Dangers Of Social Media

Social Media is anything but social: Feeding ducks bread can be detrimental to their health. Bread has little nutritional value; it can lead to overcrowding, disease can spread, and most often, if fed from an early age, ducklings do not learn how to forage for food. And so, when the bread is taken away, the duck can die because it doesn’t have the skills to find food on its own. Granted, we’re not ducks, and the metaphorical relationship is tenuous at best, but a precedent is being set, right now, within the world of social media. The precedent is that it’s okay to be mean, to take the easy way out, to brag ceaselessly about ourselves, and to lie as long as we do it online.

If I ever asked you have you lied about who you really are on the internet? You would be rolling your eyes in annoyance at my accuracy to pinpoint this exact detail about you. It is human nature to create a preppy, perfect and phoney clone of ourselves to appeal to the beautiful crush we have or anger the enemies we want to make jealous all on the fake platform we have created.

Cyberspace

The danger of this platform is how internet marketers manipulate and pressure a certain side of us to be created because of the vulnerability we hold. The internet constantly feeds us and we eventually consume till the weight of our actions crush us. If you ever scroll down to a you tube comment section you will find there has to be at least one problematic, vile comment. You only see that comment because people have a certain get out of jail card that they use as they please and never get caught hurting others online. This card is detrimental and leads up to certain deaths or mental side effects of harmless beings.

Take thirteen years old Megan Meier’s story for example, her downfall was becoming involved in an online friendship with someone who later turned out to be completely fictitious. The person responsible for the creation of this fictitious bait was another young girl, whose main intention was to hurt and mock Megan. This young girl had also been friends with Megan. The young girl created a fake profile for a young boy named Josh and using that profile for her advantage befriended Megan. After the bait had reeled in Megan’s ‘friend’ sent emails from the fake persona of Josh to destroy Megan’s confidence by stating she didn’t deserve happiness and ‘Josh’ wanted nothing to do with her. Megan’s world turned upside down and her frustration and regret got to the better of her and killed her.

So you can see the two weapons of social media are fakeness and the shield. These weapons can utlimately come back to viciously devour us and humiliate you for the complete annihalation we have caused. The hearty conversations we ignore for a scroll down facebook can bug and make us lose our braincells. 50 percent of worldwide Internet users are plugged in to social media, and an expected 71 percent will be by next year. We’re living behind this mask more and more. 91% of 16-24 year olds use the internet for social networking. Social media use is linked with increased rates of anxiety, depression and poor sleep. Research suggests that young people who spend more than 2 hours per day on social media are more likely to report poor mental health, including psychological distress (symptoms of anxiety and depression).

So how do we not fall into this consumeristic black hole?

We start by forcing ourselves not to fall into the ease over communicating on social media when we can right in person. We should start realising that virtual life is barely on par with real life. Our online personas is a mere cover up on who we really want to be and can unfortunately create us to become obsessisve perfectionists. If we never learn from these mistakes and stories we will ultimately forget the importance of a real life conversation, making friends, interacting, debating and social media will eventually become a sadistic substitute. Social media will deprive us of our ability to debate, create and spark curiosity and listen to other peoples voices. We will forget the art of speaking.