Issues with Social Media Today

 I think every social media platform has its own benefits and drawbacks.



For example, Snapchat is an online platform that allows you to share pictures and videos with specific friends, groups, or everyone you are friends with on the platform through a story.

Some benefits include real-time updates on what friends are doing, more personal communications, and the ability to have easy video conventions with people while still not requiring both people to be online at the same time. However, there are some issues with this. One of the major drawbacks is the limited time for which certain messages and such are available to be viewed. After an image is viewed, it's gone forever and no longer saved in a chat log as with regular text messaging. Another issue could be with privacy. A user may not be aware of how much information, such as address and other locations is being shared in videos or with the map feature if they are not aware it is even on. This is a lot of private information that may have not been intentionally shared, but can still be seen by other users who are on their friends list. 

One aspect of social media that tiptoes the line between positive and negative is the mental health effects a person experiences from the use of online platforms. Facebook for example can have a huge impact. With the ability to friend people on the platform and share videos, pictures, locations, feelings, and even events, there is a lot of room for varied feelings. Having only a few friends can make some people happy because they can stay in touch with just a few people. On the other hand, some people think the more friends there are, the more popular you are and the better it makes you feel. The "right" number of friends to feel good about using platforms like Facebook varies widely from person to person. I personally want to share my Facebook page with my friends and both close and extended family. This means my perfect number of friends is around 100 people. However, someone such as my boyfriend wants as little communication with others outside his immediate circle of people as possible to keep his life private so his perfect number of friends would be around 15 people. For someone who is outside their ideal number of friends, whether they have more or less, it can impact their mental health negatively. There are people who need the approval of others to feel good about themselves and so they want as many friends as possible. 

They crave friends, likes, reposts, etc. You name it, they want it. The problem with this is they will always want more and will never have enough. This causes serious issues with mental health as they always feel like there are people missing and they can not get the amount of attention they crave.

On the other end of the spectrum are people like yours truly who have social media more like a diary sort of thing where I can post my pictures to a timeline as well as share them with only people in my life who I know and would really appreciate what I post. I don't want a lot of friends because that would stress me out thinking I couldn't post this photo or that one because what if this random person doesn't like it and judges me for it. This is why the "perfect" amount of friends is hard to define and place an actual number on. 

the issue with all social media today is it is no longer being used in moderation. In my opinion, social media is more evil than good today. My hope s that tomorrow, something can be done to curve the negative effects of social media before they become too much. As with anything, the first step to this is knowledge. 


*None of these photos are mine, they were taken from the public domain 

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