Social Networks and Their Effects on Teens

Social Networks such as Facebook are used by teenagers all over the world, but the effects from having a profile page online may be detrimental. Profile pages online are filled with photos, personal information, interests, and dislikes, comments from friends and other information. All of this information can cause premature opinions of all the teens associated with these pages and personal relationships could be affected. Having an online profile page is almost like a popularity contest; teenagers vie for friends, but do not realize that these profiles can cause depression, embarrassment, gossip and lies. The use of social networks can affect real life teens and their personal relationships in very adverse ways. When a teenager creates a profile page on Facebook, their first objective is to see how many friends they can acquire. As the friend totals increase so does the popularity of the profile page owner; this is the beginning of the “unofficial” popularity contest. Photos are uploaded, statuses are typed, comments made, “likes” are displayed and friend requests are sent out; the more activity happening on the page, the more popular this teenager looks. Numbers become very important, Shalaka Gole states, “Facebook easily points out the difference between those that have a lot of "friends" and those that don't” (1). Some teenagers take it too seriously and become almost distraught because they don’t have many friends on their list or they can become too egotistical because they have so many. The next objective a teenager has is to post a picture known as the profile picture. The profile picture is the one that everyone sees when viewing the profile so it has to be perfect. When a teenager first posts their picture(s), they wait for comments and “likes”. Sometimes they sit and wait and sometimes they don’t get any. If they don’t, they begin to feel as though they are not liked and they think less of themselves. The teenager may think that they posted the