Question: Digital technology has a great impact on the self esteem of adolescents. When digital technology and adolescent come to mind, I instantly tie that to social media. I would like to use how social media has positive and negative effects on adolescents today. To start, I will begin with personal experience. I know as I hit my adolescent years and digital technology was starting to really take off, my self esteem was impacted in a good way. This was right around the time in my era of when selfies began. I'm sure most know, selfies are just pictures someone is taking of themselves. I recall capturing as many selfies as I could to get the perfect one, that way I could post it to my Myspace account and wait for my friends to comment how cute it was.
Now, for one advantage of how digital technology has for an adolescents self esteem is just as I described in my situation as a teen. Of course anyones confidence will have a boost when being complimented on how nice they look on the web. Especially for adolescents because opinions during those years are crucial and taken as literal as possible, usually. This could really brightened an adolescents day and make them feel good about themselves.
One disadvantage would be the same situation but a different result. An adolescent can post a photo of themselves with all the confidence in the world at that time. The moment someone says something mean or nasty, expressing being uninterested in the photo this can lead to negative effects. By negative effects this could result in feeling less than others, lack of self esteem, sadness or embarrassment. Those few examples could lead to an adolescents thoughts of themselves altering making them not want to pubicly display themselves ago. Of course we all also know that small forms of cyberbullying or trolling can lead to much worse things.
The self esteem of an adolescent is very important because around those years of age, we need to make adolescents feel as confident internally as much as possible so that they being confident adults within society as well.
There was a research study formulated to find out if Internet addiction has any correlation between self esteem, loneliness and depression. The study was made up of two hundred and ninety two students who did their first term of school in years 2009-2010 in Trabzon. The Rosenberg self esteem scale was one was methods of data collection used for the study. It was found that depression, loneliness and self esteem all worked together as an effect of Internet addiction but that self esteem being effected was the least applicable out of the three. Self esteem was not a significant predictor. Horzum (2013)
AYAS, T., & HORZUM, M. B. (2013). RELATION BETWEEN DEPRESSION, LONELINESS, SELF-ESTEEM AND INTERNET ADDICTION. Education, 133(3), 283-290.