We're all familiar with the typical stance of the 21st Century teen: eyes glued to the phone screen, fingers working furiously, completely oblivious to what's going on around them.
With MXit offering free IM, and even basic phones featuring Web connectivity, teens spend more time than ever on various social networking platforms, including the all-pervasive Facebook.
But everyone's favourite networking site seems to be more than a social hub for meetings and greetings. It can be a catalyst for adverse psychosocial effects and serious harassment.
A study released last week reveals Facebook can lead to depression in affected teens who obsess over the site. According to one of the researchers, there are specific aspects of Facebook that can make it a pretty daunting social landscape for kids already suffering from low self-esteem. Bombarded by others' invites, friend lists, and smiling photo streams, shy children can withdraw even further, or feel more inadequate.
At first, it's tempting to dismiss this as just another symptom of teen angst and self-absorption; it's only a social site, after all. But teens are now practically permanent inhabitants of the mobile and Web worlds; Facebook and other social networks have become their playground, and increasingly, their battleground.
As if teens these days didn't have the usual peer and media pressure to deal with, they're now faced with managing an online persona as well. With the obsessive attention given to posts, updates, invites and photo tags, these features have become a sort of online currency, a signifier of status that translates into the real world.
Tech writer Cory Doctorow captured the addictive appeal of Facebook at a recent TEDex event, saying: "It is packed with powerful game-like mechanisms that reward disclosure. The more you embroider the account of your life, the more you crave the intermittent rewards of some attention from your peer group."
Face-off
Facebook and other social networks have become their playground, and increasingly, their battleground.
Lezette Engelbrecht, online features editor, ITWeb
However, these same features can also be used for reputation bashing, humiliation, and pranks, by manipulating peers' photos or sharing links to them in embarrassing videos. Teens can easily find their online identities sabotaged, with little control over how fast and far it spreads.
Along with the Facebook study, the American Academy of Paediatrics noted that online harassment "can cause profound psychosocial outcomes", including suicide, which is just what one US teen was driven to in January last year.
The widely publicised case of 15-year-old Phoebe Prince is an extreme example of what can happen with this kind of online targeting. Prince committed suicide after intense virtual and physical bullying, which included being called “slut” and “whore” on Twitter, Facebook and Craigslist, a popular network of online communities.
It seems that like a little education, a little technology can be a dangerous thing. The scary part is that interacting online allows teens to dissociate from their behaviour - and the responsibilities that come with it. Many don't have a problem writing things on someone's wall that they'd never say to their face. It's also easier for others to join in by passing along a link, or “liking” a mean post.
The variety of social media channels available compounds the effect, with abusive messages being repeated in an endless stream from various platforms.
There's a certain detachment from reality, and the consequences of online actions, which seems to permit teens to engage outside the usual social and moral codes. Technology dehumanises actions by moving them from the physical realm to the digital, but the effects remain very real, as seen in the case of Phoebe Prince.
The fact is, social media puts powerful and potentially harmful tools into the hands of adolescents, without offering much protection. In other areas where this is a danger, there are at least safeguards to protect both teens and others, such as driver's and firearm licences, and drinking age limits (ok, bad example, but at least it's enforceable by law).
In the dark
In addition, while parents are usually able step in and put guidelines in place, there's no way for a parent to constantly keep tabs on what's happening online. Compared to more conventional forms of bullying, online harassment can be much more difficult to detect, or stop.
While physical assaults or even verbal abuse can alert teachers or parents, demeaning Facebook messages can continue undetected for months, and even when discovered, they might not be taken seriously or left till too late.
You can suspend bullies or remove a victim from a toxic environment, but how do you bar them from the Internet? For today's children, the torment doesn't end with walking out of the school gates; it's there all the time, getting updated and forwarded, for the whole world to see.
In many cases, parents also find themselves in situations where their teen's know-how surpasses their own. A marker of this age is that those who are the most au fait with technology often possess the fewest life skills to cope with and respond to it. Guardians may find their protective role is limited by their own lack of understanding when it comes to social media's subtle codes.
Some may scoff that linking depressive behaviour to social networking is similar to arguments that gaming causes teens to become aggressive. But the reality is, the freedoms these new channels bring can be abused so they leave participants with no escape. Like any human interaction, social media can develop dark undertones, and it's the world's young minds that are serving as the testing ground for the psychological effects that accompany them.
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