Social Networking: Danger on Children

Social Networking: Danger on Children

Nowadays, social networking is one of the important matters in human’s life. Social networking is an online service, platform, or site that focuses on facilitating the building of social networks or social relations among people, for example Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, and Google. Since there are many advantages of using social networking, it becomes popular among people: teenagers, adults, middle-aged people, or even children use it in their everyday lives. Some claim using social networking among children is too risky because children use it without considering whether it is right or wrong whereas other people argue letting children use social network is a good way to open their worldviews and develop their skills. However, although there are many advantages of social networking on children, they should not be encouraged to use it. It has been argued that joining social networking is an easy way for children to communicate with others. They can find old friends and make new ones on social networking site by adding friends to their friend list and regularly interact with them. Furthermore, social networking provides a great way for children to stay in touch with people who may have moved away. For instance, they can connect with their sibling who stays abroad by using social networking. We must admit that. Nonetheless, using social networking reduces or eliminates face-to-face socialization. A report from the National School Boards Association showed that social networking makes children lack confidence when they have to interact with other people in face-to-face interaction. From the report, researchers found that in some cases children fear to talk with other people because they are not familiar with building relationships with other people around the neighborhood or in society. Therefore, it can retard children's social skills development; they are losing the ability to form stable relationships in the real world. Reducing face-to-face socialization is just one of the bad effects of social networking on children. Those who agree with using social networking on children assert that there are many better information and knowledge accesses on social networking which can help children develop their academic performance. When they have to do assignments or reports, they just search information in a very large library called the World Wide Web and the large amount of information is shown. Also, there are a lot of activities for them to do on social networking that can help them develop their skills such as games, puzzles, quizzes and team activities that they can try out. On the other hand, their argument is contrary to the study of Dorie Clark of the Huffington Post. Social networking can be waste of time and lead to be a social networking addiction at the same time. Instead of reading books or doing recreational activities, the researcher found that 74 percent of 100 children waste their time with games or others and their time is useless. Moreover, it can also lead them to a social networking addiction which is spending too much time using social network. Therefore, it interferes with other aspects of daily life such as study time disruption and sleep deprivation that can make children obtain lower grade point averages. Furthermore, there is also the other one bad aspect of using social networking on children which is imitating bad behavior. Supporter of using social network on children also claim that it can help children open their worldview. Social networking helps them learn about diversity and get exposed to multiple points of view. Ultimately, this exposure can help children to learn to look at things from different angles, and be more tolerant of other people's opinions and things that go a long way in the working world. They have a point in thinking like that. However, social networking has a tendency to lead children to imitate bad behaviors. Censorship is an important issue which has not been tackled effectively on social networking websites. Moreover, it is also possible to post expletives on somebody's profile page and there have even been cases where pornographic pictures were posted on certain photo albums. Unfortunately, often such cases go undetected until somebody reports it. Besides, there are also a lot of racist, violent, and sexist materials that exist on social networking sites. The master of Child Refuge Foundation reported that these can lead children to imitate them because they do not know what they do is right or wrong. Therefore, imitating bad behavior is the bad effect of using social networking on children. In conclusion, children should not be persuaded to use social networking although it has many benefits. Although it is hard to stop children using it, there are many ways to solve this problem. Educating children about the risks of social networking, visiting the site and browsing through it, and installing security software are good ideas for parents. Once children understand the advantages and disadvantages of social networking, then they can cruise through without fail.