Research Paper

Submitted By rockinrollingril
Words: 835
Pages: 4

Reina Meza
ENG-990
Woolsey, Sarah
11/05/2013
Under Pressure
Today we cope with ongoing changes to our society that our out of our control. These changes are likely to continue with the advantage of technology and growth of our information based society. With this change Americans are undergoing heavy amounts of stress. Most importantly it’s affecting teens in American sooner than it should. The reason for this is the lack of social interaction, media consumption, and the inadequate knowledge of stress relief techniques. This has brought the uprising of an age of Anxiety, Depression, and loneliness resulting in a young stressed society in America.
According to the Pew Foundation only 60% of Americans belong to a social network, however 94% of teens belong to a social network. Social media such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and YouTube has increased or ability to connect to people all over the world, however many people use this device as a replacement for connecting with friends resulting in less face time and more screen time. Also John Dick talks about how “40 percent of social media users admitted they often post/share things to improve their image.” This is because users want to portray their best self’s to their friends and family. This causes competition between friends and makes going out a documentation to show to your friends later on social networking sites. Teens are pressured to be perfect by friends and family witch results in stress for these young generations. Also teens are not going out as much staying in and chatting with friends on Facebook and spending hours watching cat videos on YouTube has become a social norm resulting in teens being more with their self and more lonely which can lead to depression.
Every day we are consuming around 15 hours of media a day this includes TV, music, movies, games, and advertisement, and this is just the average American so if you’re a teen and online you are more likely to be exposed to more media than adults. The media we consume is strongly negative, with news and journalists playing the fear emotion to get more views and read articles. Games are highly addictive and violent. Music is becoming more sexualized and vulgar than ever before, and advertisement gives girls and boys an unrealistic view on their body image. Teens are fed this information daily and imagine the impact of it. Some kids start using a mobile device when still in elementary school and are able to access internet right there. Most parents worry about violent games but they should also worry about teens listening to thousands of songs about sadness and heartbreak. Both are equity as bad but the other goes unnoticed. Technology has increased our data consumption and resulted in younger people to get easy access to these media devices. You can access most of these things on your iPod; there is no need for even a phone anymore.
Most importantly teens don’t know how to deal with stress, and when upon the age of adulthood stress levels will spike. “The average high school kid today has the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the early 1950’s.” this is a quote from Robert Leahy article on teen anxiety witch talks about the rise of anxiety in teens. High school courses require a