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Addicted to Social Media

The Internet has a strong capability to connect, mobilize, and influence people all over the world. Rapid technological progress has already made the internet a commonplace. Due to the impetuous development of technology, the relationship between people has undergone through significant changes. A notable change is particularly, the tools which people use to communicate with each other. Such tools include the web and social media, such as Facebook, that human depend on for easy communication. Social media is important, because it is an effective driver of globalization and tool for easy communication.

Social Media first appeared with the American portal, Classmates.com, in 1995. The project was very successful and led to the emergence of more than a dozen of similar services within the following few years (“The History of Social Networking,” 2014). However, the official start of the boom of social media, in particular, social networks, is considered to be between the years 2003-2004. During this period, a number of social networks were launched such as, Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn (“The History of Social Networking,” 2014). It is important to note that LinkedIn was created in order to establish/maintain business contacts. As for MySpace and Facebook, their sole purpose was primarily based on meeting self-expression as a human need. Notably, according to Maslow's pyramid, self-expression is the highest human need, ahead of recognition and communication (McLeod, 2007).

Social media has enable people from different walks of life to easily connect and communicate through social networks. Without such media, it would have been nearly impossible to communicate and keep intimate relationship with a person from a different continent. Today, such connection and communication has been possible because social media has identified the trends in the development of the Internet in the direction of integration, by combining features into single multi-user web-based platforms (Deen, 2012 ). These platforms allow users to chat with friends, read news, watch movies, listen to music, share the information with other users, take part in discussions, create community with people worldwide., Such opportunities are concentrated on a single social network site.

Social media has a formed a community where people share their experiences and common interests. As Scheepers and Stockdale (2014) posits, social networking has become a kind of "online shelter", where everyone can find a technical and social base to create their virtual identity (pp. 31). In addition, each user has the opportunity, not only to communicate and create, but also to share their creativity with an audience of millions, through the social network. Undoubtedly, social media is a great technological achievement, which promises many opportunities. However, along with all these opportunities, social media has a negative side.

Social media have great addictive potential thus, a significant risk of dependence. In recent years, the issue of dependency on social media has become quite relevant (Deen, 2014). It is still the same Internet addiction, which was officially recognized as a psychological disorder, but in more concrete form. To prove such addition, recent researches have shown that social media have already covered more than half of all Internet users (Dijck, 2013). There are several reasons of such dependence. One reason is that spending time on social media annoys the pleasure centers in the human brain (Griffiths, 2013). People experience positive emotions by spending their time in social media. Listening to music, reading the news, read friendly comments under the photo, receiving a "Like", or when someone leaves a positive feedback, all this improves the mood and makes life more interesting. The desire to re-obtain all these positive emotions forces people to spend more time in social media.

As stated by Griffith (2013), more dependency lies in the peculiarities of information assimilation while visiting multi-user web-based platforms. For example, a person, who sits on Facebook, gets a lot of diverse information in small portions over a small period of time. A person can read a short comment, reply to the same, read some news, and listen to music, all under a single platform thus, there is a range of almost simultaneous actions. With time, the human brain is able to adapt to such simultaneous operations. Dependency does not only lie in the pleasure and features of information assimilation, but in the convenience and accessibility of social media. Eventually, it becomes easy to get pleasure from the other person's opinion of ones photos. In a single click, one can see exactly the number of people that actually like a photo for instance, uploaded on Facebook. Usually, it is enough to just open Facebook or Twitter and start reading the news; the process is quick and convenient. Griffiths (2013) agrees that quickness, as well as accessibility, is important prerequisites for the formation of any dependence.

People are instinctively looking for the easiest ways to achieve pleasure, even if these paths are inefficient and lead to harmful consequences. The dependence on spending time on social media leads to a number of problems of different nature. One of the main problems is a reduction in duration of concentration/attention (Scheepers & Stockdale, 2014). The human brain gets used to such rapid handling of information and gradually loses the ability to hold the attention on something for a long time. Over time, excessive dependence on social media leads to the development of attention deficit disorder and hyperactivity. This is a side effect, which is generated by the idea of integration of information: when working with a single web interface starts to combine a variety of functions such as communication, listening to music, as well as discussion of meetings. The user starts to operate with all these processes almost simultaneously, performing multiple processes in parallel. Furthermore, information on social media is easy to find, but it becomes difficult for one to pay attention to concept for a long time. Such easy to find and quick information affects the abilities of the human mind; it becomes difficult to concentrate for a long time. This problem is especially acute in the context of the rising generation. Children's thinking is much more "plastic" than adults therefore; it is easier for them to adopt standards of harmful thinking that is formed by social networks (Deen, 2012 p. 82). Lack of proper concentration destroyed the traditional way of acquiring knowledge through reading books. At the long end, on-going children become poor learners and student performance decreases.

Social media has adequate information at the disposal of its users. Most users are addicted to this information giving tool that they can almost not live without. Dijick (2013), states that social media may turn into a kind of "cud" for the brain (p. 64). People get used to constantly getting new information, and if this does not happen, they begin to feel the great lack of information. Living in continuous mode of flow of information, the brain gets tired and the body is under greater stress (Scheepers & Stockdale, 2014). When a person spends much time on social networks, the human brain is engaged in meaningless and purposeless activity, which is not a full-fledged intellectual work. The user does not have enough time to thoroughly realize and consider this information, as it arrives quickly and continuously. A person cannot even say what he/she liked the most, as he/she was in a hurry to "swallow" everything as quickly as possible, and there were no time to form any estimate, and some emotional response. Such feelings as compassion, empathy, commitment, and enthusiasm disappear, not having time to really take shape in the human psyche, as information replaces abruptly.

In conclusion, it can be stated that social media is a computer technology that have received considerable spread in the Internet world today. Social media has contributed to globalization and is a great communication tool. Nevertheless, this media has its negative side as well. The formation of human psychological dependence on social media is one of the negative consequences of its proliferation. Overdependence on social networks has especially negative impact on kids and teenagers by forming improper and harmful standards of thinking. Despite all the negative aspects about the social media dependency, these Internet resources are not something entirely negative; people just have to use them wisely. Social media have a number of useful features that make it easier to live and work.

References

Dijck, J. (2013). The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford: Oxford UP.

Deen, S. (2012). Social Media: Usage and Impact. Lanham, Md.: Lexington..

Griffiths, M. (2013) "Social Networking Addiction: Emerging Themes and Issues." Nottingham Trent University. Web. 13 Mar. 2015., from <http://omicsonline.org/social-networking-addiction-emerging-themes-and-issues-2155-6105.1000e118.pdf>

McLeod, S. (2007). "Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs." Simply Psychology. Web. 13 Mar. 2015., from <http://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html>

Scheepers, H., and Rosemary, S. (2014). "The Dependent Variable in Social Media Use." Journal of Computer Information Systems. Web. 13 Mar. 2015., from <http://iacis.org/jcis/articles/JCIS54-2-3.pdf>

"The History of Social Networking." (2014). Digital Trends. Web. 13 Mar. 2015., from <http://www.digitaltrends.com/features/the-history-of-social-networking/>