Negative effects of social media
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Negative effects of social media
Social media has become part of our daily lives in this technological era. It has been positively embraced because of its economic reasons. This is especially true in the corporate world where companies can market their products faster and in a cost-effective way. Today, both children and adults celebrate social media for making it easier to connect with friends and family. Social media has been helpful in society. Nevertheless, it is essential to note that everything has its positive and negative sides. This is the same with social media. Even though social media has helped in connecting people globally, we should minimize the time we spend on it because of its negative impacts.
The negative impacts of social media can be noticed in people’s social lives. Ironically, social media has helped connect people worldwide, but they are lonelier. This is attributed to the fact that social media has eliminated the traditional way of interacting, which is face-to-face. According to Turkle (2011), real human contacts are now sporadic because people focus on their communications with the pseudo-human connections on social media. It currently a familiar scenario to spot a group of friends seated together but spend very little time talking to each other because they are glued to their phones. This is proof that social media is slowly taking control of humans (Mouakket, 2015). Before the introduction of social media, friends valued their physical or face-to-face contacts. This had some positive impacts on their social skills and health. However, currently, social media is affecting people’s social skills because it discourages real-life conversations, which consist of both verbal and non-verbal communication. This makes it difficult for people to connect. Consequently, it leads to loneliness despite their daily interactions on social media. People are now lonelier because social media has made it difficult for them to create meaningful relationships in the real world. A healthy social life requires people to develop and comfort in other people to ensure supportive interaction. However, social media has robbed humans of this privilege since people can express their feeling on the virtual platform.
Social media is also among the causes of an identity crisis, especially among teenagers in the current society (Rosefield, 2015). Social has created unrealistic images of how people should be in their real lives. This is among the reasons for the insecurities experienced by teenagers. For instance, through social media, teenagers get misleading images of how their bodies, relationships, and belongings should be. Consequently, this has contributed to self-esteem issues among teenagers. The struggle to meet the unrealistic image standards set by social media sometimes leads to depression. Many people, especially teenagers’ insecurities, are determined by the number of likes or tweets they get. The unrealistic perceptions of life that is portrayed on social media has even made some to commit suicide for failing to meet the high standard. The dram on the social is not worth it. Instead, people should focus on connecting with friends and families physically.
The other detrimental effect of social media is that it has encouraged cyberbullying. Teenagers are especially vulnerable to cyberbullying because they spend more time on social media. Through social media, cyberbullies have been threatening people. They take advantage of the fact that they can commit such crimes without revealing their identities. In the real world, the bullies would be afraid of issuing such threats less; they get caught. However, on social media, there have been incidences of teenagers fearing to show up in school or public places because of the threats issued by cyberbullies. Through social media, people can use words that can hurt others. Online communities overlook the fact that words can be harmful, especially to teenagers. The hurtful words said by cyberbullies on social media can cause suicide among some people. The attacks by cyberbullies have negatively affected the emotions of their victims. This is especially true for children who are not mentally strong to handle the harsh comments of cyberbullies.
Social media has also been destructive to some relationships. It may be easier to create relationships on social media; however, maintaining them is difficult. Social media has been responsible for creating conflicts that have destroyed relationships (Rello & Baeza-Yates, 2012). Since people can quickly get information on what their friends or spouses are doing, it may create jealousy and trust issues in relationships. For instance, if a spouse is liking on commenting on another person’s picture or posts, it can create tension, which may further break ties. This is also among the factors that have contributed to loneness in the current era of social media. Moreover, since some people may feel uneasy about breaking their relationship on a face-to-face basis, social media has made it easier for them since they simply need to send a break message.
Conclusively, people should minimize the time they spend on social media because of its destructive effects. Total avoidance of social media is almost impossible, currently. However, minimizing it can reduce the cases of cyberbullying, especially among teenagers. It will also help in lowering identity issues that have affected the self-esteem of many teenagers in the current society. Minimizing social media usage will encourage people to interact on a face-to-face basis. This will help in improving people’s social health and, in turn, reduce the issues of loneliness.
References
Mouakket, Samar. (2015). Perceived Usefulness of Facebook: Effects of Personality Traits and Gender. Journal of Advances in Information Technology. 111-117. 10.12720/jait.6.3.111- 117.
Rello, Luz & Baeza-Yates, Ricardo. (2012). Social Media is Not that Bad! The Lexical Quality of Social Media. ICWSM 2012 – Proceedings of the 6th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.
Rosenfield, K. (2015). “A Case Study: Sherry Turkle and the Psychological Role of Computers.” In Digital Online Culture, Identity, and Schooling in the Twenty-First Century, pp.31-61
Turkle, S. (2011). Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Basic Books