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Positives and negatives of social media
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Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter allow you to find and connect with just about anyone, from old high school friends to co-workers and neighbors. Participating in social media sites such as these can make you feel more connected, but such an easy, casual connection in an electronic environment can also have its downside.
First of all sites like Facebook promote sharing details of our lives with one another. Posts can range from a simple update on what shows someone is watching, cooking for dinner, or pictures of you and your friends having drinks and doing shots at a local bar. Where this becomes a problem is when people begin to bypass the filters they normally would use in person and post more personal things that can be incriminating. Something as simple as a picture of your friends doing shots may not appear harmless to you, but to a future employer this does not look very good.
Another issue that social media presents is that it allows for cyber bullying. Cyber bullying has become a major issue for teenagers in more recent years, as it allows its victim's "friends" to post things in front of their peers. Cyber bullying can also take other forms such as email, text, chat rooms, mobile phones, mobile phone cameras. Those who cyber bully someone also have the ability to pose as someone else, or even create false identity to terrorize their victims. National Children's Home study in Britain found that one in four children reported being bullied on the Internet. This issue can and has left teenagers with deep mental scars, and has even lead to teen suicides (Campbell, 2005).
Along with the issues previously mentioned, social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter can also create a false sense of connection.
“I didn't know what Facebook was, and now that I do know what it is, I have to say, it sounds like a huge waste of time –Betty White (“Betty White Quotes,” 2014, para. 1).” This quote can be interpreted to fit with several of the social media avenues that many people spend their time on. Day in and day out people post, tweet, share, and pin countless times throughout the world. These different forms of communication were first created for an easier way for people to connect with others. Yet now, so much time is spent on these social sites that it has warped the interactive part and is causing more damage than good. Many are growing a desire and are living for the amount of “likes” they can receive on a post or how many re-tweets they can generate. Instead of going to these outlets to participate in a partial portion of their social lives, people are filling that time with the technological aspect of communication. As White said, this can become an inordinate amount of wasted time and can ultimately grow into further damaging circumstances. These different social media channels can cause emotional harm through disparaging the relationship between friends, conjuring of a narcissistic personality, and the retrogradation of ones self-esteem.
Social media first started in 1979, with post to newsgroups and bulletin boards. Next came the chat room, which Compuserve introduced in 1980. Social networking may only be thirty-six years old but it this short time it has redefined our society. Most people within society may view the impact of social media to positive, but there are others, such as myself, which would argue social media is doing more harm than good because it is robbing us of our privacy, weakens our verbal communication skills with others and can become an addiction.
The use of social networking sites is rising at great rates. According to a report conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in 2012, ninety-five percent of individuals aged 12-17 use the internet; and eighty-one percent of those use social network sites (Pew Interest). Although it is known that social media can have a useful impact on lives, often times people forget that with a positive comes a negative. The continual use of social network sites will impact teen lives more negatively than positively because they can cause huge distractions from valuable and critical pursuits like education; they can also cause mental health issues and a reduction in communication skills.
Technology has given individuals the opportunity to change the game of bullying. Cyber-bullying is one of the most common forms of bullying as of today. The Internet has no boundaries so the public has access to endless and countless number of things. Cyber-bully is the electronic posting of mean-spirited messages about a person (as a student) often done anonymously according to Merriam-Webster dictionary. While traditionally bullying and cyber-bullying are very comparable in forms of technique that also have many differences. Cyber-bullying gives the bully the benefit of hiding their identity behind a screen. This makes it easier to tear people down because they do not have to come in contact with anyone. It’s the easiest form of bullying. These can happen in text messages, chat rooms, email, websites, excluding people from certain online activities, digital photos, and social media. Cyber bullies have unlimited supplies of ways to hurt someone. It is difficult to conduct a study on cyber-bullying because the majority of people will not confess or admit to it. Instead, in the article “Cyber-bullying among adolescents: Measures in search of a construct.” Researchers sit and listen through the grapevine on what is going on inside of schools. They found out that cyber-bullying is more dealt with within adolescents than traditional interaction bullying. (Mehari, K. R., Farrell, A. D., & Le, A. H.) Cyber-bullying can cause more
In this day and age, many individuals simply cannot go without some sort of socialization. Specifically speaking, most participate in online social networking sites. The most popular and used one is commonly known as Facebook. Facebook was created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg. By 2007, Facebook had over 21 million users, adding up to 1.6 billion page views every single day. The typical user spends over twenty minutes per day on Facebook and two thirds of the users log in every day at least once. It is not questionable as to why many people have a Facebook account. Facebook is generally efficient, easy for socialization, and not difficult to manage. Most organizations are affiliated with Facebook, as “almost 22,000 organizations had Facebook directories,” as of November 2006. A year after that in 2007, Facebook was named the seventh most popular website (Ellison 1). However, with anything well known, many oppose to using Facebook and hold criticism against the popular network. There are many flaws in the website and the relationships it starts online. Facebook is risking dangerous activities, ignoring privacy laws, and demeaning healthy socialization.
Social media has impacted everyone that has used it some point in his or her life. Since the world is increasing in technology advances, so is social media which can be good and bad. Technology has made a huge difference in the world and definitely how people are doing things now. Yes, the Internet can be good for the majority of things we use it for such as finding research, keeping in touch with family or friends who are far away, and saving time and money. Others like to take advantage of social media and use it in a way that can hurt people; it may not hurt them physically, but it can hurt them emotionally. Examples of how some people use the Internet in a bad way include cyberbullying, identity theft, or cyberstalking. Social media has impacted the Millennial generation for sure.
Facebook and other social media platforms have brought communication across the world to a whole new level. The rise of social media has created a place for children to communicate with others in both a positive and negative manner. Although it has made a positive impact on American youth, it has also contributed and exacerbated bullying in our schools. This new form of bullying, often referred to as cyberbullying, has created an around-the-clock atmosphere where bullying can occur even when school is not in session. Many professionals have sought to address the negative aspects of social media and have worked to develop a solution to bring cyberbullying to an end.
Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter seem user-friendly but we should never rely on them as a
As we are living in the age of technology, we are seeing our youth being victimized by a new phenomenon of bullying, called cyberbullying. Cyberbullying is defined as the use of information and communication technologies such as email, cell phones and pager text messages, instant messaging, defamatory personal Web sites, and defamatory online personal polling Web sites, to support deliberate repeated and hostile behavior by an individual or group, which is intended to harm others. Cyberbullying can also employ media such as PDAs, blogs, and social networks (Beckstrom, 2008). This form of bullying is progressive because it can happen instantly due to the technology involved, whereas traditional bullying tends to take longer to evolve and happens
Today social media has become a big influence on society. There are many different social media sites that allow people to interact with others. Such social media sites are Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. There are many more different sites, but these are the popular networks that are being used today. These sites allow you to connect with anybody you want to. Social media sites can make you feel connected with others and seem like the best thing, but at the same time it can be a weakness that many of us have.
Social media has nothing but negative effects on people’s minds. Social networking can become very addicting and people can get wrapped up in the drama and excitement of the cyber world. It would only improve our society today if social media never existed to our knowledge. Our society today feels so connected with social media that it interferes with our lives making every task even harder with the temptations.
Before students only had to worry about being bullied at school, but due to technology advances and the use of social media, teenagers can be bullied twenty four- seven. Cyberbullying causes a huge impact on students and when they are too busy with the anxiety of being bullied their grades can suffer or they can even drop out. According to HealthDay News, 9,590 students were surveyed from 580 U.S. schools. Compared to kids who were not bullied, students that were cyberbullied experienced a 0.049 drop in their GPA between grades 9 and 12. This number is too big when you think about the potential students have but the constant bullying by their peers on social media effects that. For some, dropping out or taking the bad grades feels like their only option. Some teenagers that get cyberbullied on social media can’t take the constant criticism, which can lead to suicide. An example is Hannah Smith, a 14-year old student from England. Smith had been on ask.fm, a social networking site that allows people to ask questions anonymously. Cyberbullies urged her to drink bleach and cut herself. Eventually she couldn’t take the bullying any longer and committed suicide. Social media has a huge impact on these suicides because it’s through these websites that these teens are being bullied by other students. If teens don’t stop soon the side effects of cyberbullying
Furthermore, browsing sites such as Facebook may lead to low morale, as people begin to measure their self-worth with the amount of “likes” they receive. Ironically, although social media sites boast their ability to connect people, they mainly separate society even more as people become isolated behind their screens. Social media is damaging to a person’s life because it can lower self-esteem, isolate people from real relationships, and cause privacy concerns as marketers, employers, and school officials can view information posted online.
Children are often bullied in school, but they can also be bullied online. Cyber-bullying is bullying over devices and often using social media to conduct it. It has become common due to the rapidly increasing use of social media. The bullying is done by sharing embarrassing or demeaning content of one another or writing cruel messages. Some take it a step further and create fake accounts to anonymously harass a person, or even use the fake account to impersonate that person. Due to social media, cyber-bullying is a harsh reality that children are being born
Stutzky suggests that cyber bullying is the use of modern communication technologies to embarrass, humiliate, threaten, or intimidate an individual in the attempt to gain power and control over them. Bullying has been around since the beginning of time. These days however, bullying isn’t just happening on the playground, it’s happening on the internet and mobile phones, making it possible to bully a child 24 hours a day. Cyber bullying follows children around the clock and into the safety of their own bedrooms. A recent survey by MindOh!, an educational company that follows youth trends, reported that nearly 80% of the 5,500 teens that were surveyed said that they had been exposed to cyber bullying. Cyber bullying affects the mental health of so many young adolescents around the world, and the issue is steadily increasing as more and more ways to bully are created.In extreme incidents, cyber bullying has led teenagers to suicide. Most victims, however, suffer shame, embarrassment, anger, depression and withdrawal. While technology continues to evolve, new means of communication enable today’s bullies to become more effective in terrorizing and tormenting their victims. The aim was to increase awareness and decrease the prevalence of cyber bullying- Year 9 at Meridan State College being the stakeholders (people involved).