Followers, Likes, Comments: It Matters!

Nowadays, some young girls are living their lives through their social media pages.

Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, or Instagram, these teens and pre-teens are updating their pages and hoping they get likes, comments and follows. Sometimes there are great comments, a lot of likes, and thousands of follows, but there may also be bullying and degrading going on.

“Now I think students are getting more savvy with technology,” high school counselor Jessica Estrada said. “And they’re getting more brave, and they’re being meaner, because they’re able to hide behind a screen, [and] say what they want to say.”

Some teens are also relying more heavily on social media to create images of themselves that they may think are the images people want to see, but those images may be based on traditional and limiting stereotypes of women.

“I think that it’s really empowering, on some level, to be able to have the means with which to produce yourself, and distribute yourself to the world,” said CSUN Communication Studies Professor Gina Giotta. “But on the other hand, I think we’ve been compelled to produce ourselves and to author ourselves in ways that are often times consistent with those previous representations that were produced for us by the mass media…We don’t have a lot of other scripts besides those media have offered to us.”

Some educators said social media are also affecting the way young people write.

“A lot of the English teachers in my school are complaining about…text language, [for example] putting LOL [for ‘laugh out loud’], and IKR for ‘I know, right’,” Estrada said. “They’re using little acronyms, [and] we’re supposed to be graduating these kids to be college ready.”

But educators and parents said it may be impossible to take social media away from young people at this point.

“I think they’d eventually learn how to live without it, but it’s such an addiction that I don’t know that [you could abolish it]…I think they’d struggle with that,” Estrada said.

“I’m not a doctor,” Giotta said, “but I do know that people can survive without social media. People did it for centuries, so I think it’s a possibility.”

Moderator: Melanie Rosales

Producers: Angela Bickmann and Marissa Martinez

Anchor: Jesyka Dunn

Social Media Editor: Karin Abcarians

Reporters: Karin Abcarians, Angela Bickmann, Jesyka Dunn, Marissa Martinez and Melanie Rosales