What Is a Social Media Essay – The Main Aspects and Points

I consider social media to be harmful to schoolchildren under 17. Kids’ consciousness is unstable and unverified or controversial data can lead to poor consequences. Today online games full of cruelty and violence occupy networks. First of all, let’s remember the world-famous game “Blue Whale” that was created in 2016; its creators looked for depressive kids and sent them tasks during 50 days. On the last day, a child was to commit a suicide. The worst thing is that everybody knew about the danger of the game but still went on playing it.

One more negative result of social media impact is that more and more people become addicted. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social networks take most of people’s time. In addition, a great number of Internet users create their own channels on YouTube trying to get virtual friends and subscribers and forgetting about real communication.

According to an American psychologist Aric Sigman, kids degrade when spending much time online. A virtual life can make a person socially isolated, lonely, and depressed. Such way of life may negatively impact a person’s health condition and lead to cardiovascular diseases, memory loss, and cancer, in the future.

Despite the fact that networking is very helpful in communication, psychologists and sociologists claim that there are many negative effects which one can describe in a social media essay. Some of them even lead to the lethal end.

Using social sites can be threatening nowadays. People can visit various sites via tablet, phone, or computer that has access to the Internet. Some websites have no age limitations and any child can watch “adult movies” or videos with violent content with one click. One more negative factor is that children note their address, telephone number, and other private information. Such data looks very attractive to pedophiles and maniacs. According to the statistics provided by R. Murray of NY Daily News, approximately ten percent of all children’s virtual friends are fakes.

These networks are open to hackers and the government can monitor them as well. Cyberbullying is also a serious problem that doesn’t have its end. Earlier people were bullied at places like schools, colleges, and work. Today they become victims even at their own home. Contemporary digital devices allow making videos which a person can post on a blog or on YouTube. A lot of such videos humiliate an individual’s dignity and provoke suicides after becoming public. Unfortunately, neither the so-called best friends nor internet users inform the victim’s relatives about the bullying.

If a person uses social media responsibly, then they are not dangerous and even beneficial. On the one hand, Facebook, WeChat, Viber, or WhatsApp let people communicate with each other, share information, distribute news, and avoid loneliness or even save lives and relationship. Today a great number of volunteers create accounts trying to help sick people or those who suffer because of poverty and weather disasters like earthquakes, volcanic eruption, tsunami, and tornado.

There are also online communities which give psychological and informative support. Social media helps to find missing people. NY police have created nearly 150 Twitter and Facebook communities since 2014. Such searching is effective due to more than 2 billion of active users. The existing number of users turned out to be excellent tools for business development due to analyzing clients’ feedbacks and searching items.

On the other hand, cyberbullying, kidnapping, victimization, and hacking cases increase daily. Those who monitor our personal data can make a virtual bomb and use it to create a default, war, and other political and social disputes (Nissenbaum, 1998).

Austin McCann says that the social media service supplies every Internet user with virtual interaction and impacts negatively the real life. He states that common website users often don’t differentiate between the real and virtual world. An average teen spends approximately 4 hours networking every day.

Negative messages, comments, dislikes, pictures, videos, and news lead to teens’ stress and depression. In addition, teens spend more time indoors and acquire health problems. By the way, teenagers get body injuries staying online and crossing the road or riding a vehicle at the same time. Some of them don’t survive.

So, to write an essay on this topic can be really challenging for a student. It requires both personal and general data to be reflected in the paper. Such academic paper helps students realize the positive and negative role of networking in the human life and even prevent addiction to it.