What is social about social media?
Nowadays, millions of people use social media to facilitate their lives in various kinds of ways. Social media is considered very important to the majority of humans because it helps in communication, business purposes, socializing and so on. Without social media nowadays, a person is not considered valid. But should that be the case? There are around 2 billion of monthly active users of Facebook, but the effect of Facebook on people or any social media networks is not necessarily only positive for the individual. When we hear about social media, we tend to think more of its positive sides, like how it enhanced communication and the world in general. In fact, come to think of it, social media has its disadvantages too on human’s well-being and happiness. Communication is the most important thing in the world, and is used in our daily lives. When communication occurs face to face, you’d know who you are communicating with, but when communication occurs online, you might be “knowing” who you are communicating with, but in fact you do not know. People can disguise themselves behind the screens and harm others. Posting often on social media could have good effects, like getting people around the world to see what your life is like, what you’re achieving in life, but this can also be very dangerous due to exposure of social media. For the past 3 months, I have noticed a person on my social media account that always comments on what I post. As a person who likes communicating with different people around the world I reply to everyone, and I do not mind my pictures being public. This man had turned out to be obsessed with my profile for the past 3 months, and was always stalking. He had texted me saying if I would ever visit LA, and as a joke I said yes, I’m going tomorrow, and the second day I see the person sending me creepy texts about how he is in LA waiting for me. Now this experience shows that, social media is in fact a really dangerous place for people to be on, but people will always use it, because they ignore its dangers and focus more on its positive aspects. Now, students using social media also have different kinds of negative and positive consequences of the Facebook or any other social media use; such as the fact that students use social media to get informed, but at the same time it’s their source of distraction. A study has showed that “High Facebook engagement show more participation in university activities, which can be a preparation step for their bachelor studies.” (Kaya & Bicen, 2016). According to Meier, Reinecke, & Meltzer, 2016) students procrastinate a lot because of social media, especially Facebook which increases their academic stress and affects their well-being negatively. So, it is unbelievable how social media can be good and bad at the same time. A study by Sagioglou & Greitemeyer (2014) showed that using Facebook causes negative moods, but people still use it because of wrong assumptions, assuming that they are going to feel happy while using Facebook. People will think that communicating will make them happy or seeing what others have shared would but in fact it will create negative moods. This is the problem of social media networks; people are getting so much attached to it that it has become like a drug, you think it is going to make you happier but in fact does not. You think it is going to help you acquire new information, but is most of the time biased or fake. It is true that we take what we have now for granted, like the fact that new web 2.0 exists which facilitates our life when we want to share something, unlike in the past when they had web 1.0. To sum it up, social media alone without a user is not really “social media”, and one user in the whole world using it alone does not make it “social media”, but the different users communicating through these media and uploading new information and grabbing the attention of other users around the world is what really makes it social makes it social. So, it is social because of us, because of our online interaction, which I stated about the fact that it is also negative most of the times, because you do not know who is behind the screen.
We had discussed in class about fake followers, how people cheat and get fake followers on Instagram and pretend they are famous or anything. From my personal experience, I can say that getting fake followers should not always be considered “wrong” or “bad” or that the person is a “fraud”. As a person who used applications to get fake followers in the past, I can say that it is not always wrong. I had used it just for the sake of fun, and also to have cool people around the world follow me and follow them back, but all that turned into having multiple good online friends and some recognition. Most of the people rather follow someone with good number of followers rather than following someone with little followers. Say a person is a body builder and only has 100 followers, most of the people checking out this person’s profile won’t bother following the person or communicating with them, whereas if the same person had around 1000+ followers, people will be more encouraged to follow the person thinking that “people know him he must be good”. This is the trick of why sometimes fake followers are important, even if they are fake at the beginning, in the end that will help the user gain real followers. For conclusion, social media can be hell and heaven at the same time, it can cause problems such as stalking and cyber bullying and hacking, but on the other hand it is great for communicating with distant people and for business purposes.
Kaya, T. & Bicen, H., (2016). The effects of social media on students’ behavior; Facebook as a case study. Computers in human behavior, 59, 374–379.
Sagioglou, C., Greitemeyer, T., (2014). Computers in human behavior, 35, 359–363.
