Social Media

Alsulaiti

Edward Santoro

English 1031

November 29 2016

Social Media Negative Effects

The continuous growth of information technology is leading to an increase in popularity of social media. Research indicates that an individual spends an average of 1.72 hours on social media on a daily basis. In many cases, people utilize social media without considering the effects that the platforms have on themselves, their friends, and the society in general. Social networking sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace allow people to connect with individuals from everywhere around the world, but with positive and negative consequences. The purpose of this paper is to examine critically three of the most negative effects of the use of social media to individuals and the society.

Addiction is also one of the negative effects of using social media. Many individuals, especially the young generation spend countless hours on social networking sites, and this seems to cause problems in other areas of their lives. Many people find it hard to focus on other tasks, and keep o checking their phones, tablets, and laptops for updates on their social media pages. Addiction to these sites mainly affects students and teenagers, whose motivation to class work and other life activities appeared to be diminished, simply because they have access to social media. Additionally, many psychologists claim that such young people rely on the internet for information, rather than physically interacting with people to gain practical expertise and knowledge, especially in matters that concern their lives. Additionally, teenagers tend to be so focused on the internet, and check on one another through the same platforms that they are disconnected from the rest of the society. “Negative effects of social media on social development are generally because of addiction (Issa, Pedro, and Piet 209)

Notification options on social media applications lead to high addiction levels among individuals by playing psychological tricks. In this case, an individual is notified that there is some information that they need to know, but not enough is revealed until the person logs in to the site. This means that valuable time that could have been used to benefit other areas of life is used by going online to check for information that may not be otherwise helpful to the person. Individuals do not realize that the administrators of social media sites want them to remain addicted so that the platforms can survive in the highly competitive sector. Therefore, these internet sites use as many strategies as possible to unsure that people remain glued to their screens for as long as possible rather than spending their time in other important activities.

Social media although beneficial in a multitude of ways affects communication skill negatively. People are unable to develop proper communication skills due to spending too much time on the social media websites where they are alone and not communicating verbally to anyone. In the modern society, more than 90% of the people are using one of the social media platform for their communication. Young people are the most affected by the social media, they start using the social media at a very young age depriving themselves the opportunity to develop effective verbal communication skills (Bolton et al 250). If one was to get into a train, a college class, or university where the students are new, they hardly talk and each is engrossed in his/her smart phone talking to millions of people, but unable to face one of the people in the seat next. The social media does not build verbal communication skills in anyway as one only communicates by typing and posting emoji and images. The increased use of the social media is negatively affecting the verbal communications skills of the youth by a large extent, and of the aged.

The social media is also affecting the listening ability of people, which is a paramount skill in the communication skills. The users of the social media are always engaged with their phones as they reply and comment on a particular subject on the social media platform. The social media platform rarely needs on to listen to any communication and hence the users do not have to develop listening skills to use the sites. In case they have to listen, it is often one-way information where they will only have to listen, but not to listen and reply to the message encoded. The social media has affected negatively on people listening skills needed to support effective communication. By going out on the streets and observing groups of people interacting, it is common to see that one of the parties has to repeat some information severally before the other responds since either of them is on the social media and paying less attention to the speaker. According to Cotterell (12) people are busy chatting on the social media than listening to what another individual has to say.

With the use of social media, individuals reveal a large part of their lives to the online community. It appears that many of the crimes carried out to day are done in social media by utilizing information posted by users. Cyber bullying has become a major effect, and many of the social media users have fallen victim of this issue. Cyber criminals source for information from individual’s pages, twist the information and then send them threatening and intimidating messages. Of course, this effect usually causes other issues, especially in cases where an individual’s self-esteem is lowered and the criminal plays with the person’s psychology. Research indicates that around 33.7% of the individuals that make up the online community have been a victim of cyber bullying, and that many of these turned suicidal after the ordeal.

Social media makes people vulnerable to crime through identity theft that makes people to lose their income to criminals. One of the requirement to join the social media platforms is to provide valid personal information details. Criminals who have IT knowledge are able to hack the social media users and steal the information, which they use to steal from the social media users. The information is used to duplicate the credit cards of the original people and use them to pay bills (Zhu et al 389). In other cases, the information is used to make purchases on credit making the original user pay for the purchase.

Social media in the modern society has come in handy in education the society on various issues and improving the spread of information. However, it has also had negative effect such poor development of communication skills, and addiction. The society is suffering from the uncontrolled use of the social media especially among the youth. It is therefore, important that people understand these effects and hence be able to manage the use of the social media to ensure they avoid the negative effects.

Works Cited

Bolton, Ruth N., et al. "Understanding Generation Y and their use of social media: a review and research agenda." Journal of Service Management 24.3 (2013): 245-267.

Cotterell, John. Social networks in youth and adolescence. New York: Routledge, 2007. Ebook.

Issa, Tomayess, Pedro Isaias, and Piet A. Kommers. Social networking and education : global perspectives. Cham: Springer, 2016. Print.

Zhu, Ying, et al. "A survey of social-based routing in delay tolerant networks: positive and negative social effects." IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials 15.1 (2013): 387-401.

5