Eng 102 - Influence of Social Network Sites on Adolescents

Snigdha Mandal

Trevor Michael Fuller

ENGL 102

1st July, 2015

Influence of Social Network Sites on Adolescents

        Rapid growth of technology and introduction of Web 2.0 have led to a massive development in the internet technology. One of the most notable products of it is Social Network Sites (SNS), which ever since made public is gaining popularity exponentially. Popular SNSs like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Myspace and others have changed the age old perception of offline social networking and have made social interactions possible online by click of a button in laptop or a simple touch in smartphone. SNSs have become one of the most favorite mode of social exchanges for the younger generation especially the teenager adolescents. Like all other technologies, the SNSs also have their advantages and disadvantages and their impact on young minds and actions have become an important topic of research and discussion, not only for the scholars but even for the parents of adolescents. June Ahn, who is an assistant professor at University of Maryland wrote about this topic in his article “The Effect of Social Network Sites on Adolescents’ Social and Academic Development: Current Theories and Controversies”. In his work, Ahn presented a deep research regarding the positive and negative aspects of SNSs influencing social, psychological and educational achievements of adolescents. Ahn planned and delivered his arguments in a structured manner citing examples to make the technical terms and concepts easily to understand for the readers. He cited various references to research works and experiments to support his arguments and claims in his work. On the other hand, Dr. Chhitij Srivastava, who is a Lecturer on Psychiatry in MLN College in India along with his colleague Dr. Anupam Bhardwaj provided a comparatively more biased article, “Adverse Effects of Online Social Networking on Children and Adolescents” for the readers as evident from the title of it. Srivastava et al. emphasizes on the potential harmful effects of SNSs on young generation with some amount of references to studies and researches, which seems insufficient in some places. The two articles on the similar topic provides various perceptive arguments and information, but the article by Ahn appropriately uses ethos, pathos and logos to maintain a logical and unprejudiced discussion strategy using examples and mentions in order to provide a persuasive piece of study. On the other hand, on a vast and open ended topic like this, Srivastava et al. restricted their article to discuss about just one side of the whole picture, thus reducing the reach, scope, utility and effectiveness of their work.

                Ahn at the beginning defines the scope of his article and introduces the topic of discussion explaining each term in it, thus to ease the understanding process of his readers, and to influence them with his tactical use to pathos in his work. One more notable advantage in this article is that he structured his article in a proficient manner by putting forward four critical and fundamental questions pertaining to the topic, and this way attracting readers to read through the article in order to find answers to the queries. Ahn put forward topics like digital divide to give an idea about the complexity of the assessment of this topic when human ethnicities start playing roles. While discussing about one of the critical aspects of the study which is “Social Network Sites and Youth Relationships: Safety Versus Social Capital” (Ahn 1439), Ahn acknowledges the issue that “A critical theoretical concern for youth is whether and how SNS facilitate detrimental behaviours such as bullying and interacting with strangers, versus positive outcomes such as developing wider networks of relationships.” (Ahn 1439). Besides that, the author provides logical arguments emphasizing on statistical and research references to support his opinion of SNSs, having more positive traits like personality development compared to few less probable potential risks of falling prey to internet bullies, which makes his opinions certainly acceptable. While writing about the effect of SNSs on academic grades, Ahn interestingly brought out a study by Karpinski stating “Karpinski offers several hypotheses for these findings. For example, perhaps Facebook users spend too much time online and less time studying.”, and then cites works of Pasek and Hargittai, who provided a counter argument on Karpinski’s lecture by citing its limitations through a more authentic social experiment. This shows the depth of Ahn’s research on each subtopic, which gives readers more confidence to consider the opinions of the author.

        Furthermore, in his article, Ahn provided few debatable opinions without appropriate citations or data, like for example, while writing about “Psychological Well-Being and Self Esteem” (Ahn 1441), Ahn says “Adolescents typically do not join Facebook to meet strangers. Instead, they join because their friends are already members and have invited them to participate. The Internet is no longer isolating, but connecting people.” (Ahn 1441). Without appropriate statistical data to support this claim, it is hard to accept this as a natural fact. On the other hand, there are places where Ahn has provided certain opinions and postulates from established theories like “Perhaps teachers can utilize SNS to engage their students, develop closer relationships, and model positive learning behaviours over time.”, but have carefully made his readers aware about the uncertainty of the speculation saying “Such educational hypotheses have yet to be tested in formal studies.” (Ahn 1443). Ahn has encouraged a more deep research and statistical study for a better understanding of the pros and cons about the effect of SNSs on adolescents. Ahn did not conclude his article on a positive or negative note about the key topic and instead wisely accepted the fact that, be it good or bad, the effect of SNSs on adolescents is undeniable. This again shows the way Ahn have tried to be impartial about his analysis and at the same time, not shying away to effectively bring up various controversies on this topic and then analysing each of them with deep research work.

        On the contrary, in the other article “Adverse Effects of Online Social Networking on Children and Adolescents”, Srivastava et al. provide the negative aspects of SNSs on adolescents. The authors start in the article on a neutral note and briefly explains the advent of SNSs and its positive implications to catalyse the growth of “social capital” (Srivastava et al.  81) which is “the benefits that individuals derive from their social relationships and interactions such as emotional support, exposure to diverse ideas, and access to non-redundant information.” (Srivastava et al.  81). Beyond this, the rest of the article discusses the four main negative aspects of SNSs on adolescents. To support their opinions on these aspects, authors have made some assumptions which in most cases are not supported by any statistical evidences or logical arguments. For example, to discuss about physiological implications of SNSs, authors presumed, “Young people have never been more exposed to the external world. They may lack the maturity to decide what to put on such an exposed domain. They may not be as astute about the privacy settings leading to a false sense of security that their personal information is safe. They may be easily misled by potential ‘friends’ whom they may have never met offline thereby opening themselves to exploitation.” (Srivastava et al.  82). As it is evident, authors repeatedly used “may” as qualifier in order to put forward their speculations that could not be supported through evidence. To add to this series of unsupported assumptions, authors cited a reference “Some studies have shown that SNS engagement has a positive association with psychological wellbeing” which contradicts with their own assumptions on the same topic of discussion. Srivastava et al. have shown touches of ethos and logos in their article especially while explaining about the addiction aspect, where though not supported by any evidence, they successfully utilized their psychological professional skills to analyse the reasons for addiction of SNSs and wrote “The good old behaviour theory postulates that if the rewards come at unpredictable intervals (such as lottery, gambling machines, emails, texts, Facebook updates) we are more likely to get addicted to them.” (Srivastava et al.  84).

        Furthermore, in this second article, Srivastava et al. effectively used logos to support their hypothesis on cyber bullying and sexual exploitations by logically arguing the maturity level of young teens at minimum age limit to be eligible to use SNSs. Such an argument though not supported by any citations, still stands as valid arguments from psychological point of view. One peculiar feature of this article is that the authors in order to maintain their predetermined stance of showing the negative aspects SNSs, argued about the negative aspects of SNSs on adolescents suffering from mental illness. As it is evident, such users, especially specific example by the authors of those young people suffering from ADHD, are quite less in proportion compared to the number of adolescent social network users.  Bringing up such a less important topic from perspective of quantity of total users gives an impression that the authors are trying to push their agenda by emotionally influencing the readers.