New Research: Teens, Alcohol & Social Media
Monday, May 16, 2011
Facebook’s platform is certainly built on the notion of social showing-off. It encourages its users to post photographs of fun parties and social status is conveyed by which friends like your status update. As social media sites are designed to convey coolness, they are undoubtedly a source of influence for teenagers looking to their peers for cues.
Now it seems that social media might be functioning with a ‘peer-pressure’ influence; alcohol consumption and significantly more time on social media may be linked, according to the results of a study of 264 teenagers conducted by Weill Cornell Medical College and published in the journal, Addictive Behaviors.
Teen drinking and social media, downloading music
The participants of the study were between the ages of 13 and 17, and reported drinking in the last month. Importantly, the connection this study made between teen drinking and social media is a correlation, not causation, but the link is there. The exposure online is specific to social media and downloading music; students who used the internet for online shopping, games, and academic purposes did not demonstrate the same results.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTDr. Gerald Tarnoff, the Unit Chief of Child and Adolescent Intensive Treatment Unit at Butler Hospital, says that his immediate reaction is that this study has some common sense to it. “Social media has power,” he said.
Butler expert: potential rift with parents
Tarnoff said that the influence of social media might also serve to increase the already shaky rift between parents communicating with their teenagers. “People of my generation don’t have a good clue of what’s going on,” he added. This increase in the gap of communication puts teenagers further away from this parents influence.
Brown expert: isolation and self-medication
Dr. Gregory Elliot, a Sociology Professor at Brown University, sees darker implications of this study. His research focuses on social development of the individual and integrating the self into society.
Elliot said that because ‘friends’ in social media terms are only ‘friends’ in a superficial sense, using social media frequently could indicate feelings social inadequacy. If a teen would rather spend time developing the impression of having friends in the virtual arena rather than fostering ‘real’ connections, this shows a sense of social anxiety. According to Elliot, drinking is also tied to this feeling of social inadequacy.
“If you’re feeling inadequate, you might self-medicate or go on these Web sites to feel more socially adequate” he said. “They both can be traced back to some internal feeling of incompleteness.”
"Alone Together"
MIT Professor Sherry Turkle explores this in her book, Alone Together, where she writes about the pressure that teenagers feel to update their Facebook profiles in order to seem stylish, popular, cool, artsy, or witty. She calls this ‘presentation anxiety,’ and says that the site’s pressure to constantly update creates ceaseless pressure on its users.
Dr. Elliot echoes Sherry Turkle, and says that this link continues to prove that there are “unanticipated unhappy consequences from social media.”
Every Saturday night in photographic detail
One of these consequences might be the peer-pressure-like influence of the Web sites. Being ‘friends’ via social media gives teens a huge window into the lives of their peers—capturing every Saturday night in photographic detail. Rather than just hearing whispers or rumors, teens are confronted with these snapshots on a daily basis.
It could also be that teens that use social media are just more social, and therefore interested in socially experimenting. The study did not examine alcohol abuse—having one drink in the past month would qualify teens.
The cause and effect in this study are ambiguous, said Dr. Tarnoff. “This is a small study, but it’s a start," he said. "It’s going to be so important in the near future to know what kind of influence the Internet has.”
Photo of Facebook: west.m
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