Social Networking in Our Lives

Social networking in our lives

The world today has shrunk and it is rightly referred to as a global village, with information, data and news flying across to different corners at the blink of an eye. All it requires is the click of a button and all the information you need is in front of you on your screen. The availability of information has also extended to our personal lives with the entrance of social networking platforms.

Today, the availability of the social networking platforms like Facebook, Google+, Orkut, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. information about individuals is freely available to all. One can easily be in touch with thousands of individuals across different phases of their life. One is regularly updated with personal information, photographs, thoughts, opinions, and lots of other aspects of an individual’s life. The nature of social relationships is also undergoing a change. Earlier friends would have picked up the phone to reach out to a friend, today they might choose to ‘poke’ the friend on facebook or write on the friend’s wall. Though the number of people the individual is in touch with in the virtual world increases drastically, it is seen that the individual’s personal interaction with individuals reduces. The virtual contact creates a false sense of being in touch with others, though the personal one on one interaction with individuals which are vital to any form of relationship is reduced. About twenty years ago, the British anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, observed an association between the sizes of primate brains--specifically the size of the neocortex--and the number of social contacts. Chimps can process a smaller number of contacts than humans. Dunbar concluded that humans can handle regular contact with a number of friends somewhere between 100 and 200, and 150 became the standard Dunbar number for our species. So, though the social networks tend to give the perception of an increased friend circle, the individuals are actually in touch with much lesser. There are also cases of enhanced loneliness amongst individuals since the only interaction with their friends might be through the virtual media. Positive Impact:

Nowadays social media plays an important role in teenagers life. The vast majority of teenagers in the United States are daily social media users. There are countless of social networking sites that have created broad connections among teens. For example, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Skype, YouTube, and the like are used quite frequently. According to Shea Bennett, one out of every seven minutes spent online is on Facebook. But does social media have positive impact on teens? To me the answer is yes. For the vast majority of teens, the overall impact on social media has been positive (Rideout). Social media helps teens stay connected to each other even if they are a thousand miles away, and it keeps us up to date with what's going on around the world and so on. Social media has positive impact on teens in many ways.
As an teenager it's also very important to understand what's going on around us rather than just knowing what's going with friends. According to the article "What Facebook and Twitter Mean for News." Nowadays teens receive digital news from social media sites rather than turning on news channel or reading newspaper. 70% of teens receive most of the news stories they read or watch via Facebook or Twitter. It's amazing how fast news spread on social networking sites. According to Amy Mitchell, "Facebook news users get more news from friends and family and see it as news they might well have gotten someplace else if Facebook did not exist. For Twitter users, though, the news links come from a more even mix of family and friends and news organizations. Most of these users also feel that without Twitter, they would have missed this kind of news". Thus, social media results in teens being more well-informed about national and global news than they would be otherwise.

Social media has become part of the modern teenage lifestyle. It makes our life so much easier and much more efficient. It has become an essential part of our communication culture that cannot be taken away easily, because we are so dependent on it. Without social media we wouldn't be able to connect with people the way we do now.

Negative Impact:

Our daily lives revolve around technology and most of us can’t imagine going a day without logging on the internet or using our mobile phones. Social networking has become a norm in our society, with websites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and many more holding a unique and vital role in our daily lives. The idea behind social networking is to enable us to hold better contact with friends and family, advertise establishments, artists or products and connect with new people. Social networking has without a doubt contributed to many positive things, but is it also affecting us negatively? Here’s a list of a few negative aspects that come with active social networking behavior.
(i) Addiction to Social Media: Even though no disease or disorder has yet been linked to social networking addiction, still a number of behaviors associated with excessive use of social media have lately become the subject of much discussion and research. That said, a social networking addict could be considered someone who uses social media excessively to a point where it interferes with other daily activities. Such as constantly checking Facebook status updates or “stalking” people’s profiles on Facebook, for hours on end. But does spending three hours a day reading random tweets from strangers means you’re addicted to Twitter? How about five hours? One could argue that it was merely news-reading to stay updated, right? But could the countless hours we spend on social media be the cause of undiscovered behavioral disorders? Are we making ourselves sick through social networking without even being aware of it?
A research team headed by Wilhelm Hoffmann of Chicago University concluded in 2012 that twitter is harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol. The team used Blackberry’s to gauge the willpower of 205 people aged between 18 and 85. The results showed that with each day the ‘self-control’ dropped lower and lower and concluded that between social media, cigarettes and alcohol, the ‘self-control-failure’ rate was highest with social media. Other researchers have also linked anxiety, sleep deprivation, depression and some psychological disorders to people who spend too much time online.
(ii) Constant Comparison with others: Let’s face it, we all look at each other’s social networking sites, admiring clothes, lifestyles and even relationships. More than often wishing that our lives were as great as others. But when it comes down to it, people mostly tend to share only the glittering highlights from their lives, deliberately leaving out the dull ones. We usually don’t post about our boring nights at home, rocky relationships or lack of financial stability. However this is not taken into consideration when people start comparing their lives to others and instead end up feeling miserable which can at times even lead to low self-esteem, and depression.
(iii) Personal vs Professional presentation:
A vital question that often pops up in our minds while sharing personal information on social sites is: “how do we balance our personal and professional lives online?” “Am I comfortable in sharing pictures of my weekend getaway with my work colleagues?” “where should I draw a line?”
The social media landscape is vast and can get intimidating for those who choose to mix both their social and professional lives online.
(iv) Making “Friends” online:
Although social networking helps us to connect with new people, it has also impacted how people make friends these days. Instead of meeting face-to-face, people nowadays are happy to scroll through an endless list of bite-sized snippets of personal information, or interact through comments, or even chat with multiple people simultaneously. We are trading a great deal of physical interaction with a very superficial and sometimes shallow form of interaction. Many people who are best friends on Facebook are unable to carry out a face to face conversation amiably. And then there are those who instead of sharing their thoughts and problems with their ‘real’ friends, spend endless time chatting over the internet.

(v) Distraction:
One of the major cons of social networking is the distraction it causes in everyday lives. Many of us can’t go an hour without checking for updates and this can cause us to get distracted from what’s really important in life. Instead of focusing on work, school and family, we spend majority of our time online looking for the next juicy status update, headline or photograph. Social networking is supposed to help individuals learn and grow. Instead, every time we are on a social site, we feel unproductive and distracted. It is fast changing from a platform where we communicate with others into a platform where we advertise oneself to others.
(vi) Cyber Bullying/ Hate Speech:
Social networking has also opened up new doors for predators. They can pose as whoever they want and talk to whoever they wish to. They can read through someone’s profile find out what interests them and hence build a connection with that person. This can be dangerous especially if someone posts a lot of personal information, allowing the predator to track them down. Young people are mostly vulnerable and are easily lured into such traps.
Obviously social networking sites are here to stay and already they have changed the way we experience, think, interact, share opinions, make friends and even vote. But it’s time we reconsidered some of our rapidly shaping social-networking habits before we lose ourselves in this mayhem.