An obstacle that has entered the lives of each and every individual living today, old and young, mature and immature, able and unable: social media. Social media has become a terrible norm upon which the determination of your ‘normality’ is made. In the presence of six different types and 100 different social media platforms that exist today, with no cap on amount of usage, motive of usage or extent of usage, a problem exists.
Facebook. 2.2 billion users worldwide, and a name known by so many more. Due to the variety of options associated with this, like surfing different Facebook pages, Facebook messenger, Facebook games and posting pictures and personal information as biographies and stories to ‘connect with friends’ people often indulge in its use. Even though the convenience associated with being able to talk to and share things like whereabouts with people that care, make it seem utopic, its overuse is a very usual phenomenon today which has degrading physical effects like eyesight detriments, chances of epilepsy, and facial slackening, as well as emotional and psychological determinantsd like depression, seizures and adverse reactions from certain responses from viewing certain trigger-provoking content.This makes it much less of the utopia it is made out to be.
The immaturity associated with using these platforms and the pull that they generate to make people use them again and again, also make them vulnerable to strangers accessing personal information about them which leads to monumental potential harm, and the audience of today that uses it is not even fully educated in terms of how to deal with advances from strange people or with offers from the platform
Other than that, the very misleading and vague user-unfriendly privacy settings and privacy infringements by the platform as pointed out when 15 privacy and consumer protection organizations filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission about how Facebook manipulates privacy in the spirit of their personal agenda through third party involvement, have led to it becoming more of a detriment in people’s lives. Among this, some using Facebook found their private chats on display for the public. This shows the reliability and the real outcome of the platform.
These are among a multitude of examples that exist today as to how there are multi-pronged problems with social media platforms, going from ethically to as far as physically and psychologically.A second example is Snapchat which has an extremely high percentage of reporting of unacceptable behavior and mass cyberbullying. It also exposes children to the adult world by freely letting anything being uploaded on Snapchat’s staple ‘story’ feature. Alongside Snapchat, Instagram also uses filters to project pictures of ourselves in a much better light. These pictures do not compute with our brain as it is scientifically proven that these filters increase cortisol, the stress hormone, and lead to reductions in happiness and self-worth due to the projection of perfection of others.
The dangers of social media and its overuse range not only to personal problems but have far-reaching effects like the lack of productivity and increase in procrastination, communication problems and real-world relationship upkeep decreasing by a fair margin. Furthermore, children lose sight of important things like physical activities and strengthening of friendships and family bonds. Alongside this, the way society has frailly constructed the world we live in is that having a certain device and being ever-present on these platforms is ‘cool’ and something increasingly worrying is that even children around the age of five and seven may be isolated in certain social groups due to a lack of social media presence.
Accompanying this, children and adults alike are often led toward misdirection due to the lack of attentiveness associated with the use of these social media platforms and the mediums of using them, like iPads and iPods.Chaperones could lose sight of children in a crowd due to being engrossed within social media and the excess of this obsession could lead to things like accidentally tripping over or car accidents. Social media addicts people to the extent where they use their devices at all times and fall prey to the aforementioned problems.
The immaturity associated with using these platforms and the pull that they generate to make people use them again and again, also makes them vulnerable to strangers accessing personal information about them which leads to monumental potential harm, and the audience of today that uses it is not even fully educated in terms of how to deal with advances from strange people or with offers from the platform.
The simple solution to this is attentiveness and moderation. These two things can help reap the benefits that these social media platforms undoubtedly provide, alongside the priority, safety.
