Social media addiction affects students

Tweet, tweet, brrrr. It’s the sound that most Clark Magnet students have been accustomed to inside and outside of school. Whether it is a Twitter notification or a new Snapchat, some students are addicted to social media.

Social media addiction is a major epidemic and has spread through most high schools like wildfire. “I sometimes have to check my phone ten to twenty times at school,” said senior Varag Abed. “And sometimes I’m just being paranoid.” The paranoia Abed is referring to is feeling a non-existent vibration in one’s pocket in anticipation for a social media notification. Scientists have currently labeled the condition as Phantom Vibration Syndrome.

According to the textbook Computers in Human Behaviors, “Phantom vibration syndrome, or perceived vibrations from a device that is not really vibrating, is a recent psychological phenomenon that has attracted the attention of the media and medical community.” According to the study, 89% of young adults suffer from symptoms of the syndrome.

Social media networks continue to grow. They are literally limitless. According to the major social media network Facebook, there are about 1.23 billion monthly active using the  company’s services. Twitter recently released in a shareholder’s meeting that there are approximately 232 million monthly active users on the site. Twitter grew 48% from the previous year.

In addition to Facebook and Twitter, most students also have other social media accounts. Some students even have five social media accounts. “Yeah, I have about four social media accounts that I check on a constant basis,” said senior Shushanik Stepanyan. “It becomes very hard to manage sometimes.”

Some social analysts like Jolie O’Dell have said that students with social media accounts “found their multitasking led to 20% lower grades than those of their focused peers.”

AP Statistics teacher Fred Blattner said that social media itself is not inherently bad but that its misuse can affect class performance. “Kids who are focused and determined can use it as a tool that helps raise their grades,” he said. “But then there are the kids that obsess with it, which results in lower grades in their classes.”

The American Psychological Association has argued that there are both positive and negative effects to social media. Positive effects include more social interactions for introverts and “virtual empathy” benefits for Facebook and Twitter users. The negative effects the Association has written about are mostly the same as O’Dell’s studies.

A recent study by the Publications class surveyed 30 students and showed that social media use had no real effect on students’ grades. The first part of the test comprised finding 15 students with social media accounts and 15 other students without social media accounts. Then the two sets of students’ grades (GPA) were collected and analyzed. The results showed that social media usage had no real effect.

(In all statistical tests though, there are factors that are unaccounted for that can change the results of the test. For example, the study did not account for the time each student spends on his/her social media account, or even the amount of accounts each student had. Therefore, the study is not completely accurate as these factors could have affected the results in an adverse way.)

Although there was a slight difference in the GPAs of students with social media accounts and students without social media accounts, it was not a great enough difference for a statistical significance.

Not all have social media accounts. Senior Kevork Anouchian does not have social media accounts that he uses on a daily basis. “I don’t buy into the social media game,” he said. “I never have. I like to spend my time playing video games and hanging out with my friends more, to be honest.”