Written by Joey Piacentini and Quinn Trahant|
Photos by Quinn Trahant |
Social media is a huge part of every highschooler’s life, whether you like it or not. That’s why we decided to gauge the opinions of various students around The Morgan School. According to the Pew Research Center, 92% of teens report going online daily. Whether this is a good thing or bad thing is heavily debated today.
Social media can lead to bad social skills. Clinical psychologist Catherine Steiner-Adair, in her book The Big Disconnect, wrote, “There’s no question kids are missing out on very critical social skills. In a way, texting and online communicating—it’s not like it creates a nonverbal learning disability, but it puts everybody in a nonverbal disabled context…”.
However, there are some who state that social media can be a good thing, as AJ Agrawal of Forbes said, ” it is one of the best ways to stay informed. Major news outlets, corporations, and persons of interest use social media to deliver messages to the masses. With items posting immediately, the public stays informed.”
The best opinions, however, come from actual high school students. Multiple Morgan students wanted to express their opinions on social media. Senior Tony Coretti likes to use social media and doesn’t think that there are many downsides to it. His favorite social media is Snapchat, and he has been using it for 4 years. Social media is important to him because it is his main form of communication to friends. He also claims that there is not a correlation between followers and popularity in real life. “Somebody could have a billion followers and zero friends.”
Some students like to use social media for news and educational purposes. Sophomore Logan Smith said that social media is somewhat important to him because he gets to learn about other people and current events. Logan thought that there were many pros to social media.”It helps me catch up on school sports and the scores.”
There are also students that believe the use of social media brings some problems. Senior Aedan Mahoney listed his pros and cons for social media. He refers to social media as a good way to meet friends and interact with people, but he also said that it is one of the main causes of anxiety and depression for teens. He also added that cyberbullying is a huge problem.
The Morgan PawPrint conducted a poll to get a wider range of opinions. 115 Morgan students responded to this poll, and 86.1% replied saying they use social media every day. 54.9% of students said that they use social media “almost constantly”. That is clearly a lot of teens using social media, but what is the consensus on it? Well, 68.7% respondents said they like social media, 19.1% love it, 10.4% dislike it, and 1.7% hate it. Along with this, 41.7% of Morgan students believe that the number of followers/friends online corresponds to how popular the person is in real life.
Social media can be both damaging and beneficial. It can connect us with friends and update us on the news, but it can also lead to bad habits and even depression. According to what we found, most people here like it-which is fitting considering it is used nearly every day.