A Social Disaster

-By Nupur Saigal

The use of social media is increasing day and day amongst the youth today. Using social
media sites is the most common activity of today’s children. Any website that allows social
interaction is considered a social media. This includes social networking sites like Facebook,
Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr and MySpace. Besides these social networking sites, gaming sites that
allow the players to communicate with other players such as club penguin, our world and sims are
also considered as social media as the players are in a virtual world. Such sites offer a portal for
entertainment and communication for today’s youth and has grown aggressively in the recent
years. Because of this reason mainly, it is very important that parents are aware of the nature of
social media sites as the impact of using social media sites is not always healthy. It leads to
cyberbullying and addiction. It is important to make today’s youth understand about all these
consequences as they are not aware of the negative side of using all these new sites. Every day
there is a new social media site being made that helps the children interact with their friends and
be a part of a virtual environment that helps them communicate with their friends without actually
meeting them.

There can also be a positive side of using social media sites. The first positive feature is
that it helps you stay connected with your friends and helps you communicate with them even if
you are far away from them. You can always be updated with the world and your friends by using
social media. We can share our experiences on social media. We can share the ups and downs,
the twists and turns that ever happened in our lives and our friends or family can comment on our
experiences and within a fraction of a second they can also update you with what goes on in their
lives too and share their experiences. By doing all this we can empathize with one another. It also
helps in faster communication and being in touch with the rest of the world. Social networking
sites can help you find people you share interests with. Facebook asks us to list who and what we
are into right from the beginning and the same happens with Twitter. This helps us find people and
make new friends who have common interests as we do. This requires sharing information and
giving up a certain amount of privacy in order to do so. Social networking sites make fitting in
easier, as long as you open up a little.

Besides the positive side of social media, there are a lot of negative impacts of using a lot
of social media sites. The number one impact is that it creates a false sense of connection. This
means that it is difficult for us to distinguish between relationships in the real world and the virtual
world. There a large number of relationships/friendships being formed on social networking sites
which can be a false relationship/friendship. These relationships/friendships can be formed to find
out information about the other person and mislead them into something bad. The second most
negative impact of using social media is cyber bullying. Kids especially who are vulnerable
practice cyber bullying in which one terrorizes individuals in front of their peers. The devastation
of these online attacks can leave deep mental scars. Social media causes a major decrease in the
productivity of people as they are so into and addicted with social media and find it hard to
concentrate on anything else. Social media also kills people’s privacy as most of the things are
made public once you are associated to a social networking site or any other source of social media.
Social media also reduces to the actual communication of people and everyone prefers to save time
by communicating with others from your mobile phones or laptops.

The impact of social media is clearly both in a positive and a negative way on the youth. It
is now clearly upon us, whether we are still up for using these networking sites or are we to reduce
the consumption of social media to ensure the youth does not get out of hand.