Is Social Media Good for Our Society?
Recently, social media has risen in popularity as better technology allows the internet to be more convenient.
People can access the social media, from anywhere, at anytime. This leads to many people, regardless of nationality, age, and ethnicity, to use social media excessively. Whether or not it is texting, or just being unproductive, the idea of not using social media in people’s daily lives is impossible to imagine. People now live in a world where they cannot live without social media. The power that the social media has over humanity cannot be denied.
However, too much of anything can cause serious damage. Even social media, as popular as it is, can become a problem considering the excessive amount of time spent on it every day. From increasing the privacy issues, rekindling gossips, and creating addiction problems, social media causes more issues to rise. Social media allows privacy issues to increase. Nowadays, people carelessly post their private information on the sites, assuming that only their close friends and family will see them. In a survey done by Pew Research Center, “71% [of the surveyed people] post their school name and the city or town they live in, and 82% post their birth date”.
This shows that people willingly post their personal information out in the social networking cites. Sharing personal information like these can be very dangerous, though. Researchers from Cyber Security Research at Lancaster University discovered that many social media do not allow their users to know whether or not their information is being shared with third parties. Due to this, complete strangers can now get the user’s address or any other personal information. They can now grab hold of privacy and use it to their advantage, many times hurting the user’s feelings or reputation.
Also, social media causes a chain reaction, from privacy issues to gossips. People are now better informed and can find out more about someone without the person actually knowing. This creates the temptation to gossip, for like Joseph Conrad said, “gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys”. Now proven as a fact, this statement got justified through a research done by the Social Issues Research Center, in which it discovered that gossip “accounts for 55% of men’s conversation time and 67% of women’s”. With the ever-advancing technology, faster communication is established in social media which leads to gossip spreading faster.
In the past, the only way of gossiping was calling or meeting face-to-face. However, with social media dominating the present world, gossiping took on a whole new level. Distance became a futile matter as the only thing standing between the two people trying to gossip is neither an ocean nor country, but only a text. Lastly, extensive usage of social media creates serious addiction problems. Too much social networking converts many people, regardless of gender, nationality, and age, into addicts.
According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, “more than 500 million users are active participants in the Facebook community alone and studies suggest that between 55% and 82% of teenagers and young adults use SNSs on a regular basis”. This shows just how serious the addiction level of social media is nowadays. Spending too much time on social media, or just staring into the screen of a computer or a phone, can cause headaches, dry eye, and eye strain. Reading dark print on an extremely bright background can lead to spasms of the muscles at the temples, which causes headaches.
Blink rate slows down when one look at things that are closer to one’s face, which means tears evaporate more quickly than when the person was blinking more frequently. This is called having dry eyes, which would lead to itching and strong blinking. Now, with all of these said, social media only puts stress in the body, harming people in the long run. Ultimately, social media not only blurs the distinction between privacy and publicity, but also leads to gossip and addiction. With little effort, a person’s private information gets discovered by third parties without requiring the consent of the person. Also, due to the efficient social media nowadays, gossip and addiction became strong temptations.
Monarchy exists in this world today, causing trouble everywhere it goes, though nobody can really sense it. From privacy issues to addiction problems, countless people suffer under the problems caused by the monarchy. However, the true identity of the monarch of this world cannot be hidden any longer as it revealed itself to be the controller of the users and the mastermind behind all the problems — also known as the social media.
