Digital Technology: The Psychological Effects Of Social Media

Ever since the invention of the transistor – allowing the construction of increasingly advanced computers – digital technology has become increasingly integrated within our daily lives. Of recent times, a significant development in digital technology is its use in communication; especially in the form of social media or social networking. The psychological effects of high usage of social media (such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter) in today’s society have been critically evaluated. The main risks are associated with allowing the consequences of traditional forms of bullying and the internalisation of unrealistic body ideals to be escalated due to the high frequency of use and omnipresence of social media. However, social media does present

Whilst is has been found that those who experience society anxiety tend to use social media to compensate for otherwise lacking social interactions (McCord, Rodebaugh, & Levinson, 2014), there is no evidence to suggest that this decreases social anxiety in the future. Furthermore, it has been found that those with neurotic tendencies preferred not to use direct forms of communication (such as instant messaging and commenting) and instead opted for “asynchronous forms of [communication]” (Ryan & Xenos, 2011) such as posting. Hence, social media users experiencing social anxiety may benefit from decreased loneliness due to their preference for communication via writing posts (große Deters et al., 2010) – a largely asynchronous form of communication. Therefore, social media exposes those who experience social anxiety to more social interactions than they would otherwise experience (McCord et al., 2014). However, it is unclear whether this produces any lasting effects, barring a decrease of loneliness due to their tendency to write posts (große Deters et al., 2010) – assuming the slight negative effects observed by Burke (2011) are ignored when users both frequently write and view