Media plays an important role in adolescents’ daily life and study. Social medias like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, are some media tools online with which youngsters cannot live without. According to a research conducted by Piper Jaffray, by spring 2014, 72 percent of teens use Facebook (The Washington Post). It also states that the population of Facebook is almost the same as the population in China. What can adolescents get from this social network?

First of all, Facebook creates a place for adolescents for belonging to somewhere. According to Robert Fried, adolescents are desperately seeking for an acceptance of a certain group. Using Facebook and having an online identity is also a way of being accepted by a certain group and acquire their identity (The Game of School). In this sense, Facebook is quite similar to online video games in the sense of unreal community. Jordan Shapiro has made a very interesting point in his article talking about video games. He mentioned that in a video games there are two “I”s, one as the controller outside the screen, one as the character or avatar in the game. With this distance, students are building their metacognitive knowledge. More important, it is helpful for adolescents for learn to take others’ perspectives. I think it is the same thing with the identity that adolescents create in Facebook.

Moreover, it will be helpful that the teacher could regard Facebook as an educational tool and include that into students’ learning. Stimulating students learning responsibility and interests by using the Facebook and add that to their online identity will be helpful for students to find their real identity as learners.

It is significant to know that there are all kinds of information on Facebook that adolescents have access to. The positive aspect is learners from all over the world can get in touch with each other and exchange their opinions. It’ll be beneficial that the teacher encourages students to search for different ideas on the same topic, so widen and deepen their understanding and also grow an open mind to different opinions.

Adolescents are in the stage where they can hardly tell between right and wrong. It is the reason why they are easily affected by whatever information in the outside world. Under a large and frequent exposure to meaningless, or even unhealthy information will ambiguous students’ social recognition, in other words, their personal value will be shaken by what they have acquired through their “friends” in Facebook. Moreover, some adolescents tend to create a “perfect me” on the internet, which is different from what they are in reality. In this sense, some may be lost in the “perfect me” on the internet, and once they notice what they are in reality is not as good as they are in the online world, they may lose themselves in reality and choose to hide behind the network. Moreover, adolescents lack self-control, they may get addicted to Facebook and are getting consistently check their website to see if they have new messages or if someone else has posted something new. They will tend to waste all the time on them. So it is essential for teacher and parents to strictly manage the time that students could have access to them on a daily or weekly basis, and really encourage them to use it as an educational tool instead of a meaningless self-expansion platform.

Reference

Jordan Shapiro, Mar 30, 2015. How Video Games In The Classroom Will Make Students Smarter, Forbes. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jordanshapiro/2015/03/30/how-video-games-in-the-classroom-will-make-students-smarter/.

Nico Lang, Feb 21, 2015. Why teens are leaving Facebook: It’s meaningless, The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/02/21/why-teens-are-leaving-facebook-its-meaningless/

Robert Freid, The game of School, San Francisco, CA : Jossey-Bass;c2005. p.107-115.