Smartphone one-pager

I chose to read an article by Market Watch, titled “Teenagers believe smartphones make them more popular and less depressed”. (https://www.marketwatch.com/story/teenagers-believe-smartphones-make-them-more-popular-and-less-depressed-2018-09-12) This article immediately starts with the author giving facts about how significantly the number of teenagers that have social media has increased in the last six years. I found out that I am part of the 70% of teenagers that do have it. However, I was still left wondering what age the teenagers who provided information were, as they did not say in the article.

The next paragraph talks about how the “most concerning is their belief that social media actually helps improve their mental health” I found it odd that they referred to that as concerning, especially because in that same paragraph they continue to say that 20% of people felt better about themselves after social media, and only 3% described themselves being more depressed. I assumed that that would be a good thing, which leaves me wondering on the authors perspective of it all. 

In the paragraph after that however, they talk about how 11 percent of “vulnerable teenagers” said social media made them more depressed, which is 8 percent more than the teenagers with a higher social-emotional well-being scale. Now I realize that that part may be concerning, but as I kept reading I realized that there was still a significant amount (29%) of vulnerable students that think it made them less depressed.  

In the next paragraph they talked about how troubling the President of the New York based Child mind institute found that “youth at the highest risk are the ones who care the most about social networking and online communities” Again, that is not good, but it could be a whole lot worse, so I do think that low amount is a good thing.

The final paragraph acknowledges that there are students who benefit from the social skills and community's social media brings them. I’m glad they mentioned that too, as it shows this whole article isn’t completely biased, and gives information that I feel is needed.

          In conclusion, I feel like this article shares valuable information about the users of social media in teenagers. I think that the mental health of people with access to social media is important, so I’m glad they went and wrote this article. Although, I do think the author of this is biased toward social media being bad, as in the main portion of this article the author is focused on the negative parts of it. However, I do not think the information provided in this article is bad. The study they referred to multiple times specifically says that a large majority of teenagers don’t think social media makes them more depressed, so I think that is a good thing.