Social Media Affecting Society Essay

Is Social Media Affecting Our Society? Social Media has a lot more negative effects on our society than it does positive. Social media allows people from all over the world to interact through discussion, photos, videos, and audio. According to Dr. Shannon M. Rauch, “one of the main reasons we use social media is for self-distraction and boredom relief” (Whiteman 17). The latest statistics show that 74% of American Adolescents use social networking sites such as facebook, twitter, instagram, snapchat, and pinterest ("Social Networking ProCon.org."). Allowing 24 hour media access has caused the amount of time people spend on social media to rise dramatically. Some people say that today’s eight to eighteen year olds will devote an average of seven hours and thirty-eight minutes a day but, will manage to pack a total of ten hours and forty-five minutes worth of media content into those seven and a half hours just by multi-media browsing. So, we are overdoing it. Social Media sites entice people to waste time. Every day we are reminded that your days are limited and you should make the best of the time given to you. How are people expected to do that wasting all their time on social media? A study at The University of Bergen in Norway, developed a scale to measure Facebook addiction ("Social …show more content…
A 2008 UCLA study revealed web users had fundamentally altered prefrontal cortexes due to the fast pace of social networking sites rewiring the brain with repeated exposure ("Social Networking ProCon.org."). It causes people to spend less time talking face-to-face. We are so caught up in the internet we forget about the “real” world. Society is oversaturated with the details of hundreds of people’s lives that we’re not loving people we see week to week. Knowing someone’s social media life and sharing everything about your own life via. networking sites is not the same as being a real friend, or even a real