DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.
Social Media Benefits Our Youth
Being a Communications major, I love studying all types of multimedia. If our youth are actually learning through the means of social media, and using valuable skills like communicating, through writing, and interpreting so much from a picture posted on Instagram. The argument against social media id invalided.
Monica Nicklesburg argument is that lot of our youth through the United States are spending over 7 hours on social media daily, actually benefiting them. I agree with her argument due to recent research that states social media is helping improve verbal, research, and critical thinking skills in our youth.
Nicklesburg uses an example stating that kids do not find pleasure in writing a paper or engaging in writing a paper because the “teacher is getting paid”, or the assignment is “just a grade”. In contrast, with social media students are writing and reading all the time. Whether there are writing a Twitter, or Facebook post the student is writing for an audience, to receive likes and comments, which makes them feel that their message got across. In addition, they are practicing what they are learning through the communication cycle, and asking one another if a post makes sense or is the message of the post is correct. Like Nicklesburg said the students are thinking “publicly”, and show this buy writing emotional post.
In contrast, the negatives of social media is that the youths mind has an attention span of 5 seconds in comparison to ten years ago which youth had an attention span of 12 minutes. Why is this drastic? Well, I believe it has to do with youth being raised in thisDigital Age,where information on any topic is accessed fast, and all smartphones, computers and tablet are developed with faster accesses to internet. Another negative is that these social media accounts trigger emotions like sadness, and dissatisfaction. The reasoning maybe if the messenger – the one who is writing the post/blog/twit , does not get a like, comment or both from the receiver – which are their peers/colleagues, family members, or a specific social group, the messengers feel as their message did not get across and/or their message did not appeal to the audience. It might be true, but like getting a bad grade on a paper the messenger feels upset for not receive the responds wanted by the receiver.
So Does Social Media makes Us Smarter? According to Nicklesburg yes. Our society in the United States have access to many technologies that are outlets of communication. When most come in forms of social media, therefore News as well as merged in to this era of social media. On Twitter most users rang from 13 to 30 year olds, (statement by Twitters analytics team), so let’s assume that young adults from 15 to 30 year old see the trending news story on their news feed, then click the articles by CNN,CBS, and NBC that are always in the top trending articles on twitter. This shows that after reading these articles the reader form an opinion on which ever situation, as well research questions on the issue. Research, reading and developing questions, shows critical thinking. To conclude, Nicklesburg has enough research to conclude that although social media is taking over the way people communicate, it is benefiting our you to develop as thinkers, and writers.
