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The effects of social media on youth today

By Wei Seng

Are we overwhelmed by social media?

It's been a while since there has been any coverage or review of articles published in the newspapers recently, and I apologise for that. It really takes someone who has left school and joined the working world (albeit briefly) to understand what life at work is really all about and how suddenly time magically disappears when you want to work on your pet projects. Kevin, in all his hustle and bustle as a budding undergraduate at LSE, has taken plenty of time out to maintain this place and keep it alive and I shall try my best to contribute whenever I can.

I just returned from a 3-week holiday in Toronto which was refreshing and eye-opening yet isolationist - I had no access to my usual The Straits Times or The Economist in hard copy, so I had to rely on surfing news websites online, which I did not quite like as I am the traditional kind of reader that prefers to be able to hold on to what I was reading.

A source of news which was unexpected and unprecedented for me was Facebook, which thankfully I had access to while in Canada. Being overseas while a general election was ongoing, I relied heavily on my friend's postings of newsworthy articles on Facebook to keep me updated on news that slipped under my radar while I skimmed through the headlines of The Straits Times Online.

With this experience in mind, it was interesting to read in yesterday's Review in The Straits Times an article by Susan Moeller about youth today are "hooked on social media and one-sentence news stories".

Based on a recent study conducted on youths aged 18 to 25, it seems like social platforms and networks are now the place to go to for news - and the only place youths go to for news. A "paradox" his arisen - when the Internet first emerged people were worried about being flooded and overwhelmed with too much information, but instead people read only what they were interested in and what reinforced their beliefs, leading to their acquisition of lesser information than ever. This paradox has apparently only deepened with the popularity of social networks - instead of being active in their search for news and knowledge, people on Facebook and Twitter can now just sit there and wait for news to be delivered onto their Facebook Wall or Tweet page.

People today are still being overwhelmed by the tremendous amount of news and information online, which has led to this natural mechanism to shut off all the news and take in only short headlines of most news that comes in, content that this is "sufficiently informative" for them and reading further only where a piece of news is of deep personal interest. Social platforms and networks reinforce this further. Twitter in particular, with its 140 character limit on each tweet, means that whatever that needs to be communicated must be summarised.

Going back to the study, those in the study had to "give up all media for 24 hours" - in other words, be offline and disconnected from the world for 24 hours. Some of the observations made from the study (read the article for more details) include how students missed their Facebook and Tweeter but not traditional news outlets, and how these social networks have become so part of their lives that students feel empty and "lost" without access to it.

However, there is also a positive spin to these observations. It is noted that youth today actually care more about news and what is happening around them, and that they, through their huge number of friends on Facebook or following many Tweeters, would be exposed to a wider variety of news. This indicates that they are not necessarily apathetic to what happens around them, just that convenience has caused youth to lose initiative in finding news of interest to them.

So can anything actually be done? Any comments from our readers, whom I presume are also quite connected individuals and would understand this phenomenon well?