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This is the first in what will be a five-part series of articles looking at the trends in social media, how teenagers and their middle school counterparts are utilizing virtual platforms, and how parents can work with their children to ensure safety on these online frontiers. The components of understanding teens and social media include being educated on the psychological and social development of adolescents, analyzing the for-profit structures that support Silicon Valley, becoming enlightened about the addictive nature of social media outlets, and working with our children to make them feel included in this conversation.
Not the kind of streaking you knew as a child . . .
To begin a discussion of teen social media trends, the current mediums must be evaluated. For today’s youth, there are five platforms that comprise the majority of online social media use: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Snapchat. It is the last of these platforms, Snapchat, that is causing the most chaos in the lives of teens. Unlike the other four platforms, which allow users to post at their convenience without repercussions, Snapchat has created an obligation that requires its users to be active at least every 24 hours in order to maintain “streaks” with acquaintances.
As Snapchat has no publicly viewable number of followers or connections, the use of streaks is the primary indicator of rank. Streaks are ongoing correspondence between two individuals, with the number and length of streaks viewable on each participant’s profile. Milestones, such as maintain streaks for 100 days and other notable accomplishments, are rewarded with specific emojis that serve as viewable recognition of one’s dedication to the platform.
It has been recorded that users of Snapchat can engage in as many as 80-260 streaks concurrently. That means that a single user can be obligated to send dozens, if not hundreds, of messages to individual connections every day. For a teenager with academic and extracurricular activities to balance, having to carve out the time to maintain streaks can have detrimental effects on performance in other areas of the teen’s life. Because the number and length of streaks one has are in many ways quantitative representations of one’s perceived social popularity, many teens are choosing to prioritize the maintenance of their social media profiles over other commitments in their lives.
The jeopardy in maintaining streaks is that a user must participate in the one-on-one correspondence at least once a day. If a user goes longer than 24 hours without messaging the other party involved in the streak correspondence, the streak is lost. It is this requirement of routine activity that is causing issues for young users. For instance, if a teen has phone privileges revoked or vacations in a locale without WI-FI access, all eligible streaks are at risk of being broken. Because of this potential detriment, many users of Snapchat have become reluctant to attend family vacations, participate in activities that keep them from having a secure network connection, and are choosing to sit out on other opportunities that interfere with their access to the platform.
To remedy the threat of breaking streaks when one is out of network range or otherwise occupied, the advent of social media babysitters, colloquially termed with such names as “Snap-Keepers” and “Streak Sitters”, have provided Snapchat users with an alternative way to maintain their streaks when they personally cannot upkeep them. Many children and teenagers are paying their friends to post on their behalf on days when they are unavailable to access the platform themselves, while other users have created agreements with one another in which multiple participants take turns maintaining one another’s accounts. Taking it a step further, some teens are even beginning to offer semi-professional services of taking primary control of other users’ streaks in exchange for monetary fees.
Teenagers competing for popularity is hardly a new concept, but how is the blossoming frontier of social media affecting today’s youth? Is the quest for peer acceptance through social media rank cultivating more negative effects than positive ones? Is it appropriate for children to negotiate agreements with one another that dictate the babysitting of a social media account in exchange for money? We, as the adults, need to understand the behavior emanating from interacting online and ensure that the juvenile users are being met with developmentally appropriate methodologies. To shun social media altogether and patronize the youth who enjoy using the virtual platforms are not productive approaches. Given how meaningful social media platforms have become to middle and high school students, we must find ways to connect with our children that allow them to feel heard while educating them on safe and responsible uses of these platforms.
Look for Part II in this five-part series in next week’s column.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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