In this day and age, people are less likely to go out and meet their friends and more prone to post content on social media platforms. The young generation identifies social media as part of their everyday life thus being addicted to checking notifications and news feeds (Vromen, Xenos & Loader, 2015). Nowadays, technology appears to have gotten in the way of prosperous friendships. The time when individuals could chat and know their friend is long gone; all one has to do is have their friend request accepted and find out every detail about that individual. Even though social media platforms are perceived as channels through which people connect, social media websites bring more harm than benefits to society.

Social media websites have adverse effects on today’s societies because of their addictive nature (Fox & Moreland, 2015). The results can be experienced daily on the news channels with an increase in instances of harassment, cyber-bullying, sexual crimes and theft, which indicates that our society is not as ‘united’ as most individuals think. It is saddening that many teenagers with Twitter and Facebook profiles do not comprehend the ramifications of creating a public profile, therefore, exposing them to risk. Most of these individuals think that their friends on social media are people who can be trusted. Nevertheless, the truth is that some of the social media profiles are not real and therefore one could be interacting with fraudsters disguised as friends.

Apart from the fact that most users of social media websites being generous with their individual information, it is evident that these individuals get open-minded with those they regard as ‘their friends.’ The formal definition of a social media community is individuals who one develops a connection of mutual fondness. Every user of social media websites can be accused of being too open to strangers on social media. People also feel guilty when declining friend requests and eliminating friends from their profiles thus ensuring that the figures become misleading and tend to coil out of control. According to a recent study, Facebook users are perceived as much attractive when one gets almost 300 friends. Nevertheless, the magnetism grows weak in case the figure surpasses the normal threshold by far. Most social media users only interact with 12% of the entire value regularly and could consider a small proportion of their friends on social media as real close allies.

Research indicates that the affection towards social media is influenced by the reward center in the mind that generates satisfying feeling with each positive reaction that is received. However, displaying personal life occurrences in the public sphere promotes as much negativity as positivity. As a result, social media users who post their private matters usually invite other individuals to judge and comment about them. Whether intentional or not, the resolution to post a status update, photo or sharing a link is usually aimed at grasping the attention of other individuals. Since people are no longer kept happy by human relations, they egoistically and psychologically develop their own digital, modified illustration of themselves in a world of fantasy. However, with the presence of social media platforms all over, it becomes impossible to get away from the grasp that technology brings on society.

The current generation relies on social media. Members of the society have been missing from every aspect that makes them behave like human beings – fragility, imperfection, weakness – and have remained with faultless and manipulated types of people on the social media platforms. It is therefore evident that social media has made people less connected where they now feel more alone than they were before its emergence.

References

Fox, J., & Moreland, J. J. (2015). The dark side of social networking sites: An exploration of the relational and psychological stressors associated with Facebook use and affordances. Computers in Human Behavior, 45, 168-176.

Vromen, A., Xenos, M. A., & Loader, B. (2015). Young people, social media and connective action: From organizational maintenance to everyday political talk. Journal of Youth Studies, 18(1), 80-100.