What Are The Negative Impact Of Social Media?

Social media first started in 1979, with post to newsgroups and bulletin boards. Next came the chat room, which Compuserve introduced in 1980. Social networking may only be thirty-six years old but it this short time it has redefined our society. Most people within society may view the impact of social media to positive, but there are others, such as myself, which would argue social media is doing more harm than good because it is robbing us of our privacy, weakens our verbal communication skills with others and can become an addiction.

While social media encourages users to share about their lives, it is up to the user to review privacy settings for each social network platform. In the article “Facebook & Your Privacy: Who Sees the Data You

In the article, “Social Media and Interpersonal Communication” Maura Keller provides a glimpse at what we might find at any mealtime across the world today, “Glance around a restaurant and you’ll be hard-pressed to find people who don’t have their heads down using their cell phones to text, Tweet, or update their Facebook statuses—all while sharing a meal with others at their table” (Keller). In this example we see, that the even though the people are communicating, they are not doing so verbally. To see how a lack of verbal communication can have an effect on a person’s verbal skills, I do not need to look any further than the weekly Sunday dinner at my parents’ house. Mealtime rules at my parent’s house have always been the same, no television and no phone, however during every family dinner, one of the adults must tell at least one of the kids, if not all of them, to put down their phones. For about the first thirty minutes, the kids throw fits and tell us they will just die without getting on Facebook or Twitter. After they calm down and we try to talk with them, they stare blankly at us, almost as if they do not understand us. When they do respond, their first few words are usually unintelligible and sound similar to the grunt of a caveman. Because of this, I believe social media causes peoples brains to turn in to mush, as if they are in a haze or