Effects of Digital Technology on Adolescents: Pros and Cons

Effects of Digital Technology on Adolescents: Pros and Cons

Kavita Ajit Saptasagar
Copyright: © 2022 |Pages: 7
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-8318-0.ch002
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Abstract

There is a widespread use of digital technologies such as social media like Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and mobile phones by adolescents. They are spending an average of 2-3 hours a day texting, gaming, and watching irrelevant videos. Due to this excessive use, it may lead to some health issues; it also helps to encourage the adolescents to improve their communication and knowledge. It thus follows that digital technology has both positive as well as negative effects on the young minds. However, there is no denying the fact that negative impact is much more vigorous than its positive repercussions. As far as the harmful effects of digital technology is concerned, social media and mobile devices may lead to psychological and physical issues. On the positive side, it empowers learning and communication. The need of the hour is to help and nurture our young minds in a way that they learn to focus on the positivity of the digital technology so that they can use it to the optimum and get benefitted in the best possible manner.
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Negative Impact Of Digital Technologies On Adolescents

The following are the negative effects of using digital technologies

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    Psychological Disorders.

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    Physical Exertion.

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    Violence and Aggression.

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    Cyberbullying and sexting.

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    Risky sexual behavior

Psychological Disorders

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    Isolation

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    Depression and anxiety

Isolation

Digital technologies, such as social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram are designed to bring people together, yet they may have the opposite effect in some cases because most of the time they are active on social media platforms for posting and sharing messages, photos, videos and gaming. This behavior may isolate them from the social life. It also does not allow them to spend enough time with their family members.

Depression and Anxiety

Social Media, with the aid of using its nature, actively encourages social comparisons, as its miles plagued by records which could effortlessly be used as metrics of obvious social success (e.g., friends, likes, shares, fans and so forth). These metrics are problematic in themselves, because if adolescents don’t get enough likes to a comment or picture they have posted, or if someone has more likes or friends than them, it can make them feel inferior. Furthermore, the disparity between real life and what people actually post on social media means that they tend to only see an extremely edited ‘highlight reel’ of other people’s lives. This effectively gives the misunderstanding that others lead a more interesting / perfect /exciting life than our own, which, actually has its justifiable share of ups, middles and downs for everybody. So, this kind of negative social comparisons may experience higher levels of depression and anxiety in adolescents.

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