Social Media has become a very important and integral part of our life. We cannot imagine a life without it today. So why were social media apps created? To connect people from different regions and to make communication easier right.
Social media has turned out to be very beneficial for us today we use many social media apps like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Before WhatsApp was created sharing videos and images was not possible so easily WhatsApp made that possible. YouTube created a platform for online education. Good quality education was available for everyone that too free of cost. All these things were possible because of the rise of social media platforms.
There are a lot of benefits that we get because of social media but at the same time there are also some negatives. The first and the most important problem we face because of it is social media addiction. We all talk about this right? We all know wasting too much time on social media is not good or useful but still, we end up doing the same thing. I am writing about social media addiction and about how harmful it can be for us but do you know what was my last week's screen time. It was a hell of 30 hrs. We all have faced this problem and many of us made failed attempts to get rid of this addiction. Why is it not possible? The answer is the social media platform itself. As I said at the start these apps were created to connect people to form communities to help people socialize and make new friends or reunite with old friends. These apps were started for good to benefit humans. But to keep the apps working the companies need money and the only source of income for these apps is ads. For ads to be shown these apps collect our data. A lot of user information is collected to show personalized ads. The biggest problem here is the data that is collected. With the help of this data, the app knows a lot about us. It knows about our likes dislikes and biases our viewpoints on certain situations. This information can also be used to manipulate our views and make us think and believe what the social media company believes is true. The companies spent a lot of money to improve their algorithms and make their apps more engaging.
Another big problem caused because of social media is fake information. A lot of times we see fake news spread very rapidly on social media platforms because people share this news blindly without verifying its authenticity. Nowadays very less people under the age of 18 read newspapers or watch the news on television. Social media has become a prime source of information for most youth. Whatever we see we believe it very easily and whatever we are shown is controlled by the social media apps algorithm. The apps show what we like if I have a particular political ideology then I will get to see content related to that political the app will try to make my beliefs and viewpoints strong by showing how the opposite ideology is wrong. While giving recommendations the app does not check whether the post or video is fake or true, right or wrong it just wants you to spend more time on that app.
So what should we do stop using social media do things like social media detox and stuff. Of course not. I don’t think it is possible to eliminate social media usage. I have tried it many times it works for one or two weeks but then again back to square one. If you want to limit your usage then schedule your time for social media like allot some time for it. I am not saying this will 100 percent help you overcome social media addiction but at least you will have track of your usage. It won’t be like you are endlessly scrolling without knowing how much time you have wasted. Another solution I would say will be using social media after long intervals. This is something that I did for limiting my Instagram usage. I was not an Instagram addict but my daily usage was more so I started using Instagram after 2 days intervals. It somewhat broke that cycle of opening Instagram daily and scrolling through the posts and It also made the app less interesting for me. I started getting fewer recommendations so now the app became less engaging and more boring for me. After a point of time, the like comments and followers which mattered a lot to you will seem less important and you will start losing interest in the app. Now I only open Instagram as a formality after 1 week to check whether there are messages or not otherwise I am not interested in seeing what the others are doing.
In the end, I would just say social media is not bad it is a part of the technological innovation which we have to accept. In the end, many creators are getting benefitted from it they are earning crores through social media and the internet. We have to decide what we have to become.
There is also a recommendation which you can watch. It is a Netflix documentary ‘The social dilemma’. It is a beautiful documentary after watching it you will understand how these social media platforms work.
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