Introduction
As the world has become more and more digitized, more and more young people are turning to the Internet for information, fun and socialization. Social media now serves as the most popular source or platform for young people when it comes to getting news information, sharing ideas, and communicating with others (Doster; Wood, Bukowski and Lis). They create their profiles, their followings, their list of people to follow. They cultivate a public image of themselves and even develop their own personal brands. They view social media as a virtual world to inhabit and develop while meanwhile neglecting their own personal development in the real world. As Sampasa-Kanyinga and Lewis show, teens who use social networking sites lack proper and appropriate psychological functioning: they cannot communicate well in face-to-face communications; they do not understand real world socialization; they become addicted to their mobile devices; and they feel inferior and lack confidence as a result of too much comparison of their own social media popularity to others’. Thus, social media usage has been linked to depression, jealousy and poor self-esteem (Appel, Gerlach and Crusius). This paper will show how social media is corrupting youth by preventing them from acquiring effective communication skills, exposing them to unhealthy content, and causing them to miss out on their childhood.

Communication

Person to person communication skills are important for young people to develop. Without these skills they cannot interview well for jobs, they cannot gain any sort of emotional or social intelligence, and they cannot interact well or communicate effectively with peers or colleagues. Part of the process of development of communication skills depends upon experience. The problem that many young people are having is that they are not getting enough experience in communication. They are spending all their free time on the Internet and their socialization takes place entirely in Internet chat rooms, instant messaging friends, and responding to Tweets on Twitter. They are not learning or refining any real world social skills. They prefer all exchanges to be made online on a social media platform.

This is bad because the real world is not a social media platform. In the real world people are expected to be able to handle and confront complex circumstances in which they are presented with different and difficult situations. They must be able to navigate various problems, know how to deal with aggressive or hostile remarks, be familiar with ways of influencing people with speech, non-verbal communications, body language, and so on. They must learn how to show respect for others when addressing them in person so as not to cause offense and they need to learn to put people at their ease, which cannot be done by sending out Tweets all day.

Communication is something that children and teens have to learn by being around others who communicate effectively. As Vygotsky shows, the zone of proximal development is critical for nurturing the development of skills like socialization and communication (Wertsch). This is how they become confident about talking to others: they learn to do so from observing others in the real world. They learn what types of methods of talk produce what kinds of reactions in others. They learn what shocks or offends, what produces good feeling, what to say to be supportive, how to say things, how not to say things, and more. They learn from being around others and being in situations. They learn to reflect on their own actions and on their own behaviors. They learn to reflect on conversations they have had and how they made them feel. They learn how to conduct themselves around certain types of people, what is...…promoting promiscuous sexual behavior. Few people, except on family shows, are depicted as having monogamous relationships, let alone as waiting for marriage before having sex. Marriage is not even viewed as something that is common in media. Having children outside of wedlock is the norm as shown on media, and statistics back up that finding, as Yale University shows.

Conclusion

Children need time away from media in order to learn to play with others, develop social skills, and explore nature and reality. Too much media can cause them to be trapped in a cocoon of artificial life. They should get a chance to be kids, to live away from the screen, and to gain insight and understanding on their own. They need a break from the culture industry, and they should be allowed to live in their innocence for as long as possible. Because today they are basically raised on media, consuming hours and hours of it each day, having a life on social media is second-nature to them: it is all they know. They want to become YouTubers and social media Influencers. They want to have their own channels, turn themselves into a brand, and live the kind of lifestyle that they see and hear about in the media. They want to turn their private lives into public lives, and they see nothing wrong morally speaking with the sex and violence that pours over the airwaves. They have been corrupted by media and social media. They have not been given the chance to be innocent kids. They have never developed communication skills needed for getting ahead in the real world. Instead, by the time they reach adulthood, they just want to retreat back into their artificial virtual worlds where they can feel safely entrenched in unreality.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. "The…