Negatives and positives of Social Media

The topic of these last few class discussions has been about social media, and the effects it has on our generation today. Those effects are both positive and negative. Social media is everywhere, whether we want to admit it or not. At least 90% of the worlds population uses some form of social media. There are many forms of social media, such as facebook, twitter, myspace, blogs, youtube, etc. Our generation is infatuated with social media sites, so many people spend so many hours of their day on social media sites, not even meaning to. I know there have been a few times when I have spent far more time on facebook and youtube than I had originally planned, and then next thing I know, the time has flown and I haven't been productive. Its a real problem.

People revolve their lives around social media sites, broadcasting their every moves and all of their moods on twitter updates and facebook status, and who can forget the relationship statuses. Telling the world things and exploring them on blogs, facebook, twitter, etc have become socially acceptable in many circles, forgetting the phrase "too much information". The thing is is people are naturally curious and like reading other peoples status updates because they want to be entertained or because they really do care. Sources have said that if facebook was a country, it would be the third largest, what do we make of that, because that is the result of everyone who partakes in using social media as a part of their everyday lives.

Social media offers an opportunity to communicate with vast majorities of people. A negative impact of social media is that it has changed the way we write. People are finding it harder to write papers, send important emails, make proper notes, etc without using acronmys and slang. Writings are getting sloppier. People should not always write in the "social" manner, they have to take time to read over their work, because they don't realize that typing acronyms and things come natural when they spend significant times of their days on social media sites.

Social media is really a phenomenon in its own, and it will continue to grow through generations, and it will develop more and more everyday, and people will always stick with those sites. But people need to realize the positive and negative impacts that social media has on their lives. When realizing, they can have a better understanding of why these sites play such big roles in their lives and they can draw the line of when to stop each day and only spend so much time on social media sites.