Young people, obsessed with their own person
More than 750 million people around the world use Facebook to share photos and videos and post regular messages about what they’re doing and thinking.
Social networks have created a generation of young people obsessed with their own person, who constantly need appreciation from others, according to a professor from Oxford University. He believes that online friendships could harm the brain.
Specifically, they can lead to a low level of concentration, a need for immediate gratification, and can affect non-verbal skills, such as maintaining eye contact during a conversation. Baroness Greenfield, professor at Oxford University, believes that some users of the social network Facebook feel the need to become little celebrities who are watched and admired daily by other people.
Pictures, impediment to employment
Information and photos posted in the virtual environment can affect teenagers, especially if they publish pictures in embarrassing poses. Although they may later delete these photos, they can remain in other virtual pages and can be easily found by experts, especially when teenagers will try to find a job. It often happens that future employers look for information about possible employees.
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I’m distracting
Using social networking sites can lead to distraction during study sessions, which leads to poor grades. According to researchers from the University of California, this distraction is called “technological leave”.
Young people study for 10 minutes, then take a short break to check email, Facebook or text on their phones. Then they focus on studying for another 10 minutes and start over. It is a different form of recreation, but they must be aware that this will have a negative impact.
The “fear of losing nothing” syndrome
American researchers discovered a special phenomenon among users of social networks, called “fear of losing nothing”. This is translated by the increased need to constantly check the page on the social networking site, at very short intervals and by the impossibility of disconnecting from the information that flows second by second on your page.
Addictive
Hilary Betts, a British therapist, treats cases of addiction to social networks and says that the most serious effects of their use are isolation and the degradation of family relationships. Repeated exposure to virtual social networking leads to an identity crisis of users, who want attention like children.
Virtual harassment, possible risk
Teenagers can be ridiculed and insulted both through personal messages and in public. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, 1 in 3 teenagers has been harassed online and 1 in 25 has received a sexual request on Facebook.
At the same time, 1 out of 3 young people was threatened online and 25% of them were harassed repeatedly, both on the mobile phone and on the Internet. More than half of them did not tell their parents about this harassment. A study by security firm McAfee showed that 11% of 14-15-year-olds were approached on social media by an adult they did not know, and about a third of them sent pictures of them strangers, something they later regretted.
Panic button
In 2010, Facebook announced that it had introduced a panic button on the site, in Great Britain, through which children and teenagers can report abuse on this social network.
This button was introduced after several organizations for the protection of children in the online environment demanded the implementation of measures against online abuse, especially after a teenage girl was raped and then killed by a man she met on Facebook. At the same time, there were also cases in which young people from the online environment were mocked and verbally abused, until they were pushed to commit suicide.
…the number of Internet users in Romania reached almost 6.5 million in 2013?
…according to a study carried out by the Ministry of Youth and Sports and UNICEF in 2013, boys use social networks to the extent of 93%, as opposed to girls, who use them to the extent of 88%?
