// July 9th, 2008 // No Comments » // Social Media
As part of my daily trolling through Digg, I found this article from the BBC News Health section titled “Mental risk of Facebook Teens”. I want to tell you that it’s an interesting read… But it’s not. The article is quite simple in stating that the teen audience is becoming accustomed to a false reality where you can live your whole social life online and therefore believe that you can simply delete your profile if something goes horribly wrong, or you can simply delete people out of your life.
Granted there’s SOME merit to what is written in the article, but let’s be honest with ourselves as to the reality of social networking sites. You don’t simply create an account and magically conjure up a friends list (unless you’re a sociopath). Your friends list (at least on Facebook… I can’t speak for MySpace as it disrupts my point) is initially generated via friends that you know in real life. You can see this whenever a new friend has joined up to Facebook, and their status update shows 20 friends that you probably also know.
Being new to a social networking site, you typically don’t just randomly look for people. There are trust metrics and friendship linkages that allow for relationships to build without that creepiness factor. The obvious anomalies within this case are when you DO get the people that you’ve never met before “trying” to add you, to which the logical move is to hit my favourite button… “Ignore”.
As far as the young’uns go, parents should be educating their children to simply “stop talking to strangers”. It worked for us in the eighties… Should still hold true today.
As far as depression goes, you can try to blame social networking sites for a so-called existentialism quandary, but at the end of the day, these sites simply function as accelerated tools for teenagers to communicate.
When I was a teenager we had similar tools, however not as usable. It still meant that I could talk to friends for hours without leaving my house, and I think we all came out fairly well.
Believe it or not, we may not have had World of Warcraft to be addicted to, but we DID have Ultima Online, which was just as engaging and addictive. It just didn’t have the same critical mass of audience, and you know what, my parents would kick my ass out of the computer chair if they felt I was spending too much time on it.
If there was a tool available when I was 16 that allowed me to get party invites, check out who was coming into town, and know who was dating whom on a per second basis, maybe my social life would have been richer, maybe I would have made more friends, who knows. I guess my point is that these sites are all tools. Stop looking for problems in video games, websites and a lack of extra-curricular activities. There are plenty of teenagers who still get outside, and if they’re not, somebody should invite them. Yes, there’s a whole world out there, but if anything, Facebook is probably advocating many of those outer-world activities. God knows it’s responsible for figuring out what club I go to on the weekends.
I’m wondering if there are any parents out there that would like to comment,
Jon
Get the link here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7487723.stm
