Social Media And Its Impact On Society

As we all know, social media has a tremendous impact on society and has affected in some way our daily life, relationships, and/or business. Every day, people around the world access famous social media network sites such as facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and so on to find out about other people, others might use social networking to reconnect with old friends, make new friends, or even meet their spouse. The excessive use of social media websites might bring negative effects; while for other people, it might bring satisfaction or positive effects. Technological advancements such as the internet, have given us the opportunity to connect with other people anytime and anywhere in the world. Pretty much all around the world, everyone has access to the World Wide Web via a desktop computer or smart phones. The fact is that no matter our current location or destination we might go, social media will always be following us as long as we have that direct connection. The main focus of this paper is to identify the good and bad of social media, and the current and future problems it will bring.

In 2008 Joel Garreau conducted interviews and wrote a piece titled "Friends Indeed" for the Washington Post. Garreau brings up possible dangers, minor inconveniences, and what truly defines a friend in the new media world we live in. I felt Garreau came across as jaded by most of the interviews he conducted. He did not seem to speak with a wide array of people that gave positive impacts social media can have, but rather focused on the negatives of the subject. Garreau did bring up valid points, however, from personal safety to the aspect of different people in your life seeing your different personalities. For instance your Grandma that you go to church with on Sunday 's is now seeing the pictures of you partying with your friends on Saturday night.

While many people put off and ignore the issue of social media and its downfalls, others say that people should think about how our lives are being affected by this advancement in technology, including, lack of human contact and precious time being lost due to consumption with social media. Social media is currently a highly controversial topic in which numerous people have mixed feelings. Society has typically viewed new advancements in technology as beneficial and a sign of success within their country. But, has it solely caused successful outcomes, or are there downfalls to these advancements?

Since we as a society are currently living in the age known as the Technological Revolution, chances are that in some form or fashion you are aware of and have been exposed to social media. Well, imagine a world where the use of social media became more structured and used to improve education as opposed to just being used for keeping in touch with friends and family, sharing pictures, and seeing how many likes you can get per post. According to the Business Insider Intelligence Report of 2014, social media is now the top Internet activity in the world, Americans’ specifically “spend more time on social media than any other major Internet activity, including email” (Business Insider). Considering this information, it is obvious that social media plays a vital role and impacts the lives of our nation on a daily basis. Some argue that its impact can be negative and a distraction to the educational experience of the younger generation. Regardless of your personal opinion, what if educators were to work with the use of social media for educational purposes. Since it is highly used, it would not only gain the learner’s interest but also would reach more people at large. Therefore, we should learn to better utilize social media in a more constructive educational manner.

Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat - all these are called social media and they have a critical impact on the way young people think and interact on a day to day basis. “Virtual Communities” (Lee, 2015) is about the virtual world and how it affects the physical world and the influence it has on the lives of people on a daily basis. “Enhancing Your Body Image” (Donatelle, 2015) is about the influences that media or outside sources have on the way people view their bodies and how people feel about themselves. The main similarity between the two concepts is the influences that virtual communities have on the way people see themselves in the physical world. Enhancing one’s body image and the affects virtual communities have on the physical world are connected in many ways; furthermore, the influences that media has over people and how that can lead into bullying, and how all of it affects the future of an individual.

Social media can be both an extremely positive and extremely negative part of today’s society. In our current day and age, a majority of teenagers use social media apps every single day. Social media allows people to connect with friends and family, allows you to see what is going on in the world, and gives you the ability to express yourself to a large audience. As nice as that may sound, there are also negatives to social media. For example, some people use the power of social media to do harm. For most teenagers body image is extremely important. Even if you’re confident in yourself, nowadays people base their self worth on how many likes their picture gets, or even worse, by comparing themselves to the unrealistic, photoshopped pictures of celebrities that clutter the internet. Over time many people around the globe have recognized this problem and small steps have been taken to create a change; however, more people need to band together to solve this problem on a global level. The longer this problem goes unsolved, the more our youth is affected. I’m sure that everyone has looked in the mirror at least once in their life and pinpointed one specific thing they dislike about their body, and in many cases these people do not like that specific feature because it is not celebrated in the media. Every day that the problem of unrealistic photoshopping in the media is not solved, the number of people affected increases drastically. Celebrities and news outlets should work

Social media provides an outlet that reflects our lives online. It is changing the way we relate to others and how we think about ourselves. Users of social media have created for themselves a social footprint. This footprint marks where they are and where they have been online. Their lifestream is now recorded in the timeline of their social networks. Participants in social media now have a digital identity, which shows their activity with a time and date stamp in reverse chronological order. The users social brand is created by any online interactions that have been created by leaving information (Solomon, 2015).

Since the 1990s, the internet has been gaining momentum, growing in popularity and relevance in today’s society. As a result, social media has been on the rise for communication, news, and entertainment, appealing to a wide range of ages and demographics. However, this increased use has also increased challenges to privacy, policy making, and ethics within the government. More recently, the Supreme Court addressed the relationship and challenges between the First Amendment and social media in 2015, ruling that it is difficult to accurately evaluate the intentions of others through social media posts. Social media is creating a new communication revolution in the United States and is generating more effective means to address government issues, but the challenges have demanded policy changes and clarifications of the First Amendment.

As a 16 year old schoolgirl, I love social media. As a daily user, my experiences have mostly all been positive. But then again, I would consider myself to be one of the luckier ones. Too many people I know, come out of a social media encounter, feeling a lot less confident prior to the experience. As human beings, we all need to feel connected, to have supportive, loving relationships and the approval of others. Social media such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and more, have all changed how we communicate and have given us endless ways of connecting with others. We only need to look at the usage statistics for these organisations to realize how popular they are; over 1 billion people are on Facebook every day. For many users,

Social media has become a major player in today’s society, whether we like it or not. The 21st century has seen the largest growth of social media since it was introduced in 1997. The Merriam Webster dictionary defines social media as forms of electronic communication through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content. The first social media site was created in 1997. From there to the present time, social media sites have grown in numbers and expanded to allow more interaction between users by using a mix of words, pictures, video and audio.

Social media plays a monumental part in young adults’ lives. Whether it is Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, people aged 13 to 35 have been constantly discovering new ways to interact with each other through a digital medium. But given the enormity of social media, it can only be expected that its effects are just as great. One of the key areas social media affects in these people is language. Therefore, messaging in social media and other forms of digital communication are expanding American young adults’ vocabulary, their attitude towards language, and the forms in which they communicate.

The term ‘social media’ has become a broad-term to describe a large number of online systems that serve as a platform for the generation, and distribution of user-generated content. Social media creates a virtual social space, where a large number of users come together and interact with one another. These interactions can be either structured, such as responses that are moderated on blogs, semi-structured, such as a discussion between an extended network on Facebook, or unstructured, such as the anarchial functioning of Twitter.

Facebook, like most of the internet, is an excellent innovation that has become a part of our daily lives. It presents us with an opportunity to intermingle with a much broader network of people. You can form your own online individuality, while also learning how social media supports the creation of new relationships and communities. For the people who want to be entrepreneurs, it might be an introduction to business as you think of how to “promote yourself. Individuals with particular social identities or interests can connect with others, while someone who is interested in online games, can use to find friends with similar interests.

Social Media is an interaction between people where they create, share or an express their ideas and thoughts. It has also been defined as a group of web based applications which help in growing up the technological foundation of the internet. Social networking tools such as Twitter, Facebook, Google plus, BlogSpot, Youtube, Myspace and Wikipedia, and numerous additional technologies which can be considered as social media are changing the way of communication among the people across the globe. Some of the popular content sharing websites like YouTube, face book and Twitter have an option of upload, tag and comment for the users on different categories of content (Photos, Videos or Bookmarks). Human experiencing a vital part of interaction online through expansion of social media. Twitter has been a global communication tool in 2009 "Iranian Presidential Election

Facebook now refers to the means of interaction from one person to another where they create, share, and exchange contents of their lives over the internet. Facebook has almost become part of our daily lives. It is like any other media such as newspaper, radio and television but it is far more than just about sharing information and ideas. Without watching the news or listening to the radio you can get online within seconds from almost anywhere and hear the latest about the world. Today’s modern media has somehow managed, by creating a completely new world particularly in social relations, to create considerable changes in human communications. However, like anything Facebook has it positive and negative aspects. Facebook affects relationships, productivity and allows one of the most prevalent things right now; cyber bullying and cyber predators.