Modern Necessity: Negative and Positive Effects of Social Media
The importance of social media is huge, it has become a necessary part of our daily lives and with this relevance comes advantages and disadvantages. Connectivity heedless of distance is one of the main positive effects of social media, however it can cause addiction and lead to mental health issues. This negative and positive effects of social media essay will discuss, in detail, the good and the bad aspects of social media.
Rathnayake and Suthers introduce the concept of momentary connectedness, arguing the troublesomeness of abstract ideas developed to describe the offline world, for example, communities, now being used by social media researchers. They proclaim there should be new conceptions native to the emerging digital world. The new term they introduce, momentary connectedness, defines “an interactional and phenomenological computer-mediated publicness that allows polymorphism across layers of communication.” An issue-response network is used as a case-study to claim that hashtags can arrange occurrences of momentary connectedness into networks. Groups with different orientations can co-exist within the same topical network through the use of hashtagged tweets supporting different audiences, allowing people to connect, momentarily, in socially meaningful ways.
Social media’s purpose; connection is one of its main positive effects, the demand for working long hours and loved ones living in separate cities can act as barriers between people. Social media’s expeditious rise is a loud, genuine attempt by people everywhere to connect. They are connecting even with all the obstacles modernity forces on lives. Regarding this, a study was conducted to measure how abroad students were impacted by the advancement of social media, results showed 62% of students contacted friends and family 2-6 times per week. It’s clear that without social media, this wouldn't have been possible due to the time constraints that are present in traditional methods of communication. However, the study adversely showed that social media had a negative effect on their abroad experience; people wanted to remain connected to the online communities, yet their use of technologies prevented them from full cultural immersion, suggesting that we are more disconnected from the present moment.
Social media allows people to access breaking news events faster than ever. News articles shared on platforms like Facebook or Twitter allow major world events to spread rapidly across the world, meaning individuals can react quicker or even help. The Haiti earthquake in January 2010 is a prime example, more than 100,000 people lost their lives and millions more needed food and shelter. Soon after the earthquake happened International Red Cross started an appeal for aid on social media platforms. Very quickly, they raised millions of dollars to help earthquake victims. It's obvious that without social media this event wouldn’t have spread as widely and as rapidly as it did, it would have caused a sense of helplessness and the number of people who lost their lives in Haiti would have grown massively.
The final point I will be making towards the positive effects of social media is brought to our attention by Quinns, using a wait-list control design, her research analyzed the cognitive effects of social media training in older adult social media users. She chose to use older adults as they often cite a lack of digital skills, and confidence in them, as a reason to not engage with social media platforms. Their low levels of social media use means that instructional and informational support enables them to build self-efficacy and skills in using these media more actively. Thus an instructional session can be used as an experimental intervention to gauge the cognitive effects of learning new technology. Four cognitive domains shaped the research focus for the effects of social media engagement, these included, attention, processing speed, working memory and inhibitory control. The findings indicate that purely using social media has positive effects for older adults; showing us that there are benefits of using social media beyond mere social engagement, as it can also support well being by improving information processing speed and cognitive functioning.
It is clear that social media has many positive effects, but many scientists warn that social media can also harm us in various ways. A study at the University of Pennsylvania examined how social media users have an increased fear of missing out. Participants were split into two groups, one limited their time on social media to 20 minutes a day, while the other continued to use it as usual. The researchers tracked the participants’ social media usage automatically, and the participants completed surveys about their well-being and mood. After three weeks, the group who limited their social media said that they felt less lonely and depressed than the people who had no social media limits. Melissa Hunt, who led the study explained,
“Using less social media than you normally would, leads to significant decrease in both depression and loneliness. These effects particularly pronounced those who were more depressed when they came into the study”.
She also suggests that the reason for feeling depressed boils down to comparison. When we are viewing someone else’s curated life online, it’s very easy to see their perfect pictures and think their lives are better than your own.
Other research has shown that depression can be caused by social media use due to the chemical dopamine. Dopamine is produced by our brains as an association to pleasure, it is released preceding activities like smoking, gambling, drinking and, crucially, successful social interactions. Cognitive neuroscientists have shown that the same dopaminergic reward pathways are activated when we experience rewarding social stimuli; laughing faces, messages from loved ones and positive acknowledgment. Social media has provided us with an unlimited virtual supply of social stimuli. Every notification, whether it be a message, a like, or a comment, has the potential to be a dopamine influx, in other words, social media is highly addictive. As teenagers go through adolescence this becomes a problem, as it constitutes temporary relief from associated stress, anxiety and depression. Once addicted to social media it becomes easy to be vulnerable to social approval as individuals start to truly care about what other people think, minds become unprotected to other people's opinions. When individuals post they don't always get the positive feedback they were hoping for, this leads to self-doubt and thus to a potential increase in mental health issues.
As stated in a previous paragraph social media being used for news consumption makes rapid dissemination easy. However, it also enables the widespread of ‘fake news’ - low-quality news with intentionally false information. The spread of fake news creates the possibility for extreme negative impact on individuals and society. Concurrently endangering society of manipulation by malicious actors. Inaccurate beliefs can imperil to democracy and fake news constitutes a particularly egregious and direct avenue by which beliefs have been promulgated via social media. Relatedly, this reduces people's ability to differentiate between fake and real news. Over time fake news can cause certain opinions on people, leading to prejudice on how individuals and communities are seen. This can have a huge impact on important matters, for example, the 2016 election. On the run-up to the election, 30 million fake pro-trump articles were shared on facebook, while 8 million fake pro-Clinton articles were shared. Just over half of those who recalled seeing these fake news stories said they believed them; giving high indication of fake news impacting the outcome of an election.
Obar and Oelforf highlight how clickwraps are contributing to the darkside of social media. A clickwrap is a “digital prompt that facilitates consent processes by affording users the opportunity to quickly accept or reject digital media policies.” They have begun to be the presiding form of consent on social media platforms that someone encounters when making an account. Research shows clickwraps tend to divert attention away from policies related to privacy by giving the impression that consent materials are insignificant. The result means platforms are gaining legal rights to users’ data, due to the normalization of circumvention of legal consent materials. This manipulation of users sacrifices privacy in order to provide economic advantages for companies.
Finally, it’s argued that social media is decreasing the quality of individuals’ relationships. When using social media people don't talk deeply or for very long, showing that we are beginning to expect more from technology and less from one another. We desire technologies that provide a false idea of relationships, without the demands of a real-world relationship. Social media sets up a sense of anonymity and protection due to not being face to face with who you are talking to, it's said that when you speak to people in person, you're forced to be aware of their full human reality, which in turn creates empathy. Lack of empathy has greatly increased due to the decrease in eye to eye interactions, leading to a surge in cyberbullying. Social media provides easy pathways for cyberbullying, leading to individuals having low self-esteem, withdrawing from social situations, losing weight or changing appearances and even things as serious as depression and anxiety. The usefulness of social media is a very controversial topic as it has many arguments for both sides. I personally believe that social media is positive when, and only when usage time is controlled, privacy is ensured and fake news is exposed so people can choose their own truths. In the future, I think we will see a rise in the cost of social media and alot more age restrictions put in place, in order to regulate usage.
