The Impact Of Social Network Sites On Communication
In today’s society, it is more likely to find someone with some sort of social media account than it is to find someone without one. In the past several years the increase in social media accounts has gone up exponentially, completely changing the way humans have been interacting with one another. Social networking makes it easy to connect with people from almost anywhere in the world within seconds, while also making news spread faster than ever. In June 2018, more than 50% of the total population was using the Internet alone. With the somewhat recent creation of social media sites, the time elapsed in front of the computer screens has also increased greatly. Due to this, a lot less face-to-face communication is occurring within a family and on a broader social environment range. While social networks allow individuals to have an almost unlimited outreach of people to talk to, the interactions are brief and shallow and do not by any means suffice actual in-person interaction.
On the internet, social network sites make up the most popular platform by far. A study conducted in Germany, asked a student body if they used the internet on a daily basis and 100% of them responded that they did in fact use the internet daily, showing how widespread it especially is within adolescent. Since there is such a prevalent use of social networking sites nowadays, this study is aimed at investigating whether there are negative outcomes on one’s mental health by using them and interacting with them so frequently. Even though the internet advances can be beneficial in many ways including spreading critical news, finding out questions to our answers in record time, and connecting us to friends and family are the world, recent research has suggested that some psychiatric disorders come with using online social networking on the internet.
Other research has looked into personality traits associated with its use and came back with results of positive correlations with extraversion and also openness traits. Suggesting that the number of friends and time spent on these sites was correlated to people’s behavior. On sites where people can upload pictures and videos to obtain likes was also positively correlated with the personality trait of narcissism. Clearly, past research has proven that parts of a person’s personality can be determined by how often they use social media, who they allow to follow them and how often they post. But what does it do to their brain biologically? How does it affect their own mental health?
We believe that the more one uses any social media platform, the more like they are to compare themselves to others and care more about what others think, leading us to hypothesize that it is not beneficial to one’s mental health to use social media regularly. We also believe that it is more likely for someone who uses social media sites to develop depressive and anxiety symptoms as one becomes more involved and invested in it. Anxiety disorders are the largest category of diagnosis’ in the United States, and with the rise of social networking sites and people using them this study is aimed at how much they correlate especially in adolescence and young adults, since they are the largest age group with social media accounts.
