During my high school years, the active use of Twitter, Facebook, and text messaging were little to non-existent.  While I still consider myself to be a fairly young member of the Y generation, I never thought the age of digital technology would have teens suffering from a lack of sleep.  I spent a lot of school nights cramming for tests, eventually falling asleep in my textbook because I was exhausted from the long hours of school and lacrosse practice.  Even though balancing school and extracurricular activities was tough, I assumed most students had to go through it to get into a decent college or university.

These days most teenagers don’t get enough sleep because of the constant barrage of Facebook feeds or Twitter updates that they are receiving, not necessarily because of schoolwork.  While I realize how addictive these sites can be, especially with the rise in the popularity of smart phones, I believe these teens will gain several advantages from knowing the current trend of social media.

The Washington Post recently published a great article on teens and parents who suffered from sleep deprivation due to digital diversions.  A study conducted in April by the Pew Research Center found that four out of five adolescents would sleep with their cell phones near their bed. Most would wake up every time their phone would receive a notification with a new text message. The students would come to school sleepy and groggy from the night before.  The students’ parents would normally be up making sure their child was asleep.

Although this is a problem for adolescents now, they will soon learn a great skill at hand from acquiring knowledge from these social media sites. Some of these prospective teens can make a career out of the social media realm.  For instance, Ashley Qualls the creator of WhateverLife.com, a site targeted for young girls looking for a design layout, or to customize their own layout on Myspace.com, got much publicity as a young teen entrepreneur ringing in more than 1 million dollars of revenue from her website.  Her site is remarkably user friendly and designs and layouts are free to use with no costs. She receives a large percentage of audience in comparison to magazines like Seventeen, Teen Vogue, and CosmoGirl. She attracts more than 7 million monthly visitors, as well as 60 million page views.

Young adults can also gain an advantage of excelling academically. The more teens read articles, blog and social network, the more they are exposed to reading and writing. In return, teens are motivated to want to learn how to read and write well.  A study done by The National Literacy Trust conducted a survey of more than 3000 children.  They searched for an association between children’s active involvement with social media and their literacy. The results found that social media does in fact help children become more literate.

Nevertheless, there are critics who believe the social media frenzy may induce the amount of drug prescriptions to alleviate ADHD, since most individuals are now engaged to their computers. However, the amount information on any subject matter is at the reach of our fingertips, which is quite useful for all of us. Social media in my opinion marks a great advantage for teens and adults alike,  from attaining recognition for businesses to helping  to increase the rate of literacy, I see more advantages than disadvantages for social media.