The Digital Self: How Social Media Serves as a Setting that Shapes Youth’s Emotional Experiences

Social media is a term for numerous technologies that allow instantaneous communication, status updates, and social networking among individuals. Social media platforms today include text messaging via cellular phones and social networking sites such as Facebook. The use of social media by youth (preadolescents and adolescents) continues to increase across the world on a yearly basis. Youth in nearly every country use social media to maintain nearly constant contact with their friends. Given the importance of both social media and friendships to youth, this review examines the impact of social media on the emotional experiences of youth. Social media can have a positive impact upon loneliness, intimacy, and relationship maintenance during adolescence. However, adolescents also experience relational issues via social media and are more reckless online. Social media, particularly Facebook, may have both a positive and a negative impact on mood symptoms and other mental disorders. Social media may play a role in identity formation by allowing younger users to experiment with different behaviours and interactional styles. The effects of social media may lead to more positive outcomes for boys than for girls. There is need for research on social media use during preadolescence, since work is largely conducted with adolescents, and for further research to be conducted with potential mediators between social media and well-being (e.g., friendship).