How to Prevent Social Media Depression?
What is your purpose of going on social media? If you really think about it, what feeling does post social media scrolling leave you feeling?
In Nicola Brown’s How to Prevent Social Media Depression(Fix), first published July 20, 2017, she explains that social media has various negative effects on people and how people should decrease their usage to help from harm. Brown first illustrates how the increase of time people spend a day on these platforms creates addictive tendencies can lead to effects like “fear of missing out” (FOMO), PTSD syndrome, and lower self-control. Then, she suggests three ways to avoid these psychological pitfalls: setting a time limit per day, changing the way it is used, and establishing alternative news sources.
Brown’s writes a credible article being that she has respectable credentials and sources to back up her arguments.
About the Writer
The blog site, Fix, emphasizes their quest to help people enrich their everyday life with expert content from experienced and knowledgeable authors. Each author has a picture and a biography of their achievements, hobbies, and careers. Brown’s biography includes being owner of Think Forward Communication, Editor-in-Chief of Anew Traveler, and an award-winning writer. Think Forward Communication is about corporate website content to social media and includes a lot about Brown’s works and credentials. Under the “about” link, it includes her extensive resume, proving her degrees in business communication, years of experience at multiple jobs, and two communication awards.
When trying to find what other people thought about her, I could only find content marketing websites and various blog websites that she writes for, which all just had her same bio. Skimming through her social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram, she portrays herself as very positive, kind, and the lifestyle she writes in her blog posts. I couldn’t find one bad thing someone had to say about her.
Sources Matter
In Brown’s sources used in her article on Fix has a link for each to prove where she got each of the studies.
When opening her post, she explains how social media usage went up 18 percent from 2013 to 2016, which was sourced from Statista. The website includes an offer of a paid subscription to access thousands of statistics and studies, which means many businesses and companies may pay for to gain this information. When other businesses trust this source, it insures the trust in the experiments and reliability of the data.
Next, to explain the effects of social media, she uses a study from ScienceDaily, to prove how it causes depression from people comparing themselves to others online. The website consists of the latest research news and the specific study includes references from studies from a journal published from the research at Lancaster University that found, “In cases where there is a significant association with depression, this is because comparing yourself with others can lead to ‘rumination’ or overthinking”. Brown’s comments about the study align with those of the actual study, making them not out of context.
Her second fact suggesting that social media content can lead to PTSD symptoms is from EurekAlert!, claiming to be “the global source for science news”. The website has a fellowship with AAAS, American Association for the Advancement of Science, which is a non-profit organization made to help the scientific community. The source Brown incorporates Dr. Pam Ramsden’s findings from the Faculty of Social Sciences in Liverpool, who found 22 percent of the subjects “scored high on clinical measures of PTSD even though none had previous trauma, were not present at the traumatic events and had only watched them via social media”. Therefore, the conclusions from the study backs up what Brown is arguing.
The last point Brown makes of social media usage lowering self control, self esteem, cause overeating, and prevent us from thinking independently is from Reader’s Digest, which is a magazine known by millions to be a reliable source. The article lists 10 ways of weird negative effects of social media with links to studies for each; Brown lists exactly the gist of some of those points.
Then Brown goes into explain the ways to avoid the psychological pitfalls in three ways. The first, “Set a limit of time spent on social media sites everyday” and third, “Establish news sources outside your social media feeds” tips don’t include sources to back the claims up. Even though there aren’t studies to show how reliable these tips are, Brown is a healthy lifestyle enthusiast that I would trust to give tips based off her research. Also, in the second tip, “Change the way you use social media”, Brown include a study by PhychologyToday, a magazine, about avoiding social media based depression. Brown explanation for her tip summarizes exactly what the article is about, making her argument in context.
Would I Use the Article?
When first looking at the blog post, no one would think of using the article or others from the website. The cover photos and info-graphs are animated and colorful, which makes it look only read for fun (hence, this website is for everyday people). By researching the author and sources deeper, I realized that all the information is reliable. With that being said, in research papers I would use the sources from the article, instead of the article itself.
Reference
Brown, Nicola. “How To Prevent Social Media Depression.” Fix, 20 Jan. 2017, https://www.fix.com/blog/does-social-media-cause-depression/
