A few decades ago life was considered simple but as technology has slowly took over lives, it is considered that the young generation cannot seem to live without it. One of the main aspects or the key components of this technology is social media which was originally created to help people communicate and stay connected to each other but it seems that its purpose is changing. Now, there is not just one type of social media available, there are different types each fulfilling a different purpose. Although, social media does help humans to connect and communicate, it can be considered an evil with it being highly addictive, making people more unsocial, lowering self-esteem making people more narcissist, it also leads to cyber bullying, mental health problems like Facebook depression, giving us instant gratification and it hinders from making deep meaningful relationships.

Social media does not only harm a person’s mental health but also hinders or prevents a person from having a deep and meaningful face to face relationships as people are in a habit of having instant gratification like matching a Tinder date or ordering something online weather it is food or clothing, not only this, people are now used to put on filters on almost everything they post on social media such as Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and so on, showing that life is better than it actually is, which is a concern because then they are just used to show only their best side and try to keep up with the appearances and lower their self-esteem with the number of likes. While some people do not understand that the process of having a deep meaningful face to face relationship requires time, patience and getting to know the real person and not the one on social media with filters so it is not something that one can have instantaneously or by change the other person by using filters according to one’s likes and dislikes, and the people who use social media especially teenagers are not to be blamed for such a thing as there is no fault of their own, the people who give access of social media to the young generation can be blamed as they let them use it with no supervision.  This is not the only reason why social media is bad for anyone, social media has showed signs of being mentally affecting a person and cases have showed that people go in depression and have other mental illnesses (Taylor Argo).

Differences in personality and many traits leading to them is getting pretty common, focusing on the use of Facebook as a social networking site, there have been “Studies investigating the relationship between Facebook use and mental health variables have described a positive relationship between Internet use, e.g., chatting or e-mailing, and mental disorders” (Brailovskaia, Julia, and Jürgen) and “Most of these studies found depression to be positively associated with online behavior, especially the use of SNSs like Facebook. A positive correlation between depression and time spent on Facebook has been described.” (Brailovskaia, Julia, and Jürgen) The usefulness of social media is declining and its negative aspects to be overtaking. A change is happening but with a negative impact.

There have been studies conducted using surveys of around two hundred people aged between 18 to 82 who were in a relationship and the results were positive that the use of social media especially Facebook does impact relationships and mediate between the relationships negatively. This could be because of the addictive effects of Facebook as this could be leading to a partner giving less attention to the relationships and giving more to social media. Social media is so addictive that people would check their phones first thing in the morning rather than saying good morning to their partner which results in distances and the partners feels disconnected to each other and find that they are not the significant other anymore.

Networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are growing with millions of active users which grew over the past decade like wild fire, “Facebook in 2011 had around 500 million active users” and “Facebook allows users to create a profile where they can post information about themselves ranging from their occupation, to their religious and political views to their favourite movies and musicians. On this profile, both the user and their ‘friends’ can post web links, pictures and videos of interest. Further, Facebook also offers the facility to send private and public messages to other users and even engage in real time instant messaging. All of these features coupled with the creation of applications, groups and fan pages make Facebook broadly popular for online socializing.” On the other hand, “Twitter allows users to update their account with short statements named “tweets” limited to 140 characters. Other users are able ‘follow’ these updates” and has more than 73.5 million unique users and a growth of 1105 percent. (Hughes, David John, Moss Rowe, Mark Batey, Andrew Lee) with such a large population using these social networking sites, they act as strong personality predictors and cause high level neuroticism.

The use of social media is increasing drastically since the last few years and can be considered as addictive. Research scientists in a Harvard study which was conducted in 2012, reported that “talking about oneself on social media activates a pleasure sensation associated to food, sex and money which can also be referred to as a dopamine effect.” Which is a problem because if children are exposed to pleasures like these which is addictive, they cannot control it and feel that their social life is more necessary than their actual lives. There have surveys and research done which concluded that “children spending more than two hours on social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter are almost twice as prone to suffer poor mental health, but also that children who spend no time on social networking websites have symptoms of mental ill-health” as per the Office of National Survey.

There have been studies and research conducted on the usage of social media by children, there has been reports verifying that there is clear association between longer time spent on social media and the incidence of mental health problems, with the distinction of girls being glued to social media more than boys and the statistics for the usage of social media for both the genders is increasing every year, and also increasing stress. (Sophie Jamieson) Not only this, but social media has been proven to have alter the personalities of its users according to the social networking sites they use. (Huges)

There also have studies and research conducted on the usage of social media by children, there has been reports verifying that there is clear association between longer time spent on social media and the incidence of mental health problems, with the distinction of girls being glued to social media more than boys and the statistics for the usage of social media for both the genders is increasing every year, and also increasing stress (Sophie Jamieson). Not only this, “but social media has been proven to have alter the personalities of its users according to the social networking sites they use.” (Huges)

Whereas some articles and researches show that certain group or a particular group of people like students in collage benefit from social media and the most popular social networking sites for them are Facebook, YouTube, Blogs, Twitter, Myspace or LinkedIn (Martin, 2008). As Facebook is the most preferred form of social media, more than 50% of its users log on every day and spend roughly 100 minutes per day on average on it. Even though spending or wasting so much time on social media, it reaps its own benefits for students such as they get a virtual space to explore their interests or problems and interact with similar individuals online, it also helps the students to get academic support, while strengthening online communication skills and knowledge. Still, the findings done through all the surveys and researches conclude that social media negatively affects the learning and education of the students because of various reasons such as they create modes to procrastinate, increasing distraction and making the students less productive and the effects can also be seen on the grades of the students and their work efficiency. (Wang, Qingya)

The impact of social media is not just limited to a group of people rather, social media has a huge influence on teenagers, the most common problems are that the youths are disconnected from reality and suffer from loss of privacy as they share too much information. “Another serious risk is the amount of information shared on social network sites. LexisNexis and Lawers.com surveyed 1,000 Americans and found that half of them divulged too much personal data online. What is more worrying is the fact that 44 percent of them believed that the information they posted on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn or MySpace were being used against them.” (Hughes). Teenagers are also used to being serious victims of social media as they get emotionally distressed and go through Facebook Depression and cyber bullying through the process of unpleasant emails and trolling, some teenagers are not even aware when they are being cyber bullied and those who experience these kinds of activities tend to have mental illnesses. “A nationwide survey by the National Campaign to Support Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy found a shocking 20 percent of teens participating in sexting.” (Suren)

Due to the many negative effects of social media, it has started affecting relationships as it is evolving at such a great speed. Social media creates an illusion if connecting people together but in reality, it is creating more distance between the partners. “The younger generation is affected more through social media as they cannot make deep meaningful relationships without any fault of their own because they never learn how to create those relationships as it takes time and social media provides instant gratification to its users like Tinder gives an opportunity for instant dating.” (Sinek, 2016)

There have been major growing concerns these days for the effects of social media regarding cyberbullying and how it affects a person in the real world and cause more problems. People do not realize the seriousness of the issue that even “some scholars have theorized that cyberbullying may be more harmful than traditional bullying” (Hase). Cyberbullying, by definition is “bullying through the use of electronic venues, such as instant messaging, e-mails, chat rooms, websites, online games, social networking sites and text messaging” (Hase). Even though this phenomenon is fairly new, studies shows that 20-40% of adolescents have been victims of it. (Hase) As time is passing our society is changing and in this era of technology comes with its assistance as well as its dreadful applications.

Social media, no doubt is an evil but without it, life only becomes more difficult. It is not like social media has no positive outcomes or benefits, it does helps us to connect to people and gain more knowledge and is seems to be also be providing news to its users, but “the major mistake in the way of using it, like alcohol, gambling and other things if used in balanced quantities it may be actually good for you” (Sinek, 2016), but as it is said, too much of anything is bad for you, same goes for the use of social media. It has been proven, and it can be also known to be as basic knowledge that using such a powerful thing on the internet such as social media could be extremely dangerous for the teenagers specially without any filtration or supervision of the adults. The main cause of problem starts when there is unsupervised usage of social media by kids and teens, as they start to get addictive to it.

America being the most advance and diversified in the use of social media and building multiple social networking sites, according to the “report by Common Sense Media, 5 percent of teenagers in America currently have profiles on social networking sites, of which 68 percent use Facebook as their main social networking tool”. (Ramasubbu) as such a large number of adolescents using social media they get vulnerable to “evils such as Facebook depression, sexting, and cyberbullying, which are realistic threats.” (Ramasubbu) Not just this, “research found that 15 percent of teens were disturbed and uncomfortable about having had their private message forwarded or posted in a public forum” and “that nearly 39 percent of teens on social network have been cyberbullied in some way, compared with 22 percent of online teens who do not use social networks.” (Ramasubbu) Teenagers also indulge in the act of Trolling which is defined as “the act of deliberately inflicting hatred, bigotry, racism, misogyny, or just simple bickering between people, often anonymously, is also pervasive in social network.” (Ramasubbu) which is a bit terrible for the person who is getting trolled.

The use of social media is proven to have good effects such as increasing confidence as the users can express themselves more freely, more importantly, the main reason social media was created was to connect people and it helps in building and maintaining relationships to some extent essentially by removing or at least giving the illusion of no barriers of distance. Another benefit for social media is that it gives its users an unrestricted platform to amplify their thoughts and reach as many people as possible to express their views freely and safely, there are some cases in which the speaker likes to keep their anonymity and social media does provide that. Having all the benefits and aside, social media is a powerful tool and using it without any guidance can lead to many negative consequences which easily outnumber the features and positive impact it has to offer to its individual users or the society.

Social media is ruining the life of its users typically due to the imbalance use of a technology like that. There is no denying the helpfulness of social media but at the same time we cannot be ignorant about the fact that social media does impacts and influence its users’ life in a negative way. As we now know it for a fact that social media does ruins relationships and sometimes be the cause of divorce, breakups and fights between the couples, as they feel more disconnected to each other. Social media does not only ruin personal relationships, but also does not lets you build a relationship with you job which leads to people not finding job satisfaction or they feel that they are not making an impact on the society, this can be claimed back to how people have so much less patience these days and do not know how to build those relationships.

It seems that social media plays such a bizarre role in our lives as we gather information from one of the sources proving that social media plays an important role in ruining relationships, but also studies show that it helps people in building those relationships as well, and sometimes makes them last longer as it helps the user to stay connected. Social media is a cure to a disease created by social media, as in the case of college students, it helps them as a means to get away and let them be more socially active at the same time, helping them in various ways, so the important thing that is lacking and what we are doing wrong in the use of social media is the balance of use. If that is corrected, them social media can be considered as a powerful tool which has a huge, live changing positive impact on its users.
