Technology And Social Media

Improved Essays
How Technology and Social Media Negatively Affects Your Life
More than 9 people are killed, and more than 1,153 people are injured in crashes that are reported to involve a cellphone daily in the United States alone. (CDC) This is one big way that lives are affected by technology. While there are many benefits to having technology be such a big part of life, there are many downfalls as well. There are many advantages to limiting the amount of time spent on technology as well as the way it is used.
Technology is human knowledge being applied to a situation to create a solution and make life easier. From the very beginning of people, there has always been the spark to innovate and create, through this spark, things such as arrow-heads, spears,
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“As of January 2014, 74% of online adults use social networking sites.“ states pewinternet.org and Kristin Marino of schools.com has said that 46 percent of people get their news online at least three times a week. Three quarters of the people who use the internet have a social media profile of some sort. This means that almost anything posted on a social media account will be seen by another person and spread on. Anything posted online is visible to thousands of people normally, including information that is false. Social Media is so huge that the it easily allows the spread of unreliable and false information. Kristin Marino has also stated that “49.1% of people have heard false news via social media“. This creates the problem where people cause unnecessary panic in people that believe the information that they read on social media. There have been multiple cases in which this has happened. A guy named Shashank Tripathi wrote a tweet that spread false information in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy that said the New York Stock Exchange was flooding and that the power company would cut off electricity to all of Manhattan. The false information was picked up by national television broadcasters including CNN and the Weather Channel. This example shows how easily anything can be spread using social …show more content…
The use of social media sites is closely related with personality and brain disorders, such as the inability to have face to face conversations, a need for instant gratification, and ADHD, as well as addictive behaviors. People who have Pathological Internet Use normally feel loneliness, depression, anxiety and general distress. A 2008 University of California Los Angeles study revealed web users had altered prefrontal cortexes due to the fast pace of social networking sites rewiring the brain with repeated exposure.
People are starting to become too attached to their social media and technology that it is causing people to become recluses and spend less time interacting with people face to face. A study done by the USC Annenberg School found that the percentage of people reporting less face-to-face time with family in their homes rose from 8% in 2000 to 34% in 2011 and 32% reported using social media or texting during meals instead of talking with family and

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