The Consequences Of Social Media

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Social media is the means of connecting people together via the access to the wide web. It includes sharing, communicating and a large variety of other things. However, social media is ironically making us less social in real life situations. For example, nowadays at any café it is guaranteed to find at least a small group of friends/family sitting down and are not interacting with each other as they are using social media through their smartphones or tablets. Social media gives us a virtual world in which we control making us portray ourselves the way we want to, makes us lose authentic interaction with friends and family, people use social media as a channel to express their thoughts and feelings rather than opening up to family or friends, …show more content…

As Sherry Turkle emphasized “We are designing technologies that will give us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship, we turn to technology to help us feel connected in ways we can comfortably control” (“Connected, but alone?”, TED talks, 2012). This clearly tells us that people are sometimes scared to open up to their friends and family but instead they do anonymously on social media. That is because you are not judged online, but you are afraid to be judged by people in real life when you open up to them, social media as a result makes us less social as it gives us a virtual world that we can control ourselves. Lastly and most importantly, valuable time is lost as we are unaware of how long we use social media for. As researchers once explained “Teenagers spend 27 hours a week on social media” (The Telegraph, para. 4). This shows how long average teenagers waste their time on social media instead of using their time in a more productive way. That is around 4 hours a day using social media, and if they’re awake for 16 hours a day that means they waste 25% of their time on social media. This is a growing problem that needs to be solved by making social sites allow accounts on their website for a certain amount of

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