Positive and Negative Effects of Social Media on People

Many of us in this day and age can’t live without our cellphones and especially our social media accounts. We use our social media to get our news, to find out what events are going on in the world, in our communities, in our mosque. We use it to keep in touch with family, to connect with friends, we buy things, comment on the products and sometimes even people. Growing up in the technology era I have seen the effects it has on people’s lives. There are many positive things about social media as well as many negatives. This paper will review and discuss a few of the negative effects social media has on our mental, physical and social well being. The impact of it on our fitness level, or lack of it. The effect it has to our ability to connect with people in person, the lose of socialization skills and a reduction of common courtesy and empathy for others. The influence of it on the mental health and the emotional toll it has taken on us.

As my parents say, “When we were young, we would spend all day playing outside and were only allowed to watch TV for thirty minutes”. We can almost say the opposite these days, we spend all day on devices and disconnect from them for only a few hours. Many people that used to live active, healthy and athletic lifestyles have taken up an unhealthy sedentary life. There are many things that contribute to the sedentary nature of life. Automation of jobs is one that no longer requires us to use physical labor, instead we use computers, instead of communities being local due to them sitting looking at social media and not having the courage to get up and go for their once daily walks and exercise routine. A lot of this is due to the fact that people think of social media as a source of entertainment and a way of keeping in contact with others, but it is also adding a lot of unnecessary entertainment to their lives which causes them to sit down for most of the day just looking at the screen.

As my parents say, “When we were young, we would spend all day playing outside and were only allowed to watch TV for thirty minutes”. We can almost say the opposite these days, we spend all day on devices and disconnect from them for only a few hours. Many people that used to live active, healthy and athletic lifestyles have taken up an unhealthy sedentary life. There are many things that contribute to the sedentary nature of life. Automation of jobs is one, many jobs that require hard physical labor no longer requires us to use physical labor. Farming for example people had to do hard labor to pick crops but know they have computerized tractor to do this. So instead some one sits in the cab of the tractor running the computer and in the mean time spending time on his social media account during the free time. A paper recently published by Pankaj C Patel et al in the Social Science and Medicine Journal shows a relationship between automation and deteriorating physical and mental health at the county level. We used to meet up with friends and play basket ball, instead now we watch a basketball game while we are commenting on it in social media the whole time. Instead of meeting with our neighbours and going on walks we are sitting at home commenting on photo’s and events of others thousands of miles away. According to Quentin Fottrell from Market watch “Adults spend more than 11 hours per day watching, reading, listening to or simply interacting with media, according to a new study by market-research group Nielsen. That’s up from nine hours, 32 minutes just four years ago”. Lastly the need for speed has added to the discouragement of physical activity, we can no longer wait or put in the longer effort it takes to get things done. Instead of walking to the corner store to buy groceries etc we drive there. Instead of doing research by talking and surveying people in person we do it online and over social media because it’s faster and requires less physical activity. In the constant effort of making it easy on ourselves and enjoying the entertainment value of social media we are impacting our physical and social well being.

When you reduce your physical activity, your health deteriorates and so does your energy levels and your mood, but your mood and mental health can also be influenced by social media. According to Jessica Brown from the BBC, “Researchers in Austria found that participants reported lower moods after using Facebook for 20 minutes”. The constant exposure to perfectly framed photographs of other and there lives creates a feeling of jealousy and worthlessness that leads to dangerous feelings of depression. Allison Abrams from Psychology Today writes about a 2015 Study conducted by the University of Missouri, she says “In a 2015 study on the effects of Facebook use on mental health, researchers at the University of Missouri discovered that regular use could lead to symptoms of depression if the site triggered feelings of envy in the user”. There are many reasons for the shift of their mood and change to their mental health. Many time Doctor Iroise Dumonthiel of Birkbeck University says, “social media is affecting our brain particularly its plasticity”, which is the way the brain grows and changes after experiencing different things”. Social media is being linked to many mental illnesses such as depression anxiety related disorders and also can be related with stress according to a study from the university of Pittsburgh found that “. Social media also increases the chance of suicide based on how many people liked you photo and how many followers you have on social media if you don’t you are not “famous” or well known to be honest I don’t think you should depend on numbers like this due to them not really meaning anything at all because if you post a picture of you going somewhere or a picture of yourself doing something fancy or wearing fancy clothes what good is that going to do to you are you going to die? The answer is no way because its just a picture in the end after a week or so you completely forget about how many like you had on that post.

According to Huffington post there are many skills that are essential in order to socialize successfully and fit into society, two of the top traits are the ability to maintain eye contact and use proper body language. In the past, parents would teach their children it was bad manners not -to look a person in the eyes when speaking to them, it tells the other person they or their message is not important. Lauren Sherman one of the lead author of a UCLA brain mapping study says that “Before, if you were having a face to face interaction everything was qualitative. You use someone's gestures or facial expressions, that sort of thing, to see how effective your message was.'. She implies that reading of facial expressions and gestures is an important social skill and one that we are losing due to social media. When we interact with one another over text we no longer are reading the facial expression, seeing the gestures or know the impact of our words. This leads to people saying and doing things online they normally would not do face to face. People distance themselves from their words and its impact when they are communicating through social media. This detachment is dangerous as it leads to the disintegration of our social skills, this disintegration is becoming the cause of a myriad of mental illnesses.

Social media has many negative affects on your mental well-being as well as physical well being and deteriorates social skills very quickly. Therefore, I think that if we do use social media, we should reduce the amount of time were on our phones scrolling through our feeds looking at random useless things that gives us entertainment for a few short seconds. My point is that anyone looking to get into social media to keep away and people already in social media to reduce the amount of time they spend on social media, my Islamic viewpoint to this is that social media could lead to interactions between people who wouldn’t dare to talk to each other in real life at school or in front of parents who talk to each other through social media.