Negative Effects of Social Media
After discussing the positive effects of social media, I feel as if it is important to also address the negative effects of social media. Around 40% of the world’s population uses online social media and it is averaged at about 2 hours every day (Brown 2018). BBC Future reviewed some of the findings of how social media affects our lives and the first area they looked at was stress. A lot of people use social media to vent, but in doing so there is an endless stream of stress and negativity for everyone to see all the time. The social media site that caused the most stress was Twitter, even though it was also seen as a coping mechanism as well. There was a survey of women and men and the results showed that women were more stressed than men because Twitter increased their awareness of other people’s stress. However, the same women also said that using Twitter made them feel less stressed (Brown 2018).
Another area that the BBC Future looked at was anxiety and how general anxiety is provoked by social media. A study that was published in the journal Computers and Human Behavior showed that people who reported using seven or more social media accounts were more than three times as likely to have high levels of general anxiety symptoms compared to people who used 0–2 platforms (Brown 2018). That being said, it is still unclear how social media causes anxiety because the results were pretty mixed, and it was concluded that more research needed to be done.
There is also the case of social media addiction, and how there are arguments about whether or not it is real. Not much research has been done on it, but scientists from the Netherlands have invented their own scaled to identify if there is addiction. They call it the 9-item SMD-scale, SMD standing for Social Media Disorder. There were online surveys conducted among 2,198 Dutch adolescents from the ages of 10 to 17, and it showed that the short 9-item scale is a psychometrically sound and valid instrument (Eijnden et al 2016). It suggests that higher levels of media multitasking is related to deficits in cognitive control and also the ability to have a greater attention span. This instrument has been a good way to determine whether or not the average adolescent is addicted to social media.
Works Cited
Brown, Jessica. “Is social media bad for you? The evidence and the unknowns.” Likeminded. 5 Jan 2018. http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180104-is-social-media-bad-for-you-the-evidence-and-the-unknowns.
Eijnden, Regina et al. “The Social Media Disorder Scale.” Computers in Human Behavior. ScienceDirect. Aug 2016. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563216302059.
Houston. “Negative social media behaviour linked to depression, loneliness: Study.” The Week. 10 Jan 2019. https://www.theweek.in/news/sci-tech/2019/01/10/Social-media-addiction-linked-to-depression.html?fbclid=IwAR0UAAgDtaXmEZKwSGw8KU_kthTq5HMA58nwNiaQrwYaMM3l68royopSCw8.
