Nowadays Social Media plays an important role in our life, we are using it to keep in touch with our friends and make some new friends. Besides that we want to show the world what we are doing by means of posting pictures or videos. These tools are all very useful, but do they control our life too much? A few years ago Social Media wasn’t that big yet, but nowadays people are able to use it for almost anything in their daily life. Why would people buy CD’s when we have youtube? Why would people buy newspapers when we have Facebook and Twitter? When you just wake up and open your eyes, you don’t have to go out of bed to see what’s going on in the rest of the world. Everything looks and feels easier to do with social media.
But is the impact of social media in our daily life too much? Browsing on Social Media websites can make you feel connected to a larger community, but according to Steven Strogatz of the Cornell University this is a false sense of connection. Social media can make it difficult for us to distinguish between important relationships from the real world and normal relationships formed through social media. Due to our social media relationships there will be a higher chance that our most meaningful relationships will weaken. The second negative impact of social media is that especially children are very sensitive for cyber-bullying. Through social media it’s easier for bullies to terrorize their victims anonymously and this will tend to deep mental scars at the people who are getting bullied. The phenomena Cyber-bullying is growing very fast the last years, nowadays 42% of the children is reporting that they have been victims of bullying. The main reason of suicidal thoughts is the anonymity that the bullies afforded online and that is all with the help of social media websites.
Social media causes not only problems for individual people, it’s also a problem for many businesses nowadays. Social media websites are very useful for companies to keep in touch with their customers and get some important information about them, but there is also a negative side. There will be a chance that employees are more interested in their own personal Facebook timeline than in their work tasks. It will decrease the work productivity when people are influenced the whole day by social media instead of more important things. A research of Morse claimed that only British companies lost 2.2 billion a year due to social networking sites.
The fact is that there are advantages and disadvantages of social media. I think you can’t say that is controlling our life too much, because nowadays it is very important and in the future it will be more and more important. So in my opinion we have to continue with social media and tools like that, but we have to be aware of the influence of social media.
Sources:
http://smallbusiness.chron.com/negative-effect-social-media-society-individuals-27617.html
I think there is no way to argue the importance of social media in today’s society. There are many positives to it with just some of them being communicating with people across the globe at any time of the day and receiving a quick response, seeing places and the things your friends are doing, as well as keep them up to date with what you’re doing. Despite the positives I think social media has become like a drug, where so many people are dependent on it and cannot function without checking their social media pages. The main problem with this, aside from cyberbullying, is that it causes people to lose out on experiences they could be having. I think when people are so focused on social media they forget to enjoy life, for instance if you’re on vacation. Some people will spend most their time taking pictures by the beach or famous landmarks and then spend the remaining time editing them. Instead of actually being in the moment and enjoying themselves and gaining experiences that would last a lifetime, they are more preoccupied with making their online life the priority. Another point is that that I personally think is true, is that social media will slowly start to limit people’s ability to communicate as well as before: pre-social media. Unlike when you’re having a face-to-face conversation where you need to think of a response and topics of discussion on the spot, online gives people the ability to respond after carefully orchestrating what it is they want to say. Although there are positives to this, it is not organic and can lead to people creating a facade. I myself enjoy going on social media, but I do sometimes wish people were less focused on it and instead would go out and enjoy life without having to constantly take pictures and post updates online.