Social Media and Children

Introduction

Social media refers to the environments that change the way people communicate, interact and socialize and, in the meantime, allow people to express themselves as they want, using internet infrastructure.

Social Media is a platform that enables its users to participate in activities and events identified as its content as a way of communicating with their social circles including other users in the system and society, to share their own opinions by bringing them together to create their own content (Cohen, 2011). Although interaction and communication between social media users are emphasized in this definition, Fredman (2013) divides social media platforms into two different groups as interactive and non-interactive social media environments.

According to the way Fredman (2013) distinguishes social media platforms, interactive social media environments provide a way for users to communicate. Outputs of the software programs that make this communication among users possible depend on input from registered users in these environments to the system. In other words, all kinds of information and interpretation that users share in the system directly affect the output of the programs. Digital and electronic devices, software, touch tablets, applications, video games, interactive screen-based media such as Facebook, MySpace, game play sites, club penguins, blogs and YouTube are directly influenced by the output of virtual site programs and they are designed according to these outputs. Non-interactive social media platforms, on the other hand, do not provide an interactive experience. These environments consist of content that electronic devices cannot change, such as songs, movies, photographs, news articles, online images, and ads that appear on sites. These include digital copies of television programs, DVDs and CDs that have been shipped to the market. In summary, interactive social media environments are social media sites where users interact with each other and create their own content through their sharings and comments, while non-interactive social media platforms are the social media sites where users listen to music files and watch the video files that are added to the content without communicating with each other and sharing their own content.

Whether it is interactive or noninteractive social media environment, it is an undeniable fact that social media tools exist and occupy a huge part of modern life. Therefore, it is important that their uses and effects be searched in detail and people, especially parents, be aware of their both positive and negative effects on children and behave accordingly.