Social Media Effects and Self-harm Behaviors Among Young People

Theoretical and Methodological Challenges

Abstract

The pervasiveness of social media in the lives of the young has prompted a growing number of studies investigating their effects on online and offline behaviors, especially when it comes to risk or self -harm behaviors. The examination of self- harm behaviors both suicidal and non-suicidal is grounded primarily in psychological and medical research but the increase in the number of adolescents who self- harm, in the last few years, expanded research into the use of social media. While there were both positive and negative accounts of the relationship of social media use to self- harm, this paper addresses the issue from a communication perspective. The main argument of this paper is that social media are complex interactive, multimodal and multidirectional environments and user created cultures that cannot be understood through traditional theories of media effects or simply in quantitative terms of uses and gratifications. Drawing from contemporary studies on media effects and social media affordances, this is an attempt to map the theoretical and methodological challenges in an effort to lay the ground for an enhanced understanding of social media as mediators in self-harming behaviors. A review of current studies in this field reconfirms the conditional and indirect character of media effects identifying at the same time the limitations and gaps in the examination of a complex behavior as it relates to multimodal “self- mass communication” (Castells, 2009) that leads to new forms of “socialized communication”. Further research on social media affordances and their effects on the cognitive and social-emotional development of young people will provide a better analytical framework not only for the assessment of self-harm but also for using social media to mitigate negative behaviors.