UNDERSTANDING why the young and adolescent are addictive to social media platforms empowers parents and other stakeholders with the right approaches to harness their risky behavioural taints. Recent research all over the world highlight how an uncontrolled exposure to social medial platforms entraps the young people to be potential victims of sexting, stalking, violence, drug abuse, harassment, defamation, cyber-bullying, paedophilia, dopamine effects, terrorist organisation and blackmailing. Next, it can potentially lead them to develop an aggressive attitude, psychological disorder and aversion to a disciplined and healthy way of life. And the worst of all, some victims tend to disregard social values, display a tendency of shallow and stereotype thinking and lack interest in developing life skills, which highlight their inability at thinking critically.
Social media platforms are interactive technologies to create and facilitate information sharing, ideas sharing and interest sharing on virtual communities and networks. The trajectory of social media dated back to the mid-1990s with the emergence of platforms such as SixDegrees.Com. The phenomenal rise of Facebook, Messenger, Twitter, TikTok, WeChat, ShareChat, Instagram, QZone, Weibo, Tumblr, LinkedIn and Baidu Tieba, YouTube, Quora, WhatsApp, Line, Signal, Pinterest, QQ, Telegram, Snapchat, Vibers, Imo, Reddit, each having 100 million subscribers globally, have empowered users to create service-specific profiles that are maintained by the social media platforms themselves. The users around the globe can develop an online social network by connecting their profiles with other profiles of individuals and groups.
However, in Bangladesh, according to Statcounter GlobalStats survey in February 2023, Facebook is the most popular social media platform, having as high as 91.3 per cent of the total 49.55 million social media users whereas YouTube has 6.28 per cent users and other platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Printerest combinedly have only 2.36 per cent users in total. According to another survey carried out by NapoleonCat, people in the age group of 18 to 24 were the largest user of Facebook, totalling 18.60 million users.
On the surface level, the main reasons for the rise of social media among the users have multifaceted factors, including the world wide web that has facilitated the formulation of online communities and the advent of Web2 that has enabled networked communication to an interactive platforms for networked social interaction. Besides, the default features such as quality, reach, frequency, usability, relevancy, permanence and user-friendliness of the popular social media platforms have also placed them as the front-liner in the virtual world today.
Again, the unprecedented breakthrough of smartphones marked a phenomenal increase in the use of social media among all age groups across the world, reaching as high as 4.6 billion users as of today. Next, the affordability of smartphones has also marked a dramatic change in the way the young people access and use social media and their contents. In fact, an increased use of mobile devices marks the most of social media’s global growth. In America, 75 per cent of the teens aged between 13 and 17 have smartphones. The landscape is the same in other European countries such as Denmark, Romania, Portugal, and Belgium.
In Bangladesh, the smartphone penetration per capita is 48 per cent. The purpose of use of social media does not differ significantly from users to users, regardless of their country of origin. Users usually love to share ideas, document memories, promote themselves, learn and explore things and gaming sites and form friendships on social media. They also share and learn ideas from the creation of blogs, podcasts and videos.
However, beneath the surface, the factors that attract young users are subject to a microscopic study as they indispensably resonate with human psychology and cognitive domain. The affordance theory, coined in 1979, is of greater relevance in explaining why social media is so appealing to the young and adolescent population. In short, it means the possibilities the objects in our environment offer us.
Of late the concept of affordance has penetrated in communication research. Here affordance refers to the possibilities that social media platforms offer to users which are not just limited to reaching any place at any time. Social media provides as many as seven affordances that are relevant to the developmentally induced needs of the young people. Why young people are so much attracted to the use of social media can be illustrated through these affordance tools. The following list summarises seven affordances and the possibilities they offer:
Asynchronicity: communicate when it suits them, in real time (synchronously); identifiability: decide to which degree content is anonymous or linked to their true identity; cue manageability: show or hide visual or auditory cues about the self while communicating; accessibility: easily find information and contact other people; scalability: choose the size and the nature of their audience; replicability: replicability copy or share existing online content; and retrievability: store and later retrieve posted content.
However, before explaining how the affordance tools work, it is also important to understand the developmental needs of the young people. The key objective of mental development of the young and adolescent population is to achieve individual autonomy, ie, the capacity to make decisions independently and act on the basis of what appears personally useful or important. To achieve this individual autonomy, it becomes important for them to establish a stable identity that defines what they like, who they are or what they want to become. In the process of establishing this identity, they must acquire some skills to build friendship and relationship and develop their ability to experience and share intimacy. Finally, they must learn to control their sexual desires. The must know how to maintain a healthy relationship.
The attainment of these development phases successfully for adolescents and youth largely depends on two communication tools — self-presentation and self-disclosure. Self-presentation is about presenting identity traits keeping the normative standards of the audience in the loop and self-disclosure is about information sharing within the normative standards of the circle of audiences. It is important that the individuals should not disclose too much information about themselves during the introductory phases of conversation and again, they should not remain completely zipped either. Both the tendencies obfuscate the building of friendship or romantic relationship.
The quality of self-disclosure and self-presentation increases if the individual practice certain roles in the loop of a varying audience. Feedbacks enable the young people to validate their belief and behaviour and integrate them into their cognitive perception about their identity. Again, self-disclosure enables them to approach the correct behaviour in the loop of the audience. Reciprocities enable them to adapt the appropriate behaviour approaches which enhance their ability to form friendships and romantic relationship.
In today’s world, the youth are often termed smartphone generation. Social media provide them with an effective platform to develop these skills. A survey reveals that one in three adolescents opt for social media to talk rather than face-to-face conversations, if the matter is about love, sexuality, and things that embarrass them. Another recent survey data reveal that a vast majority of teens think that social media platforms help them to feel more connected with their friends’ feelings and daily lives.
Affordances of social media strongly attract the young people to the platforms for sharing and exchanging their views, ideas, information and emotions about intimate matters. The affordances of social media empower them with an enhanced sense of control. Although according to the researchers, it is wise to term it ‘the illusion of control’ as it creates an impression in them that they can choose whether they should or should not expose their identity and with whom, how, and when they interact. This makes them feel more assured and secure on social media than in real life situations. This aspect of sense of controls plays a crucial role in the young people as it empowers them with autonomy.
Social media also gives a sense of security to its users. Theories of privacy explain it better. The issue of sense of control and security is at the core of the definition of privacy. Using the privacy setting tools, the youth can control to what extent their personal information and content can be shared or disturbed. This is contrary to the understanding that the youth are aware of the threat of informational vulnerability the social media platforms pose.
The privacy has psychological dimension as well. Psychological privacy refers to the possibility to control when, what, to whom and how we share something about ourselves on online platform. Even if the young people are aware of the threats of social media with regard to compromising informational privacy, unlike the adults, they are not careful enough.
In fact, the seven affordances of social media can reinvigorate the perceived sense of control, eventually boosting up their psychological privacy. Asynchronicity, for example, avails them with the possibility to choose a suitable time for communication. They can contemplate for long about what contents or which photos to share. Again, they can do it instantly as well. This provides them with a sense of control and an opportunity to remain always connected with their friends. Facebook or Instagram also provides visual autonomy, and auditory autonomy which are also an integral aspect of virtual worlds. Young people can interact visually and auditorily with their friends at any time from anywhere.
New Age
