Social Networking Sites Addition or Addiction to Young Age

For the past years, social networking has been very popular for people worldwide. For teens in this generation, SNSs has become sort of an addiction. After joining a social network site, users are prompted to identify others in the system in which they have a relationship. The youth in the status quo use social networking sites as a means of interaction, socializing, and for purely entertainment purposes. Despite the fact that most schools block access to such sites via school computers, 9- to 17-year- olds spend about nine hours a week, according to a 2007 study. Some teens engage in unsafe activities that include: unsafe disclosure of personal information, addictionspending excessive amount of time online, resulting in lack of healthy engagement in major areas of life. These technologies are infantilizing the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment. The usage of these internet sites are also particularly harmful to children, and could be behind the observed rise in cases of attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder. If the young brain is exposed from the outset to a world of fast action and reaction, of instant new screen images flashing up with the press of a key, such rapid interchange might accustom the brain to operate over such timescales. The amount of time spent on Facebook at each log-in varied only from just a few minutes to several hour. Surveys showed that people who do not have a Facebook account study for an average of eleven to fifteen hours per week, while those with Facebook account study only for one to five hours per week. Social networking sites are highly addictive to those people who cannot control themselves into constantly using these sites and gives too much attention to social acceptance and affiliation. According to a study conducted by Oxygen Media and Lightspeed Research on the habits of 1,605 adults using social media in 2010 ,24 percent of women aged between 18 to 34 check Facebook in the middle of the night, Fifty-eight per cent of those polled use Facebook to track their frenemies (people they are friends on the site but do not like in real life) and 50 per cent are happy being Facebook friends with complete strangers. 63 percent are using the site to find dates, whereas only 50 per cent of women felt the same. 9 percent of women have used the network to break up with their partners compared to the 24 per cent of men who have used the site in the same way. While 49 per cent of women believe it is alright to track their partners activities by having their login details, and only 42 per cent of men share the same view. With the endless amount of pros comes a limitless amount of cons as well. So we have to consider if the cons of social networking outweigh the pros of using this technology then the need of the hour is to have tighter regulation on its usage.Moreover,it is important to learn how to balance ones time and to know one,s priorities first before engaging oneself to other activities.