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.

Culture is an ever-changing phenomenon that dictates the way a certain group of people think, and in turn, act. It is their identity as a whole. Because culture is something created by living things, it too is alive and evolves with the human race. Arguably, the biggest factor of cultural change is human thought. It is from the minds of men and women that technology, art, music, architecture, language, and traditions are born. These are some of the most fundamental aspects of what distinguishes one culture from another. As mankind moves forward in any and all of these areas, culture changes. One aspect of society that has greatly evolved over the last twenty years or so is social media. In fact, what most people view as social media in

Usage of social media has become the part of our everyday life. Social media has become the necessary and unavoidable part of our routine. We use internet, websites, social networks, television and other means of social media everyday very frequently. The social media is designed in a way that it attracts and draws our attention immediately towards itself. We are mesmerized by social media. Our daily life activities are linked with social media’s effects.

One of the most prominent areas of information technology present in today’s society is that of social media. Facebook users make up 62% of the entire adult population and Twitter users compose 20% of the population (Mobile Messaging and Social Media, 2015). Sites like these allow users to transfer information, in the form of social content, to the Internet community with no limitations. These sites also ease communication across great distances, allowing for a diverse audience for any information posted on such a site. Such a tool for information transfer is incredibly powerful in the hands of those who know how to use it.

Some of our biggest role models in America revolve around our sports leaders. People who have put in many hours of training hard and overcoming seemingly unsurpassable obstacles. People like Lebron James, Usain Bolt, Peyton Manning, etc. Maybe we want to feel the fame, own the money, or meet other amazing people, but we all want to feel the accomplishment in some way or another. Team activities seem to be a major concept our civilization immerses itself in. We are willing to pay hundreds of dollars year after year to go out and cheer on our role-models and follow players’ social media accounts like it is theology we are reading. In ways it is consuming our thinking however, today teams teach many valuable life skills that children lack.

Traditionally, people used the Internet to simply expend content: they read it, they watched it, and they used it to buy products and services. Increasingly, however, people are now utilizing platforms–—such as content sharing sites, blogs, social networking, and wikis–—to create, modify, share, and discuss Internet content. This represents the social media phenomenon, which can now significantly impact how an entire movement is viewed worldwide. It’s difficult to comprehend in this day and age that social media could actually produce something positive and worthwhile, considering so much of the discussions are filled with arguments revolving around race relations, political ideologies, and violence. The social media phenomenon has people “plugged in” to twitter wars between celebrities, the latest political sound bites, and hashtags to use against one another (i.e #BlackLivesMatter vs. #PoliceLivesMatter). Yet, through the issues, there are social media platforms that promote positive expressiveness of one’s self worth and love. In relation to the body, the hashtag #EffYourBeautyStandards has created its own phenomenon within the realm of the internet. In times of body shaming, scrutiny, and being judged based off of a size on the back of a tag, or the color of your skin, or the lack of makeup one refuses to where, this hashtag promotes beauty acceptances and embraces the differences of every person.

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).

When social media first became a popular business tool for networking, building brands, and establishing authority and credibility, many people networked haphazardly. Their approach was akin to throwing spaghetti on the wall to see what would stick. The goal was to connect with as many people as possible with the hope that some of those relationships might be fruitful. Sadly, some people still use social media this way.

Selfie is defined as a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and shared via social media. Selfie was the 2013 Oxford Dictionaries word of the year and have great impacts on social media websites across the internet. To this day the world has been caught in this tendency by mocking it or participating it. As selfies get more popular the beauty standard are impossible to reach for ordinary young women. Every individual have different perspective of what self-portrait present. In fact, based on my own experience and the experience of classmate, I cannot deny the boost in confidence level that selfies bring. People, who were often unexpressive and distrustful of their own positive trait in the real world, often finds their worth through selfies.

What kind of world could possibly exist without some form of a Facebook, a Twitter, or an Instagram? Perhaps, it would be a world so unjust; people would actually have to call all of their five hundred and twenty-nine best friends by phone. So that they may share with them, the stale bread with one slice of turkey meat sandwich, they bought during lunch! Social media websites like, Facebook or Twitter are portals to information and communication. It has provided new and exciting opportunities for people all around the world to be able to connect with each other more easily than ever before. It has also helped businesses to flourish, and provides just about every answer to a sought out question. The internet superhighway so to speak, has created an excessive need. And as a result, it has become such a craze, that the sophisticated computers used to access the internet, now play a major role in everyone’s life; including children. Many gaming systems, cellular phones, and other electronics readily made available to children all have the potential to easily access the internet. Ever thought about what effects might such a craze have on children? For instance, could the excess of internet use with social media in particular, pose any implications onto children? The excessive partaking in social media amongst children- inhibits their productivity, interferes with the development of their social skills, and desensitizes their outlooks.

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.

Social media is said to be the cornerstone for communications between everyone in the world. Social media refers to the interaction among individuals in which they create, share, and/or exchange information and ideas in cyber communities and networks. Social media sites negatively affect society by destroying an individual’s ability for independent thinking; consequently, these sites should be banned. There are many psychological effects, constant distraction social media provides for people, and the risk of sexual harassment/ cyber bullying.