The Downsides of Social Media

In a time where technology is constantly evolving, social media has become more and more popular. It has gotten to the point where the amount of people who don’t use social media are a fraction of the people that do. While it may seem like a positive thing because of its convenience, there are many downsides that come with it that make it out to be a negative thing. Social media has affected people in many different ways including; addiction, bad mental health, and unrealistic expectations. If you understand that these things are detrimental, then you will know what to expect from social media.

I personally have fallen in the social media trap of becoming addicted to my phone. If I’m bored, I’ve created a muscle memory of grabbing my phone and opening Instagram. The constant notifications and bad habits can be very distracting and prevent you from spending quality time with family or from what you are supposed to be doing. This addiction can lower someone’s productivity and stop them from focusing on the task at hand. If you can step back and realize that you are addicted to social media, then you can try to control it.

Scrolling through social media you always see the perfect examples of everything because they get the most likes and shares. This perpetuates the idealized version of people’s lives, making them have a distorted view of reality. Constantly seeing these things gives you false expectations and for some it may lead to mental illness and obsession over a false sense of reality. When people don’t meet these false expectations they can become depressed and experience other psychological issues.

You often see on social media people “friending” each other. This is a cheap cop-out for a genuine face to face real relationship with another person. This is also very similar to people leaving positive superficial comments on other people’s posts when in reality they either don’t like this person or they don’t even know them. This has given people a false sense of what a friend truly looks like because for some it may just be a button/number on a screen. This is how social media can create a lack of true human connection.

An upside to social media is how you can spread information easily and quickly. It makes things like spreading party invitations, GoFundMe links, and other stuff very easy. It allows for communication to a large audience (or small) to spread a message, or just so you can send your friends funny videos. While social media has its downsides, I still use it on a daily basis. I have acknowledged these downsides and since I’m aware of them, I’m less prone to fall to things like these superficial friendships. I still believe social media is worth having because the positive outweighs the negative for me.

“BlackBerry Storm Smartphone” by liewcf is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.