Social media in todays society

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Negative Impacts Social Media in Todays’ Society
Introduction
In today’s society, social media has increasingly become a popular component that we can’t do away with. Specifically, the teens and young adults seem to be very much preoccupied with the social media. This is probably due to the increased applications and usage demand across the world in communication efficiency, blogging, sharing of knowledge and global interaction irrespective of geographical location. Social media tools commonly used today include; Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, google plus, my space, WhatsApp among others. Today, social media cuts across virtually every activity from local and remote business advert to political campaign platform in great states, from healthy behavior and risk factors internet pages to comprehensive online education institutions mandated with information dissemination and award of certifications in various levels. It is due to this growing application and demand that has made nearly 1 billion worldwide users of Facebook alone. About 90% of the one billion users are teens (Abdulahi 10). It is estimated that about 1 in every 7 people uses Facebook. According to Sawyer (27), the numbers of estimated Facebook users were about 500 million by the year 2010. This corresponds to 1 in every 14 users of the 6.8 billion people in the world. From the two studies, it is evident that from 2010 to 2014, the number of people using social media (through Facebook) had doubled.

Suggestively, the resulting consequences similarly doubled during the same time interval. Despite the associated benefits that have consequently led to the enormous usage across the world, social media is equally associated with some negative impacts on the todays’ society. This research work critically assesses the associated negative influence of social media usage in the society. These adverse impacts include associated drop in academic performance among the student users, insecurity issues to private information, health threats resulting from addictive usage, cyber bullying, and cultural erosion.
Negative impacts of social media in today’s society
First, social media is associated to an increased insecurity as a result of publicity of private issues either knowingly, unknowingly or through theft, fraud or vandalism. Many organizations in today’s society are used to keeping organizations’ documents in a database system (Shabir 4). Some of the information stored in such database system is highly confidential and need not to be exposed to unauthorized personnel. Through social media, however, there are systems developed to secure access to password protected sites by internet hacking. Hacking is an illegal act and most states protect companies and private properties that can be hacked. Consequently, the individuals found doing these are heavily charged in court or face many years of imprisonment. The problem is that hackers have devised a way in which they do their business with total anonymity to identity. This makes the constitutional protection against them to be highly thwarted. Publicity of potentially private issues can also be unknowingly facilitated by an individual. The resulting publicity through social media turns to work against the individuals with time. For example, an adequately completed Facebook profile gives such information as; age, sex, status, current location, likes (books, videos, TV program and one’s best quote among other preference), employment status, contacts and working experience. From this information, negative impacts can be facilitated to such individuals by, say hijackers or thieves who would go on using this information to do their business. It has also been reported that a number of cyber users forget to log out from their account ones they are through with their activity. In return, the next user may use their account to do illegal business, thus making an innocent individual to be criminally culpable. Another negative impact associated with access of private information is the rising cases of plagiarism. Due to fear of data lose through computer crash, especially for researchers, many prefer to save their data in their social media accounts. However, the resulting access by unauthorized persons in such accounts may encourage plagiarism. In this case, an individual who access the data may go ahead to do faster analysis and then produce a publication before the real researcher who will later on seem to be the one who is copying upon their time of publication (Zeitel-Bank 54).
Secondly, the rise in usage of social media among the students has resulted in poor academic performance among users. The level of performance in academic drops with relation to the amount of time spent on social media (Shabir, Yousef, & Ghulam 4). Social media is known to impact a multitasking ability among many users. The induced task switching ability as a result of social media usage lowers academic attachment and consequently lowers the related performance. Similarly, a study by Siddiqui and Tajinder showed that time spent is negatively related to grade performance (73). This implies that the more the time spent in chatting, blogging, tweeting, messaging and sharing information through social media, the poorer the grade performance. The effect is worse when it comes to addiction where users spend virtually all their time in social media. For example, an addicted social media user may be physically present in class but all his or her attention is on the media and thus loses all the information disseminated by the course instructor. In another study, social media is connected to reducing the attention span of users. This is probably because of its intended priority – social entertainment which keeps on changing and becoming obsolete with time making the users to uncontrollably store the information in short term memory. Based on this situation, the user may equally store important academic information in their short term memory, thereby interfering greatly with their ability to recall. Academic performance among social media users is also worsened by the related exaggeration that tends to distance reality from fantasy. In social media, more activities relate entertainments with fantasy making reality to be ‘pushed’ very far from the context (Zeitel-Bank 72). In the process, an academic achievement which is more of a reality than fantasy is underrated resulting in poor academic performance. An individual student can also significantly perform poorly when such individuals’ private information is posted in social media by their fellow peers. This private information includes that act that an individual is willing to do and may never want anyone else to know. When such information finds their way into the social media, the affected student is likely to lose attachment to education and social requirements (O’Keeffe et al 801)
Social media usage is also correlated to some health threats among the users. According to Chou et al, over-reliance on the use of social media causes addictive salience expressed both in cognitive and behavioral ways (48). Addiction about the time an individual spends in social media is correlated with the loss of control, individual withdrawal from normal behavior and most of the time result in mental disorder. In another study, too much TV exposure to violent episodes activates a part of the brain that regulates arousals, episodic memory and attention. With repeated views of such episodes, the associated behavioral changes are stored in long term memory of the user, thus resulting in reduced attention and increases emotional response when a violent stimulus is presented within their surrounding (O’Keeffe et al 21).
Internet bullying and degradation of the status of people is also an impact of social media. This can happen in either directly or indirectly causing a threat or emotional harm to another user. Directly, cyber bullying can be performed by an individual or a group launching an online attack on victims (Chou 48). For example, in a political campaign set up, aspirants are known to sponsor threats and negative attacks to their opponents through social media tools like Facebook that is accessed by the majority of voters. These attacks may range from spreading of personal background issues to unverifiable rumors expressed in a negative way with a view of making the voters be convinced otherwise and end up voting a potentially strong aspirant out of political position. Unfortunately, these negative attacks affect the victims past the campaign era and at times throughout their lives. Indirectly, social media can also result in bullying through social isolation, peer rejection and the creation of fake sites to spread rumors.
One of the achievements of integration of social media in today’s society is the resulting interaction and sharing of information from all nations making the society be more of a global village. On another viewpoint, this same advantage can equally be viewed as a tool for cultural erosion. Culture identifies and links a particular community to some practices that are repeated over time. The resulting cultural differences in different communities serves as a source of livelihood for a great number of people working directly or indirectly in hospitality and tourism industries. Through social media, in the process of sharing knowledge and learning about other people, the majority of users tend to equally copy and emulate cultural practices, behaviors and values associated with specific communities. The end game of this cultural practice emulation is a eroded societal culture that is no longer unique to a particular community (Mehraj, Akhtar, & Hakeem 61). Cultural difference aspects or dimensions include individualism versus collectivism which defines how an individual is integrated into the group and masculinity versus femininity which defines gender role distribution. According to Huxley, cultural difference can influence communication ways, behavior and values (76). In today’s society, the culture demonstrated by the new social media is one in which everyone takes the role of both the publisher and the critical reviewer. Given this contest, the performance of these roles is reduced. Similarly, Rebecca reported that among new social media users, the difference between the individual and collective cultures was large. In this context, individualistic culture resulted from an individual meeting new people and associating himself or herself with them rather than maintaining existing cultural relationships. Cultural attachment family members are traditionally known to enjoy also eliminated by new social media. According to El Khouli et al, there has been increased desire by family members using social media to engage themselves in seeking new friendship from other unknown users instead of focusing their attention to strengthening their family ties (85). In comparison, cultural erosion is also depicted in the Huxley’s novel Brave New World. In this novel, a new society comprising of complete loss of individual freedom to traditional norms is as a result of a desire to respond to science as it influence humanity. The associated desire to be part of the changing scientific world has made older cultural behaviors and practices to be eliminated. The novel writer further explains how the complete integration of scientific society is contradicting the long-cherished cultural values and practices (Huxley 58).
In conclusion, the negative impacts discussed in work include; resulting user poor academic performance, insecurity and over encroachment into private issues, user health threats, cyber bullying and culturally associated erosion. Education performance of social media users drops majorly because of the diverted attention that distracts an individual from academic work. Heath risks for social media users mainly originate from usage addiction, resulting in complete loss of control which is later on expressed in the form of disorders. Cultural erosion on the other hand occurs as a consequence of desire to copy and assimilate other cultures into an individual’s behavior. The degree to which these impacts are felt depends on the time an individual accesses and uses social media becoming worse at addiction stage. However, all the negative impacts can be controlled by strict rules that put measures on positive social media use and adverse actions taken against the negative intentional users to discourage many ill-intentioned users.
Work Cited
Abdulahi, Aida, Behrang Samadi, and Behrooz Gharleghi. “A Study on the Negative Effects of Social Networking Sites Such as Facebook among Asia Pacific University Scholars in Malaysia.” International Journal of Business and Social Science 5.10 (2014).
Chou, Wen-Ying Sylvia, et al. “Social media use in the United States: implications for health communication.” Journal of medical Internet research 11.4 (2009): e48.
El Khouli, Mohamed. “The most important negative aspects of using social networking affecting the family stability in Abu Dhabi-A pilot study.” International Journal of Engineering and Technology 5.1 (2013): 85.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave new world. Ernst Klett Sprachen, 2008.
Mehraj, Hakim Khalid, Akhtar Neyaz Bhat, and Hakeem Rameez Mehraj. “Impacts OF Media on Society: A Sociological Perspective.” International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Invention, 3 (2011) 56-64
O’Keeffe, Gwenn Schurgin, and Kathleen Clarke-Pearson. “The impact of social media on children, adolescents, and families.” Pediatrics 127.4 (2011): 800-804.
Sawyer, Rebecca. “The Impact of New Social Media on Intercultural Adaptation.” Senior Honors Projects. Paper 242 (2011).
Shabir, Ghulam, Yousef Mahmood Yousef Hameed, and Ghulam Safdar. “The Impact of Social Media on Youth: A Case Study of Bahawalpur City.” Asian Journal of Social Sciences & Humanities Vol 3 (2014): 4.
Siddiqui, Shabnoor, and Tajinder Singh. “Social Media its Impact with Positive and Negative Aspects.” International Journal of Computer Applications Technology and Research 5.2: 071-075. 2013
Zeitel-Bank, Natascha, and Ute Tat. “Social Media and Its Effects on Individuals and Social Systems.” Human Capital without Borders: Knowledge and Learning for Quality of Life; Proceedings of the Management, Knowledge and Learning International Conference 2014. ToKnowPress, 2014.