Writing to Respond – Are teenagers screen – enslaved and social inadequates?

Dear Samantha Taylor,

I am a teenage student coming from London, where social media has a massive impact on us and many others around the world. I believe that your most recent article was not thought through very well and it was one that solely focused on the negative side of the internet for teenagers of today.

I am surprised that these inaccurate statements were allowed to be put in a newspaper, falsely accusing teens as a whole as mis-users of the internet. You talk about one teenage girl who texts over 250 times a day as though she represents all teenagers of the world. This is simply naive and is not a good representation of teenagers to use, especially right at the beginning of the article, pushing readers to make an instant judgement of the next generation. Being a young, active, social media user, I can assure you that many teenagers today do in fact use their phones and tablets quite a lot, but to use the rather inaccurate statement of one teenage girl is an unfair interpretation and certainly should not be allowed to stand for the opinions of other teenagers of 2015. This choice of stereotype is already an example that we teenagers are judged quite easily off of one situation, and this really should not be the case as we are the most vulnerable age group to criticism and unfair judgement.

In the first paragraph, Jonathon Franzen’s statement that socializing online is “creating” a uniquely shallow and trivial culture jumped out at me. I have a simple yet meaningful reply. Social media is used by billions around the world: 92% of teens use social media, not purely for socializing, but as an excellent platform to easily communicate and exchange ideas they may have for various subjects, many of which might be educational. Many adults believe that we as the next generation are glued to misbehaving online and sharing things that are detrimental to our or other people’s well being. This is not entirely the case, as many teenagers nowadays use social media for information that will help in the future. For example, I recently had to use a lot of Facebook and Twitter to help me with a course called Model United Nations. Being quite inexperienced and clueless in what I was talking about, I think the Internet played a great role in helping me improve my speeches. Obviously not all teens will be using the internet and social media to implement ideas into their work, but I believe that the number of teenagers who mess about on it is over exaggerated by the older generation and this tarnishes us. We could almost call this discrimination. I say this as it can seem like the usual assumption for kids and teens on the Internet.

Another thing I would like to cover is the series of quotes John Henley provides for the newspaper report. I recognize that it is often teenagers who have been involved in hacking and other crimes on the internet and how much of an impact this can make. But this still does not reflect the real interaction that teenagers have with the internet. A common theme, repeated throughout your article, is the targeting of teens and grouping them almost into one person, giving a negative view on every one of them.