Effects of Social Networking on Teens

You don’t have a Facebook account??? Are you crazy??? Everyone has a Facebook account! These are the words that I heard at the beginning of the school year. I never said I was up-to-date on today’s trends, but I never realized I would be seen as an outcast because I hadn’t taken the step into the wonderful world of Facebook. Well, after being laughed at by a group of 13 year olds, I decided to find out what all the excitement was, and yes, I entered the world of Facebook. And to this day, I don’t understand why this new advancement is so wonderful. To me, it appears to be a way for people to complain about their lives, bad mouth others, hide from face-to-face interaction and destroy the written language. Writing has become a lost art due to all the advancements in technology. Many teens do not understand that “you” is not spelled “u” or that there are apostrophes in words like can’t, don’t, and won’t. As a writing teacher, I have become very discouraged by the fact that my students need to be retaught at 8^th grade how to write a complete sentence and, just because commas and periods are not necessary when Facebooking or texting their friends, it is necessary when writing a research paper or creative writing piece or any other “formal” type of writing….which would include most school assignments. Not only are students losing their ability to write correctly, but also their ability to communicate with others has greatly decreased. It isn’t uncommon to see two friends sitting side-by-side texting one another. Why? Why don’t you just talk?? I have a friend whose husband will fight with her over text message. He refuses to face her when having this conversation. This phenomenon of social networking has been taken advantage of, and is not showing signs of benefiting teens in terms of their academic success, but rather causing them to lose ground and grades are beginning to slip in some areas due to their ability to not use these sites correctly.

So, after ranting, I understand these sites are not going away, so whose job is it to teach how to use these sites correctly and to understand there is a world outside of Facebook? How can these sites be used to benefit teens in and out of the classroom? What are your thoughts?