In the year of 1997, the world drastically changed, the first form of social media was released, and to this day we still do not know if this change was for the better or not. You may be asking what happened in 1977, to cause such a great change. Well the answer is, that the first form of social media was invented, “Sixdegrees.com”. From that point on social media kept escalating and adapting to different versions and platforms, and with it creating more and more problems as well as benefits to society. 62% of people’s mental health has been affected by social media. Many students here at Hackley are being or have been affected by Social Media.
Whether you believe it or not, everyone is affected by social media. One way or another, you are being influenced by Social Media. Social media sets a lot of the ‘trends’ in fashion, room decor, recipes, restaurants, water bottles, makeup, and pretty much anything you can think of. Users see these trends and what to partake in them, because of this those who do not have social media see these ‘trends’ in real life, and some of them decide to participate, even though they never had Social Media. Social media is integrated into your everyday life, no matter what. Though those who are the most affected are young adults and teenagers, as they learned to integrate social media into their lives at a young age.
The positive effects of social media including spreading news, though everything one sees on social media must be fact checked.
“Social media has given me fun facts and helped give me news on important events, like the missing submarine, or the speech Harrison Butker gave, and I keep up with sports through social media.” explains freshman Lolay Frey.
Social media helps spread news, but the news on social media usually is very biased so one who sees this news only is able to get the general idea and/or a biased view. Social media sometimes motivates users to go read the news to further understand what they see on social media.
Social media is also a way people stay in touch with friends and family, especially those who move away.
“ I have used social media to stay in touch with friends, especially if they move and since I switched schools.” Beatrix Mackil said.
This aspect of social media is the most widely reason people interact with social media, because it is an amazing way to keep in contact. Social media allows people to stay in touch whether just keeping up with people’s daily lives through their posts or messaging and video calling them.
Another pro of social media is finding and receiving recommendations, whether on restaurants, recipes, and ect.
Lola Frey also explains that she has received “a lot of good recipes for food” when on TikTok and other platforms.
Social media allows people to share their creations with others, informally, without needing to go through an editor to publish something, and for free. It also permits for people to comment on whether or not this recipe worked for them, or if they enjoyed the restaurant, and is an easy way to ask questions to the creator and get a quick response.
On the other hand social media most definitely has negative effects such as unrealistic beauty standards and this causes a lot of issues with mental health. 61% of men and 50% of women are or have been depressed as a result of social media use, because of these unrealistic beauty standards. Users post videos or photos of themselves that are generally edited, making beauty standards impossible to meet, this causes everyone to edit their posts and everyone begins to believe that they are the only ones who don’t look like all these people. This greatly impacts the mental health of all users.
Social media also makes users’ attention span much shorter, because of the short clips and photos, causing users’ minds to quickly switch from one topic to another with little to no thinking in between. This constant switch also makes users not realize how long they spend on their screens causing them to spend many hours on their screens.
“Social media makes me spend time on my phone I don’t have and I waste a lot of time using social media.” says Beatrix Mackil.
Beatrix is sadly not the only one who experiences this, close to all users spend a lot of time on social media when they could be doing other things.
As social media continues to grow into different forms more issues may develop and these issues that others have stated may become much more prominent or maybe society can try to fix the issues.
