Social Networking Sites: The Psychological Effects Of Social Media

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Social Networking Sites Social networking sites, also known as social networking services, are the online platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube that people use to connect with each other. Over the past ten years, with the technological development, social media have grown sharply. To illustrate the popularity of social networking sites, Newton Lee, an expert in computer science, stated that if Facebook was considered as a country, it would be a nation having the third largest population in the world, after China and India, with over 995 million citizens in 2012 (xiii). Using social networking sites to communicate, update daily activities, share videos, and exchange knowledge is a contemporary lifestyle of people all over the world, …show more content…

A study conducted by George C. Nitzburg and Barry A. Farber, who are working at Zucker-Hillside Hospital and Teachers College, Columbia University in New York, emphasize the tendency of “intensify jealousy…, surveillance behaviors,” and the avoidance of personal face-to-face communication during social networking (1183). The study proves the power of social networking in generating psychological problems like envy and anxiety. Young people tend to compare their lives to others’. The jealousy of someone’s success, beauty, sexuality, or wealthy damages the relationship as well as the communication between them because they discourage themselves from in-person meetings. Communication skills would be diminished due to less deliberate attempt to communicate in face-to-face environment due to emotional …show more content…

For Adler, social networking provides opportunities for people to share information, communicate, and enhance face-to-face interaction skills. She means that the more people contact with each other on social media the more they feel comfortable to talk in person with them. However, professor Rosen asserts that kids prefer send messages and sharing information on social networking sites and “not to talk face to face” (qtd. in Clemmitt). The concern that having a preference for virtual communication over in-person interactions is understandable and reasonable because the more time young people experience virtual contact on social networking sites, and the less chance they have to practice their self-expression in face-to face environment. The lack of practice in-person interactions leads to the decline of communication

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