Is Social Media Helpful or Harmtful to Today’s Society (Essay Example)

📌Category: Entertainment, Social Media
📌Words: 1080
📌Pages: 4
📌Published: 21 February 2022

We often question whether social media benefits or damages our society. Social media draws concerns from many different aspects of our normal lives. It has the potential to destroy or build up one’s life. Using it can affect you and everyone else around you, positively or negatively. Social media ties into seven main important aspects of everyday life: safety, religion, culture, education, politics, humanity, and family.

Safety is something we all strive for and social media just might put our safety at risk. An issue that a lot of people fall into is catfishing. Catfishing is when someone deliberately deceives you into thinking they are someone that they are not. ¨For these victims of catfishing, invasion of privacy, appropriation, false light, and intentional or negligent infliction of emotional distress do not provide a substantial likelihood of successful recovery.¨ (Tyler W. Hartney) Catfishing victims obtain severe mental distress when they figure out they have been catfished. Due to this they gain mental issues that they can not steadily recover from. Another major issue that people come across on social media is suicidal influences. ¨There is increasing evidence that the Internet and social media can influence suicide-related behavior.¨ (Tyler W. Hartney) We often encounter cruel and evil people on social media platforms that try to influence our suicidal behavior.

Religion is important to many people around the globe and social media carries a lot of information that disagrees and agrees with certain religions. Communication about religion is key to people and most social platforms include a way to communicate. ¨Technology can be beneficial to religion when it enhances the communal aspects of religion, and detrimental to religion when it degrades these communal aspects.¨ (Mookgo S. Kgatle) Although we can communicate, people tend to communicate in a negative way to degrade aspects of a person’s religion. We often jump to judgement, instead we should listen and provide a positive way of communication towards others on social media. ¨ The third shortcoming is the publication of false information. ¨(Mookgo S. Kgatle)Others on social media frequently put out false information in order to persuade you into believing their opinion on a certain religion. Social media is filled with faulty information that is put out by evil people. 

Social media impacts cultures in major ways. Cultures around the world are dramatically changing due to long usage of social media. Without social interaction we often fall short of our cultural needs. ¨Social media has a negative impact on social lifestyle interactions. ¨(Joshua Ebere Chukwuere) Social media draws your attention towards your phone, computer, tablet, etc too often causing lack of social interaction. People need to interact with others to maintain their cultural identity. Social media destroys how we value life. ¨Social media destroys people's social values.¨(Joshua Ebere Chukwuere) People are hooked on social media to the extent that they forget the value of an actual social lifestyle. There needs to be a push for more real life social interactions.

Education is key to living a great life and social media helps by providing many different sources of information on almost every subject. Social media provides us a great way to interact and learn with each other. “Social media applications therefore allow users to converse and interact with each other; to create, edit and share new forms of textual, visual and audio content.”(Neil Selwyn) With social media people are able to access information and learn easily. There are forms of visual and audio learning available making education easier for people with social media. Social media also provides ways to multitask; We can listen to a book while playing a sport and there are plenty more ways. ¨Social media is therefore associated with an increased tendency for young people to multitask.¨(Neil Selwyn) Social media makes it easier for young students to do multiple things at once. Social media provides a sound way of getting a solid education.

`Politics play important roles in our everyday lives. We depend on politicians to make the right decisions everyday. Social media provides us with the latest information on different topics about politics. ¨Social media can bring forward content that is not featured in the mainstream media. ¨ (Tim Highfield) Mainstream media tends to be biased towards certain political parties. Meaning they will put out what they think is right for their political opinions. Social media holds a lot of unbiased information on politics. Certain platforms allow people to speak freely upon their opinion on politics. Facebook offers various opportunities to express opinions on politics¨ (Tim Highfield) Facebook, a social media platform, allows others to share their own opinions and beliefs about politics. Social media provides us with the ability to share important information about politics.

It's hard to decipher whether social media is human or inhumane. It can affect our everyday mental and physical processes because of how long we stay on social platforms. ¨Social media usage has dangerous effects for younger generations because problems related to mental health which develop during short periods can act as an epidemic for any individual throughout life.¨(Hilal Bashir) When we look at our phones everyday constantly, we tend to not focus on how we are doing mentally. Our mental health is important and social media drags it down.  ¨Loneliness is one of the prime concerns of present virtual society, as it is intimately related to serious health problems.¨(Hilal Bashir)  As we are looking through social media, we forget about our social life. Social media can affect how much we eat due to addiction. Social media is inhumane.

Family is important and social media distracts us from our family bonds, but it also can bring us together in ways we never thought was possible. “It is possible that families use both entertainment and social media in positive ways in their family.”(Sarah M. Coyne) Social media can help the family bond more by producing a sense of entertainment that the whole family enjoys. We can use social media to our advantage and bond together tightly with our family. Social media makes us hide from our family and focus on our phones.  ¨Social media may displace real life meaningful interactions with family.¨(Sarah M. Coyne) Social media also has the potential to draw you away from family. Don’t let social media affect your social interaction with family. 

Social media affects everyday aspects of life including  safety, religion, culture, education, politics, humanity, and family. It draws us away from safety by putting us in situations we don't know how to handle. It can push or pull us to a religion depending on who or what platform you're on. Social media draws us away from culture by making us spend too much time on our phones. Social media increasingly helps with education by giving a way to multitask and learn simultaneously. Social media shows us different opinions and facts on politics, sometimes we can trust them and sometimes we can’t. Social media is inhumane because it puts stress on our minds and bodies. We spend too much time on social media rather than having an actual social life.

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