Teens and Social Media Use Research Assignment

TEENS AND SOCIAL MEDIA USE
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Teens and Social Media Use
Introduction
In the last decade, social media has revolutionized human communication and interaction, especially among the youth. Today, many teens and tweens own a mobile or can access a computer with internet connection and their primary use of these gadgets is access to social media. While girls spend more time than boys on social media, the amount of information they share and consume daily is mind-boggling, and the tech giants in social media harvest this information for their business interests. Today, about 90% of America teens use at least one social media site with over 71% having at least two social media sites CITATION Len15 \l 1033 (Lenhart, 2015). Spending time on social media has some positive impact on the users, but the adverse effects outweigh the good by far. In this essay, a comprehensive description of the primary causes of increased social media use and the effects it has on individuals.
Causes of increased social media use
Technological development and access is the main driver of increased social media use. Technology has relatively become cheaper over time, and more people can afford it. The infrastructure supporting the social media sites has been greatly developed and providing cheap services to the people CITATION Syu15 \l 1033 (Syuntyurenko, 2015). The internet has also had deeper penetration even in the developing world enabling more people to access the internet. Phones and other hand-held devices also support access to the social media sites, and therefore the teens and tweens have multiple channels through which they can access their social media accounts. Today, Facebook has over two billion users with over half of them accessing the site daily. This level of social media addiction is more rampant among the teens, and they are continually and severally accessing their accounts for more information. The relatively low cost of technology has thus led to a robust infrastructure to support social media use and affordable for even the teens. Internet connection for teens is all around them in schools, homes, malls, coffee shops, etc. giving the teens an opportunity to check their accounts.
Psychological factors
Social media offers teen a platform for peer approval regarding some likes one earns from posting photos or information on social media. Teen brains are gratified by the reward systems offered by social media such as likes and positive reviews by their peers. Therefore, teens continually become more addicted to the reward system and become unable to resist the urge to check how their peers have rated, liked or commented on their postings on social media. Teens who viewed photographs posted to social media that had received more likes demonstrated greater activation of neural regions involved in reward processing CITATION Ant17 \l 1033 (Burrow & Rainone, 2017). Neuroscientists have found that positive reviews activate pleasure response in the brains of teens from their social media. This is addictive and the brains over time cannot resist the urge to go online and quench their thirst for social media ‘likes’. Some teenagers try all possible ways to...