A Teen Perspective on
Social Media
By Anne Florence Brown
We live in a technology-driven world. Gone are
the days of snail mail and landlines with tangled
cords. Teens are now surrounded on every side by
the influences of the internet, social media, and
smartphones. According to commonsensemedia.
org, “Almost all teenagers in America today have
used social media. Nine out of 10 (90%) 13 to 17
year olds have used some form of social media.
Three out of four (75%) teenagers currently have a
profile on a social networking site.”
With so many teens in our community
enveloped in this world of technology, we
must examine the effects of social media, not only for the sake of this
generation but also for the next. Living through the screen can damage
our hearts and magnify our sin.
But even though social media has its flaws, there is hope for
redemption.
Two years ago, I was sitting on my bed with a computer in my lap. I
was weighing two options on my Instagram settings: “Deactivate” or
“Return to Profile”. Slowly, I dragged my mouse across the settings page
12
SEPTEMBER 2017
and pressed a button that freed me. I have been without Instagram for
two years and without Snapchat for one. Living without them has given
me freedom because for years I suffered from the harms of social media.
Instagram was an effective trigger for my already struggling self-worth
as it provided me with a tangible measure of how many friends I had and
how many people liked my life. It was a tool I used to damage my self-
esteem daily. The most dangerous part was I did not realize how much
I was controlled by this social app. I felt immune to its addictions, its
allure. But I found myself at the beach, spending the entire time “fixing
my feed” with new pictures and filters. While waiting in the doctor’s
office, I tried to come up with the perfect caption for a picture I was
planning to take that weekend with a certain popular friend at a party. I
imagined how cool I would look to my Instagram followers once I posted
it. I lost sleep because I stayed up late every night before bed, refreshing
my screen for hours on end.
Every scroll of my thumb brought a new judgment, comparison, or
observation that was followed by a feeling of either self-righteousness or
self-degradation.
When I finally spent a week “unplugging” from my phone, I realized
that the withdrawals I experienced from disengaging from the app were