Health experts say that sitting is the new smoking. With the diseases connected to sitting and the number of people it kills every year, sitting is one of the worst things you can do for your health. Possibly as dangerous is what we often do while we're sitting: Mindlessly scrolling through our social media feeds when we have a few spare hours.
The American Academy of Pediatrics has warned about the potential for negative effects of social media in young kids and teens. The same risks may be true for adults from all generations. Social networking sites like Facebook allow you to find and connect with just about anyone. Browsing these sites can make you feel connected to a larger community, but such easy, casual connection in an electronic environment can also have its downside.
1.
A
false sense of connection: Social media sites can make it more difficult for us to distinguish
between the meaningful relationships we foster in the real world, and the
numerous casual relationships formed through social media. By focusing so much
of our time on these less meaningful relationships, our most important
connections will weaken.
2.
Cyber-bullying: The immediacy provided by social media is
available to predators as well as friends. Kids especially are vulnerable to
the practice of cyber-bullying in which the perpetrators, anonymously or even
posing as people their victims trust, terrorize individuals in front of their
peers.
The
devastation of these online attacks can leave deep mental scars. In several
well-publicized cases, victims have even been driven to suicide. The anonymity
afforded online can bring out dark impulses that might otherwise be suppressed.
Cyber-bullying has spread widely among youth, with 42% reporting that they have
been victims.
3.
Decreased
productivity: While many businesses
use social networking sites to find and communicate with clients, the sites can
also prove a great distraction to employees who may show more interest in what
their friends are posting than in their work tasks. Wired.com posted two
studies which demonstrated damage to productivity caused by social networking.
Nucleus Research reported that Facebook shaves
1.5% off office productivity while Morse claimed that British companies lost
2.2 billion a year to the social phenomenon. New technology products have
become available that allow social networks to be blocked, but their
effectiveness remains spotty.
4.
Privacy: Social networking sites encourage people to be
more public about their personal lives. Because intimate details of our lives
can be posted so easily, users are prone to bypass the filters they might
normally employ when talking about their private lives. What's more, the things
they post remain available indefinitely.
While at one moment a photo of friends doing
shots at a party may seem harmless, the image may appear less attractive in the
context of an employer doing a background check. While most sites allow their
users to control who sees the things they've posted, such limitations are often
forgotten, can be difficult to control or don't work as well as advertised.
“There are a lot of pros and cons about social
media. It’s just how you choose to handle it and how you have to be prepared
for the negatives as well. “(Aubrey Peeples)[i]
[i] Sources used:
·
“6 Ways Social Media
Affects Our Mental Health” by Alice G. Walton
·
“The Negative Effect of
Social Media on Society and Individuals” by Brian Jung
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