The Negative Impact Of Social Media

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In the current world, social media have a significant role in our daily life. Urban population is getting addicted to the social media and it enjoys strong hold in the mind of huge majority of population of the world. The current lifestyle, eating, thinking, communication, and behavior of a common man is being influenced by social media. In this context, ‘social media’ is used as an umbrella term for all internet applications with a communicative and collaborative function. In their ordinary use, social media applications are interactive and participatory. Web services that can be categorized as social media include (listed in increasing degree of participation) wikis, forums, multimedia platforms (YouTube, Flickr), blogs (WordPress), microblogs…show more content…
Applications such as social networking sites facilitate new types of social relationships and individualized forms of information reception and production. In these applications, researchers perceive not only new patterns of communication but also new forms of identity formation at the individual level that can have various social effects. In particular, social media may affect collective and individual well-being (Amichai-Hamburger and Furnham, 2007), increase the size of social networks and the number of social contacts with friends or family (Katz et al., 2001), increase feelings of contribution and closeness (Contarello and Sarrica, 2007), and provide social support (Haythornthwaite and Wellman, 2002). Building relationships within social networks and online communities enables information exchanges among friends in the context of novel social interactions regardless of geographical proximity. However, the extent to which offline and online social relationships interrelate has not yet been determined. Socially inhibited individuals may benefit from social media because of the comparatively anonymous nature of participation, the amount of control over social interactions, and the ease of finding likeminded others (Amichai-Hamburger and Furnham, 2007; Barak, 2007; Etzioni and Etzioni, 1997; McKenna and Bargh, 2000). Online media may enhance feelings of emotional closeness and openness (Ben-Ze’ev, 2003;…show more content…
As Chung (2011: 25) found, ‘social networking features can have distinct values for people who need emotional support and comfort’. For example, social media facilitate contact by helping users create lists of friends or contacts with whom they share a connection (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). The results indicate that such connections often consist of contacts from offline networks and confirm current social network research regarding the use of social media to maintain contacts rather than to expand social networks. This finding demonstrates the positive impact of social media on (social) inclusion, as predicted by Amichai-Hamburger and Furnham (2007). However, there continue to be differences in the levels of social support in different social networks, and these are not resolved by social media. The individual remains in a loop: social media use and engagement depend on the individual’s social network, thus indicating that even in this era of social media – when everything has become social, connected and participative – differences in the offline world persist
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