Social media use among youths has impacted their education positively and negatively. One significant effect is that social media use has led to the sharing and distribution of educational materials, hence knowledge acquisition. However, too much usage has led to an addiction to jargon and abbreviations. Most social media users use the abbreviations but cannot spell them in real life. Also, some youths using social media use terms blindly because they cannot define or give their true meaning. Some of these words are abusive, yet the users use them confidently because they do not understand their true meaning. When spelled, some abbreviations have more than one meaning. For instance, ‘tml,’ a commonly used abbreviation by many youths when commenting on social media, may have different meanings, such as thank me later, too much love or even tomorrow, maybe late. When such terms are used, they may cause confusion and misunderstanding among social media users because they are unaware of the intentions of the user.
The excessive use of abbreviations and slang names may spread to academics. Youths may become used to such teams, forget the right words and use them in their writing, resulting in poor performance in class. For example, when writing, some may write
‘gonna’ instead of ‘going to.’ This impacts their writing skills. It may also result in misspelling of words because users may get confused about the right spelling of the word. This is because every social media user tries to write words in the simplest way possible and others may get used to such words and when writing them in their academic, they may misspell them.
Lastly, social media use may degrade English by eroding language norms and grammar, causing language degradation over time.
