
Social media over the past years has been growing in number of sites and usage of these sites. Social media has many uses and every site has its own special use. For example, Facebook is a great tool for communicating with a large amount of people through groups or just keeping your friends updated on your life through statuses. There’s also Instagram that allows people to share their photos with their followers and have people like the photos. Instagram has now also been updated to where people can shop for things they see in pictures making it almost like an online store. Although these sites can be helpful at times these sites can also be very addictive and can be harmful to a persons well being. These issues can come in overuse of the sites and also can be very harmful to self esteems with the stigma of popularity. A cause for the over use of social media can be smartphones, the Huffington post writes “Twenty-four percent of teens admit to going online “almost constantly” — this is undoubtedly linked to the widespread availability of smartphones”. Social media can be a very useful tool in communication and entertainment but the overuse of sites such as Facebook and Snapchat can lead to addiction which comes with harmful effects including mental and emotional issues.

    When you become addicted to using one of these sites you may not even know how consumed you are in it until someone else points it out to you. An article in reader’s digest shows how easy it is to become engulfed in the social media even when you’re with friends or colleagues when they write “When you’re at a social event and suddenly alone for a moment, you might pull up Facebook to avoid looking awkward. But taking the chance to mingle with other people will help build your confidence, says Karen Sobel Lojeski, PhD, assistant professor of technology and society at Stony Brook University”. This shows how people use Facebook as a sense of security in social situations to try and avoid being labeled as awkward meanwhile this is hurting your overall confidence. Another way that you can be addicted is when you use a site such as Facebook to procrastinate doing something in real life like school work or going to the gym. However, this can actually be healthy habit. In the same reader’s digest article that was referenced before it touches upon this subject when the author writes “Ever jump when a coworker catches you on Facebook? No need to apologize—studies show short breaks throughout the day can boost productivity and creativity. The problem is, a quick, ten-minute social media break can quickly turn into a half hour, says Pamela Rutledge, PhD, director of the Media Psychology Research Center” this goes to show that short breaks can be useful but when we get lost in the social media and instead of a short break it turns into a long break it is detrimental to our production. Another way that the addiction to social media could be present is when you become angry or upset you log onto these sites and try to run away from the problems you’re facing in real life. All of these examples make up the same point, when you use social media as a crutch instead of facing the problem in real life and solving it you may have a social media addiction that needs to be dealt with. There is no medicine that can fix this kind of addiction though. The ways that the addiction can be dealt with is coping mechanisms. These coping methods can help in ways like going to a consular instead of posting it on social media. Also another way that it can be dealt with is to go “cold turkey” which is to completely delete all social media accounts and try and go on with your life without it. This method is extremely hard however and can also lead to a relapse. The best way I believe to break an addiction to social media is to combine these two mechanisms. When you have a problem in life you confront the problem head on and if you need help with that problem you seek person to person interaction through consoling. Social media is meant for entertainment so that is what you should use it for. You should try and cut down the time you spend on it. A good way of doing this is when you leave your house to go on a hike or a run you should leave your phone at home and enjoy the outdoors. If you are set on going “cold turkey” and don’t want any social media in your life a way of making this easier is to buy a non smart phone which would wouldn’t allow you to access the internet unless you were at home, taking away the temptation of having the sites readily available at your finger tips.

   Now that I’ve touched upon how you can be addicted I’m now going to talk about who can become addicted and which groups are more likely to become addicted statistically. Anyone can become addicted to social media, whether its someone in their 60’s or someone whose 10. Anyone that uses social media as a crutch in any situation can be considered addicted. The common consensus is that millennial’s are the generation that overuses social media way more than any generation before. This is inaccurate however. According to Jonah Engel Bromwhich who writes for the New York times Generation X which is the generation before the millennia’s uses more social media than any other generation. This data may be skewed however because of the number of people in generation X compared to the millennial population but I still believe it is valid information. This example is shows that there are many more people addicted to social media than that was thought before. This is because the majority of people don’t even know that they are addicted and continue to live their lives as if nothing is wrong. The people who are most likely to become addicted to social media are the people who have smart phones. As mentioned before in the paragraph above smart phones make the access of social media so available all you have to do is open the phone and click in the app and you are on the site and ready to explore. EMarketers did some research and found that “ this year, there will be 190.5 million US smartphone users of all ages, representing 73.4% of internet users and 59.3% of the population. By 2019, the smartphone audience will reach 236.8 million, or 85.5% of internet users and 71.4% of total consumers in the country.”. This statistic shows how much of an issue social media addiction can become if not talked about and the issue is not solved. This is because as the number of internet users increases the number of people addicted will increase also. Most people are at risk of becoming addicted to social media and are just unaware of it, there needs to be some way of reaching people to let them know that social media addiction is a real issue and needs to solved. The best way to accomplish this goal is to have speakers go to high schools and work places and give presentations on how someone can tell if they are addicted and the various coping methods to relieve this addiction. Another way that could work to get the word out to a larger number of people is to have a television commercial about it, however many people would change the channel during commercial breaks or would just not pay attention to it which is why presentations would be more effective because you are forced to listen to it.

   Although social media addiction has very negative effects on a person, social media in proper doses can very beneficial to a person’s life. Social medias main purpose is to connect people together who may not have the opportunity to meet or communicate face to face. Tools such as group pages on Facebook and group messaging on Snapchat allow large quantities of people to make plans with ease. Other things like hashtags and pages allow people all around the world to talk about a similar topic and allows people to learn things they never knew before. Social media also can help out in the class room. Joanne Gikas writes about the use of social media in the class room and touches upon the fact that social media provides is that teachers are able to respond immediately to their questions. She also adds that social media has provided is the ability to have access to information immediately. Social media has been impactful on the current society mainly on making communication easier but also made meeting new people simpler or even going as far as meeting your wife on a dating website when this was almost impossible in the past. 

  With the positive impacts of social media there comes much more negative impacts on a person as a result of the overuse of social media. One of these negative impacts is the portrayal of unrealistic bodies of females. When girls use social media often they are looking at models on sites such as Instagram. There is not an issue with this except that many of these pictures that are put up on Instagram are altered so much to the point where you wouldn’t recognize the model in real life. It can be anything from using enhancement on there butt or breasts to using a site or app that smooth’s they’re face out and shows no blemishes. This can really hurt a girl’s self esteem. When they are looking at these models all day on the social media site and then go home and look in the mirror they could be upset with what they see and could led to serious mental and physical illnesses. An example of this is when Minas Michikyan who wrote a piece for Journal Of Adolescent Research talks about the social media portrayal of Latina adolescent girls and the modeling of valued body shape and size. She also talks about how impressionable social media can be on a person whether its something good and inspiring or something that can hurt a person mentally. Another effect of social media is that the addiction of social media can lead to other addictions such as alcoholism. In the article called “Craving Facebook? Behavioral addiction to online social networking and its association with emotion regulation deficits.” Written by Julia M. Hormes there was an experiment that’s design was to use. “Cross-sectional survey study targeting undergraduate students. Associations between disordered online social networking use, internet addiction, deficits in emotion regulation and alcohol use problems were examined using univariate and multivariate analyses of covariance.

”. The aim of this study was to examine the personality traits in substance abuse users and people who overuse social media and compare the results. The findings of this study are that “The use of online social networking sites is potentially addictive. Modified measures of substance abuse and dependence are suitable in assessing disordered online social networking use. Disordered online social networking use seems to arise as part of a cluster of symptoms of poor emotion regulation skills and heightened susceptibility to both substance and non-substance addiction.”. This is saying that the people who are either addicted to social media or a substance that they abuse have very similar personality traits. This being said if someone who is addicted to social media should be cautious about becoming addicted to substance abuse because they may have an addictive personality. Another example of how social media can be detrimental to a person is talked about in the “Ted Talk” called The hidden influence of social networks in this ted talk it Nicholas Christakis speaks about the underlying effects of social media and the effects that people don’t notice. These types of things are like going out to dinner and being on your phone the whole time or as mentioned before being at a social event and when you are alone you use your phone and go on social media. These things may not look like they are the worst for you but if you take a step back and look and see that your social skills are diminishing which will make almost everything in life much more difficult. Things that people need social skills for are meeting new people and being able to tell stories to your friends or even something more serious as going to a job interview and being able to hold a conversation with the interviewer. The effects of social media abuse are very negative. These effects can range from wasting your time looking at pointless things on the internet to much more serious things such as depression and other addictions. 

  Social media can be a very useful tool in communication and entertainment but the overuse of sites such as Facebook and Snapchat can lead to addiction which comes with harmful effects including mental and emotional issues. One of the ways you can tell you’re addicted to social media is when you use it as crutch in an awkward situation or when you have a problem in life and choose to just go on your phone and look at Facebook instead of dealing with it. Social media has many negative effects on you such as mental effects like depression and anxiety or physical effects. There are ways to cope with these effects and kick the addiction to social media. Things like counseling and educational programs can help you with the addiction and give you ways to prevent overuse in the future. There are some positives that come out of having social media. Social media is a great tool in communication and meeting new people when it is used in correct doses. However, when it Is over used and abused it can become addictive and have negative effects on your personality such as low self esteem and depression. The original social media was newspapers that got all of the current events out to the public now. As we advanced through history the way news was spread has advanced also. We now have many online sites that allow people to share the news and talk about it with mass groups of people. These sites also allow people to interact with each other in other ways too. Some of these ways include sending pictures to each other with text written on the pictures and virtually poking someone on Facebook. Social media is a great tool for society as whole for spreading news and interacting with each other when used in proper moderation. Social media can also be addictive and people begin to overuse it and use it as a crutch when they as faced with a problem in life. Social media addiction is an issue that our society must face or it will begin to hurt us and we will regress in the progress we have made.
