Do You Think Social Media is Good for Teens?

 Afifah Nur Fatinah (02)

Bismo Irmanendra Rachman (11)

The development of the Internet in Indonesia is growing rapidly with the existence of various facilities or containers to connect to the internet such as mobile phones, laptops and modems as well as wifi networks. The interest of 

the Indonesian people, especially teenagers, in using the internet is also growing, both by using cellphones and computers.

The latest development of social networking is Google+ which was born in 2011. Google+ was launched by Google which was initially only limited to people who had been invited by Google. After that, then Google+ was launched in general.

Social media is an online medium, with its users being able to easily participate, share, and create content including blogs, social networks, wikis, forums and virtual worlds. Blogs, social networks and wikis are the most common forms of social media used by people around the world.

According to Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein, social media is "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and which enable the creation and exchange of user-generated content".

Among the positive impacts of social media are the following:

• Expand your network of friends. Thanks to this social media site, it is easier for teens to make friends with other people around the world. Although most of them have never met in person.

• Teenagers will be motivated to learn to develop themselves through the friends they meet online, because they interact and receive feedback from each other.

• Easy to obtain information. Teenagers become easy to obtain information on the internet because of blogs or websites. In addition, social media can also be used as a field of information for the fields of education, culture, and others.

• Social networking sites make children and adolescents more friendly, caring and empathetic. For example, paying attention when a friend's birthday is there, commenting on their friends' photos, videos and statuses, maintaining friendly relations even though they can't physically meet.

• Make it easy for teenagers to share or share. With the existence of a blog, it is easy for teenagers to share their life experiences and various other things, namely by posting them to the blog.

• Can be used as a place of advertising for teenagers who do business online. Currently, social media has provided advertising services. Like bloggers, facebook, twitter and others can place ads on these sites.

The following are the negative effects of social media on teenagers.

• Teenagers become addicted to using social networks without knowing the time. Mostly when a teenager uses social networks, they can spend hours on them.

• Teenagers become lazy to communicate in the real world. The level of language understanding was also disturbed. If the teenager communicates too much in cyberspace.

• Social networking sites will make teens more selfish. They become unaware of the environment around them, because they spend most of their time on the internet. This can result in being less empathetic in the real world.

• become lazy to study because they often use social networks to play games on the site. Facebook provides gaming services that make teenagers addicted to games.

• Leads to a lack of youth manners nowadays. With the existence of social media, more and more teenagers are using inappropriate language. And for teenagers who are still innocent, of course they will assume that the language is the modern language of today's children.

• For teens, there are no spelling and grammar rules on social networking sites. This makes it even more difficult for them to distinguish between communicating on social networking sites and in the real world.

In my personal opinion, the positive and negative impacts of social media above will not occur if teenagers are good at using social media properly and correctly. In addition to the youth themselves who can manage it, the environment can also be an important factor in encouraging teenagers and the impact they get.