The Negative Essay: Does Social Media Helps Society

756 Words2 Pages

Viewing Led Zeppelin’s daily adventure at any time would seem impossible forty years ago, today it takes at least ten seconds to see what Drake has done the past week. Social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook have allowed average people to instantly interact with celebrities. While instant access to information seems useful, too much of a good thing can be bad. The vast amount of information social media provides has created a debate on whether social media benefits or harms society. Some believe that social media encourages increased interaction with others and allows instant access to useful information. Others say social media prevents face-to-face interaction and is only a distraction. This argument on social media is a double-edged …show more content…

Its presence and ease of access make it a powerful distraction mechanism. Social media companies use features like notifications to grab the user’s attention. Instagram and Facebook for example can notify phones when someone interacts with their account, resulting in teens continuously glancing at their phones. YouTube has a list of recommended videos next to the video currently playing which can entice someone to view more videos than intended. The distraction of endless entertainment can turn a ten-minute break into an hour of wasted time. Stoney Brooks, the author of Does personal social media usage affect efficiency and well-being, states that “the results of a large survey conducted by KellyOCG, the Kelly Global Workforce Index (more than 168,000 respondents worldwide), 43% of respondents believe that the use of social media in the workplace negatively impacts productivity (Kelly Services, 2012). In the university classroom, Jacobsen and Forste (2011) found a negative relationship between usage of various types of electronic media, including social networking, and first semester grades” (Brooks 27). This information supports the idea that social media is not going to make someone more productive, only

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