Social Media and the Value of Education by Cadence

Social Media and the Value of Education by Cadence - March 2022 Scholarship Essay

Social media has impacted my learning by providing me with tips and tricks from others that I can use to help further my own education. Personally I don’t use social media that often, but I would say that I do use it a good amount. Through snapchat I am able to stay in contact with my friends, and communicate with them outside of school. We are able to share and compare homework answers together as well as ask each other questions on problems we don’t understand. Through TikTok I can watch videos of others studying techniques and learn ways to remember facts. Also through Tik Tok I can watch videos of people, like Hank Green, explaining concepts and lessons.

An advantage the social media has on the influence of education is that it can report facts and events almost instantly. In the current conflict with Ukraine and Russia, students now can see updates in the conflict and what is currently happening. In other areas such as the scientific community, students interested in science can learn about breakthrough discoveries as soon as they are published. Another advantage is how many people it can connect to. It's not just a few students that have seen videos of the Ukraine and Russia conflict. The majority of the students, at least at my school, have seen multiple videos of the conflict and are well aware of what is happening over there.

A disadvantage of social media's influence on education is how vulnerable the internet and the user is. A student can learn from social media to help them in school, but certain aspects can also affect their performance in school. Social media offers a way for students to anonymously cyberbully each other and get away with it. It can negatively influence a students education because the student can think less of themselves because of it or even potentially commit suicide. A student can also think less of themselves because social media has warped the perspective of what is acceptable in this society. I know from experience that if you doubt who you are and try to conform to what others want you to be you can lose focus of what is important, especially doing well in school. Those standards that social media has created can distract students away from their education because they try to be more like the person they see on social media. Another disadvantage is that social media can be a distraction to learning. From experience the students that go on social media all of class instead of learning tend to do worse in the class.

Without a doubt social media has impacted my education and the way that I learn both positively and negatively, but at least from my perspective it has affected it minimally. But social media has the potential to drastically impact the education of students, either in a positive way or in a negative way.