Through the rugged time from early 2020 to now, social media has influenced teenagers in a positive way. While in quarantine throughout the school year and summer of 2020, all people could do is find some way to occupy themselves. People decided it was a good creative outlet to make content or watch content that related to each and every person.

To spare each other from boredom, teenagers used a specific form of social media, Tik Tok, to entertain themselves. While just sitting around the house, it seemed that Tik Tok was the app that most people used their screen time on. With an average of three hours for teenagers, even adults would catch themselves browsing.

Junior Anna Barber added her input on Tik Tok with, “One example of a trend that influenced me on Tik Tok during quarantine was when lots of people were posting and sharing their morning routines as well as their study habits which really encouraged me especially during quarantine when it was hard to stay motivated and on track.”

It is tremendously common for teenagers to feel unmotivated and uninspired while seeming like there is nothing to do. For some people, to get out of the slump, watching others succeed and do well is helpful. Schooling also seemed to be a problem when it was all online.

Staying in contact with specific people is really important to teenagers’ social life and Snapchat has allowed that social life to stay intact. The feeling of loneliness is common when there is no real social interaction with others. 

“It provided a seamless way to stay in contact with friends and loved ones, while still allowing people to stay safe at home,” junior Tyler Martin voiced. 

Snapchat permits people to be able to take pictures and send them to whoever they want. When being in quarantine, you cannot see anyone or really even talk to them.

Instagram is extremely pleasant to know what people are up to or what fun things they have experienced. People can create captions, tag people, and tag the location of where the pictures were taken. 

Junior Ashlynn Olson mentioned, “Instagram impacted me on an emotional aspect of my life. Quarantine was such a hard time to adjust to, so having Instagram as a method of communication was very helpful. I still felt as though I was connected with my friends and family.”

Adjusting seemed to be a constant struggle for everyone when going through the lockdown. As Ashlynn said, having an extra form of communication seemed to relieve a little bit of that stress.

Any music platform is also considered to be a way for people of all ages to stay occupied and free of boredom, especially the more popular apps such as Spotify. 

“During lockdown, I obviously had a lot of extra time. In that time, I found myself listening to more and more music. As a result, my taste, knowledge, and love of music has dramatically increased,” sophomore Evan Lawrence expressed.

The increase of knowledge and love for music helped many people through their lonely times and helped them persevere.

The use of Tik Tok, Snapchat, Instagram, and Spotify have allowed teenagers to have more motivation, better communication, and more fun creative outlets while they are stuck at home. 

Social media has always had an impact on some people and their lives, it just had a large increase in popularity throughout the times when people didn’t know what to do with their lives. Social media is extremely stereotyped to be horrible and useless, but people never knew how much of a positive impact it could have through hard times.