Kennedy: Social media and teen heartache

Close up on a boy with a mobile phone
Close up on a boy with a mobile phone
photo Mark Kennedy

On Monday night, members of my family were watching TV together. Wait, check that: We were all looking at our iPhones and iPads while pretending to watch TV together.

Anyway, the TV did manage to win the tug of war for our attention momentarily during a CNN documentary: "#Being13: Inside the Secret World of Kids."

The documentary was a collaboration between CNN and two college researchers on the topic of adolescents and social media: Marion K. Underwood, at the University of Texas at Dallas, and Robert W. Faris, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California at Davis.

Together, the researchers studied the social-media habits of two hundred 13-year-olds from across America who agreed to install an app on their smartphones that saved the content from all of their social-media posts on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook for eights months - essentially a full school year.

Since we have a 13-year-old son, the program was of more than passing interest to my wife and me. My son also watched a portion of the show, although he would often drift back into iPad land, not wanting to seem too compliant. After all, being 13 requires you to say "no thanks" to most of your parents' suggestions.

I came away from watching the CNN program thinking that it's a wonder today's 13-year-olds can even function. Social media, it seems, serves as a multiplier for social status, the most important form of currency to 13-year-olds. As the researchers noted: "The social-media feed essentially serves as a scorecard for popularity."

Through selfie photos and group pictures on Instagram, teens invite an endless stream of likes and comments from their classmates which, when taken together, make every day a referendum on their popularity. Who wouldn't crack under that kind of peer pressure?

Perhaps more importantly, teens who don't attract a lot of attention on social media are delegated to the lower rungs on the popularity ladder. They see other teens with their perfect smiles and friend sets and wonder what's wrong with them. This creates tremendous pressure to be continuously cool and cute. For example, the researchers talked to one 13-year-old girl who took 100 selfies before she settled on one that she thought would attract the most "likes."

Some of the study's more interesting findings were:

* More than one-third of the kids in the study - including some who never post themselves - say they check social media between 25 and 100 times a day. The researchers call this "lurking" and say it robs teens of more creative pursuits such as reading, exercising and having real conversations.

* About 80 percent of the 13-year-olds say you can tell how popular a teen is based on his or her social-media profiles.

* Some teens say the worst thing that can happen to you on social media is "seeing friends doing things where I wasn't included."

While sexting and cyberbullying have commanded headlines and have parents all twisted up - and for good reason - it's probably the garden-variety heartache of being excluded from fun gatherings that is more pervasive among teens.

You begin to think that social media is a no-win situation for kids. So what if they build up a lot of social currency in middle school? It will ultimately be as worthless as Monopoly money.

A ray of hope: The researchers said that, when parents monitor their children's social-network habit, it mitigates the psychic damage that "lurking" teens can suffer. So those of you with shy or unplugged teens take heart; they might just be avoiding a world of hurt.

Maybe someday we'll all wise up and smartphones can go back to being appliances, not devices that stir up our fears and phobias.

Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645. Follow him on Twitter @TFPCOLUMNIST. Subscribe to his Facebook updates at www.facebook.com/mkennedycolumnist.

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