Social Media’s Monster

As technology has grown so has people’s abilities to communicate. In modern society today you often cant meet someone new without hearing the question, “What’s your Instagram?” or “Do you have Snapchat?” Although social media may help bring people together and communicate easier. Truly, social media leads to laziness and unrealistic expectations of people as seen in the swift decline in teens’ mental health and attention span.

A negative trait created by social media is often laziness. People who are always using social media, especially the app TikTok suffer from a poor attention span. Opponents will argue these apps will not affect important parts of their lives. However, they are incorrect as the implementation of “shorts” or “reels” on other platforms has created a mindless scrolling epidemic. Which is affecting people’s work, school, and social lives. These acts of mindless scrolling create consequences that can set people back or change their lives, such as getting fired from prioritizing looking at their phone at work or causing students to fail classes as they are too busy on their phones to pay attention and do the work. If people don’t stop focusing on their phones society will be full of lazy people, who lack work ethics, attention span, and ambition. And the world will be full of mindless phone zombies.

Often when you scroll through social media you’ll see these fitness influencers and Instagram “models” who often promote people to look more like they do. It has been argued that influencers like these often can help people with poor images of their physical appearance, and that is the case in some examples. Although more often than not these influencers’ messages are taken negatively, And the photos of these models or influencers are often photoshopped or have filters. A majority of social media models also promote expensive plastic surgeries in order to make them look more appealing. The use of filters, photoshop, and plastic surgery creates unrealistic body images. This pushes young teens to often try to be something they could never be and creates a negative and poor body image and low self-esteem, which is one of the leading causes of depression in teens.

Social media is a plague on modern society today. What help is communicating better when the negative effects of social media are going to hurt others. Creating laziness and unrealistic body images not only hurts people but hurts society, hurting the job market, people’s education, and their own self-worth. If social media becomes less about trying to be like others and more about being yourself and sharing your experiences. Social media will always be creating a monster. That one day will change the world as we know it.

Featured Image; “Automotive Social Media Marketing” by socialautomotive is licensed under CC BY 2.0.