who I am. You put things on the Facebook wall, then you sit down and observe the comments you receive. In short, it’s like a place where you can grow and develop.
But the negative sides are lurking. In most developed countries, young people (up to college) interact in any sort of online social activity at least once in a 10-minute break.
The issue here is that it is believed this worsens student performance.
Not only: as the “focus” on social media is constantly turned towards ourselves and towards what others say about us, it happens that many users – especially the younger ones – show a marked tendency to narcissism.
Excessive use can also lead to anxiety and depression. Furthermore, little attention is paid to the rest, everything else is done in a sort of “light way” as the brain activity is still concentrated into those last few comments or the latest viral “meme” that I have an absolute and instant necessity to share so that I can be part of the latest games sort of thing.
Everything you do on a social network is done behind the coverage of a screen. Attention is not paid. But there are real people on the other side of cyberspace and our words can affect those people.
For all these reasons, in recent years we have seen flourish advice and “guides” for parents in particular.
Contrarily to popular belief, it is actually advisable to avoid checking children online activity with specific programs, or applications, because we risk losing their trust first and foremost but also because they will find in a few seconds, thanks to social networks and the web, how to avoid parental control.
- In Conclusion
If you establish a relationship of sincerity with your children, talk to them about the use of technology and what they do, then they will talk to you when there is something that makes them feel bad.
At this point, however, we must also consider another aspect of this social factor that has now taken over the entire world population on a large scale. If we have understood so far how to help our children to behave online and in the various social networks, who will help us parents in the event we are completely immersed and we can no longer realize it?
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