Guest Lecture on Growing up in the web of social networking: Adolescent development and social media

Date -   20/03/2017

Venue- IIS University, meeting room

Speaker- Dr. Mayank Gupta

Director,Clarion Psychiatric Centre,Pennsylvania,USA

We got an opportunity to listen to the speaker Mr. Mayank Gupta’s research on “Growing up in the web of social networking: Adolescent development and social media”. He explained the whole topic with the help of PowerPoint presentation, which is a very effective method of teaching and learning.

We listeners were able to relate with the speaker as we have also gone through these experiences. How the use of social media has influenced the child and adolescents aged 12-17.   These children spend most of their time on various networking sites. It has hindered the growth of these children both mentally and physically. Adolescent is a part of life when a person makes a maximum growth and experiences various mental and physical fluctuations. This is the time when children are very probing, so they have taken the support of these social sites to satisfy their curiosities. On one hand where social networking provides knowledge as well as a lot of connectivity, the problem caused by it are many. Social media has greatly affected the students in choosing friends where they get connectivity to various types of individuals where the conversation is non-verbal which are nothing to do with facial expressions and body language. This type of friendship restricts the progress of the children. So, adolescents who are over connected with social media have nothing to do with their social life and eventually they are pushed towards isolation and loneliness and which give rise to a sick society.

In contrast to this, face to face communication can be associated with social wellbeing. So I have realized that for the development of society it is very essential to have friends and people who are physically present around one.

Due to social media the distance between parents and children has increased. Parents are not very familiar with social media, so have limitation in solving the problems faced by the children caused by their being too much on social media. Children prefer to spend more time in front of screen rather than facing the parents which in turn increases the distance and decreases the attachment with the parents. So, here again I feel that we are progressing towards a society which will have people without any emotions and attachments.

This is the age where children start becoming physically matured and they want to have secured and intimate relationships. So, here again they get an opportunity in developing online intimacy and they start sharing more information than required. They start communicating with people of all age groups do to which they get involved in sexual harassment cases. This lack of understanding of certain things leads them towards the crime rates that are increasing in the society.

The children know the consequences but still they are using the social media to extract various types of information then getting involved In Anti-Social activities and then experiencing the feeling of guilt and shame.

This is the age when adolescents develop moral values, pursue   special interest, hobbies and experience an al round development. This is the age when they start forming their identity and personality, where their relationships with family, teachers and friends play a great role. But here again the social media takes them away from all this. They are so connected with the screen that again they get separated from their well-wishers. Their self-esteem becomes low and they engage more and more on social sites that they start assuming a false identity. They post misleading personal information regarding their status, locality, looks and family information etc. the advertising companies here take the advantage and they provide incorrect information and entice the adolescents in their cob web from where they can never come out.

Adolescents enjoy a sense of independence on social media websites. They create websites, blogs and videos to express their line of interest this we can take as positive aspect but till it is face and affecting the youngsters craving to enjoy popularity.

Self-esteem and confidence is a very important aspect for adolescents and social rejection, harassment and threatening on the internet can have very deep effects. It has been noticed that peer rejection has landed up the students to loneliness, academic difficulties and psychological disorders. This harassment and aggression taking place online and on social media has been termed as cyber bullying. A large number of teenagers using social networking sites have witnessed cruel behavior, many have been targets of such harassments and many have faced aggressive or hurtful content posted about them and others took part in this vicious activity. When cyber bullying was compared to in person bullying, it was found that a victim can easily become an aggressor because through internet victims are more comfortable with retaliating against their thus becoming big bullies as they can hide their identities. Cyber bullying is unique due to its anonymity as almost half of victims did not know the identity of aggressors. Teens victimize through cyber bullying are at a higher risk for substance abuse. It has been found that cyber bullying has greatly affected the teen’s self-esteem which was found much lower than their peers. They are surrounded by feelings of hopelessness, poor mental health, depression and suicide.

Thus during this session I realized that a thing which was introduced for the benefit of the people has become one of the most troubleshooting problems. Due to the adolescent’s long term involvement with the internet studies have shown that we are heading towards a society which will have more depressed, psychologically ill individuals, lower self-esteem, lacking in social communication, increasing generation differences, with less interpersonal communication skills, more crimes and many more such things will become prevalent in the society.  But I feel that if we make the teenagers understand the proper use of internet limit their time and use it to their advantage then we can work wonders as actually it is a wonderful thing which due to lack of guidance is not been able to use in the right way.