Social Media Problems

Social media has become the ultimate way of communication for our generation. It allows us to connect with one another no matter where we are or what time zone we live in. It has been a great tool for meeting people and also maintaining those relationships, even without having to see them face to face. Social media helps us share memories and also helps us create them. We are able to share thoughts and ideas and post pictures of our everyday lives for everyone to see. Social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, have been the new way of connecting with others. People use these sites for many different ways to connect with the world: Creating events, updating statuses, advertisement, and more. It seems that everyone these days either has a Facebook or Twitter account, or in most cases, both. People use these accounts on a regular basis as part of their daily routines. Social media has many positive aspects but it also comes with many negatives. Our generation has become attached to the internet and to knowing everything about the lives of our peers. While we want to know about others, we also want everyone read about us. It seems to have become a game of who can disclose as much information about themselves. This can be a problem because it leaves people to be vulnerable and exposed to the rest of the cyber world. Although social media can be a great tool for connecting and communicating with others, it can also lead people to have a false confidence and reliant on the acceptance of others.(267) When logging onto social media sites, we are instantly bombarded with information about our peers. People have become obsessed with posting about themselves and having their every move known to others. Shae Bennet states in her article "The Psychology of Social Networking" that "In each and every minute, we generate some 694,980 Facebook status updates and write 532,080 tweets. And 80 percent of those posts are about our favorite person – ourselves"(n.p.). Anything that looks or sounds appealing about ourselves, we share for everyone to virtually indulge over. Subjects that we used to hold private, such as financial information, doctors appointments, and relationships are now on display and shared by mostly everyone. Pictures and posts about meals, desserts, and beverages are put up as if to assume someone actually cares about what we eat. Along with our food, there are also posts about our homework load, the movies and shows we watch, quotes from various famous people and much more. It seems that our generation uses social media not only as a way to interact but also to promote ourselves so that others will be envious. In the online post Next-Level Vanity: Social Media and Self-Obsession by Bill Dubiel, the author agrees that "While we all spend time on Facebook and Twitter communicating with friends, we spend just as much if not more time maintaining everyone's perception of ourselves"(n.p.). With all this being said, our generation has seemingly become a more confident one. And while it seems this way, it is more of a false confidence. Sherry Turkle, author of Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet quotes a woman saying: I feel very different online. I am a lot more outgoing, less inhibited. I would say I feel more like myself. But that's a contradiction. I feel more like who I wish I was"(424). While we are online we can portray ourselves to be anyone we want. Making statuses about how entertaining our day has been or posting pictures of the places we've visited are all ways to make ourselves seem more interesting. We often make ourselves vulnerable to the rest of the cyber world by posting every delicate detail about our lives in order to come across more appealing. This false confidence in which social media gives us can be unhealthy because it takes away our skills for real life interactions. We are beginning to only know who we are behind a computer screen and without it we don’t know how to express ourselves. While seeming more confident in whom we are, this is also a sign that we constantly seek the acceptance of others and we're willing to expose as much about ourselves to receive this acceptance. Social media has caused people to be child-like in a way that we constantly rely on feedback and the feeling of being accepted by our peers. Repeated exposure to these sites leaves us, users, with a crisis regarding our identity. We continually seek attention in a manner that reflects the behaviors of a child. Everything we do, we post online. This way others can recognize our actions and thoughts. We are always thinking of ways to make ourselves more appealing so that we can get an approval. Changing the way we look online in pictures and making up information about ourselves are ways in which we strive for this acceptance. We have become so addicted to people being kept up to date with our lives, and us being up to date with others, that it’s beginning to cross the line into a damaging habit. Sarah Harris quotes Baroness Greenfield, a professor at Oxford University, in her post Facebook and Twitter are Creating a Vain Generation of Self-Obsessed People with Child-Like Need for Feedback as saying, “The growth of internet ‘friendships’- as well as greater use of computer games- could effectively ‘rewire’ the brain… this can result in reduced concentration, a need for gratification and poor non-verbal skills” (n.p). We have become so accustomed to interacting online that our skills, such as making eye contact during conversations, are gone. We constantly receive feedback from behind a computer screen so that when it comes to real life situations we become more self conscious. Our generation has become more immature when it comes to feeling included in everyone’s lives and being liked by others. We are dangerously dependent on what others think and say about us that soon there will be no thinking for ourselves. Our lives consist of repeatedly trying to impress our peers so that we receive more reassurance from their attention. While “the Net may well be the single most powerful mind-altering technology that has ever come into general use”(Carr, 116), social media is a part of everybody’s daily lives. It helps us plan our everyday routines and helps us keep in touch with friends and family. While social media has many positive features about it, as we can see it also brings a lot of negative. Our generation today is becoming so dependent on social media and reliant on its way in representing who we are that soon our in-person skills will fade. This unhealthy way of interacting and communicating with others is decreasing our skills to be mature and reliable in the real world. While in the past, we saw that mainly adults used these social media sites we are now seeing them become more popular for younger generations which will lead to increased signs of these negative features. At some point there will need to be a point where a line is drawn but it seems that, in our generation, nobody is willing to step up to do this.