BUS203: Principles of Marketing

Social media have evolved through human cultural practices along with technological affordances.

At what age should a child have social media?

In today's society it is impossible to go out in public, and not see someone looking down at their phones. Our phones are the first thing we look at in the morning, and the last at night. We have become so glued to them, it can be difficult to hold a simple conversation. We even use our phones for the sole purpose of not having to interact with others in public. When we use our phones out in public just to avoid conversing with other people we are not only being very anti social, but we are practicing civil inattention. Everyone always says it's teens who use their phones the most, and maybe that's true, but why is that the case? Is it because we have more social media accounts, or more followers? Or is it because we choose to use our phones to distract us from the real world? I believe this is true for a number of reasons but the main one being, we've never known any different.

iPhones were first released when today's teens were very young, and many of us acquired our first phone before we even hit our teenage years. It seems kids today are on social media at a much younger age, and now even elementary school kids have cell phones. The childhood experience is so different from what it used to be, but now so is the normal adulthood experience. Before iPhones we all had to get our news from broadcast media, and now we check our social media for updates on the world.

So what age is too young for a social media presence? I interviewed a Freshman at The University of Arizona to share her first experiences with social media, and get her take on how young is too young.

Amara (a pseudonym) is 18 years old, and has an iPhone just like every other college student her age, but the difference between her, and many other of these students is that she didn't even have a phone until she was 16 in her Sophomore year of high school. Amara's parents were very strict about phones and didn't want their only child active on social media at such a young age, and since the only phone she wanted was an iphone, where it is extremely easy to access social media, she was not allowed a phone until she turned 16. This was difficult for Amara for a few reasons, the first being she couldn't contact her parents after school when they needed to pick her up, she couldn't talk to her friends outside of school, and she always felt very out of the loop. Vine was very big the year all of Amara's friends started getting phones and when they would all talk about the latest videos she couldn't participate in any of the conversations. Amara's parents valued their young daughter's privacy over her social life, and at the time this upset Amara very much, but now as she's older she feels happy that she had different experiences than her classmates.

While other kids talked only through their phones, Amara had to meet up with her friends in person, and she had to have the childhood experiences her classmates never would. She played outside, and did normal kids stuff. This is why I believe that parents should wait as long as possible to get their kids phones, because every child should have those experiences of making plans with friend's in person, and playing together outside of school. Kids need the experience of being kids, before they should have any presence on social media. Amara's parents were also worried of any harm that may have come to their daughter if she had had a phone at a younger age. Cyberbullying is so common, and it is so easy for kids to be mean behind a screen. Younger kids especially think it's ok to say hurtful things over the phone because they can't see the other person, so they think it's no big deal. Kids should not be active on social media until they are mature enough to use it properly. Kids should enjoy their childhood while it lasts, and then enjoy all the good of social media when they are old enough to appreciate it.

It is important to understand the relationships between older media and social media. By older media, I mean the industry-produced form of mass communication available in the US before digital social media became a thing, such as television, radio, newspapers, books, magazines, etc.

Older media can be referred to by other names, such as traditional media. And then there are subcategories of older media: broadcast media are one subcategory of older media, including television and radio, that communicates from one source to many viewers at once. Print media are a paper-based subcategory of older media such as newspapers, books, and magazines, that many users access individually.

Source: Diana Daly, https://opentextbooks.library.arizona.edu/hrsm/chapter/identity/
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.