Is social media helpful or harmful essay

Is social media helpful or harmful essay

I have already briefly touched upon the issue of the dangers of social networks in other articles, but now I decided to consider this topic in a separate article. Here I will talk about how a fascination with social networks like Contact, Facebook, Classmates, Twitter can negatively affect a person’s mental health. I will give some tips on how to use social networks for the benefit, not harm. I also compiled a ranking of social networks, which you can find at the end of the article.



Social networks have identified trends in the development of the Internet in the direction of integration, combining opportunities in a single, multi-user web platforms. These platforms provided an opportunity for the user to communicate with friends, read news, watch movies, listen to music, share it with other participants, take part in discussions, unite by interests, create communities and all these opportunities are concentrated on one site!

Undoubtedly, social networks are a great technological achievement that offers many opportunities. But along with these opportunities come troubles ... It’s impossible to say that social networks are one continuous harm, just like you can’t say the same thing, for example, about a computer game. With the right, disciplined approach to this miracle of Internet technologies, you can get some benefit and make your life easier. But there is always a risk that working with social networks will have harmful consequences on our psyche.

What could be the consequences? What is the danger of social networks? This will be discussed below.

Dependence on social networks
Social networks have a great addictive potential, that is, a significant risk of addiction. There are several reasons for this. The first reason is that social media work annoys the pleasure centers in our brain. We have pleasant emotions, every time we read a friendly comment under our photo, we get a “like”, when someone leaves a positive review, etc.

The desire to re-receive these emotions brings us back to the open spaces of social networks, forcing us to spend more and more time there.

The second reason lies in the features of the assimilation of information when working in multi-user web platforms. A person who sits, for example, in contact, receives a lot of heterogeneous information in small portions in a small period of time: he read a short comment, answered, immediately opened the news, looked at an interesting post in the community about science, began reading, simultaneously turning on the audio recording, missed , because the attention was distracted by a message from a friend, answered and went to the page of this friend to see what's new there.

The brain gets used to this mode of operation as quickly as the hand and mouth get used to the “clicking” of the seeds. It's not just about the pleasure itself and the features of learning information, but also about the convenience, speed and availability of social networks!

To enjoy the opinion of another person about your photo, you don’t have to suffer much: logged in (at least from the phone) and with one click looked at how many people “liked” your photo on the beach! To take your attention with something not straining and enthralling, you do not need to look for an interesting article in the search: opened a contact and began to read news and watch updates from friends. Everything is fast and convenient.

The speed and availability, in my opinion, are important prerequisites for the formation of any dependence. Man instinctively searches for the easiest ways to achieve pleasure, even if these ways are ineffective and lead to harmful consequences. Take the habit of smoking. Quick and affordable.

Dependence on spending time in social networks leads to the following problems.

Reduced attention span
Above, I wrote about how a user can digest information in social networks: quickly, spontaneously and in small portions. As I said, the brain gets used to such work with information and gradually loses the ability to keep attention on something for a long time. Developed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. This is a side effect generated by the philosophy of information integration: when working with a single web interface begins to combine many functions such as communication, listening to music, discussing meetings, etc., the user is tempted to break everything at once and perform several processes in parallel.

It badly affects the abilities of our thinking. It becomes difficult to hold attention for a long time, for example, while reading a book. Our mind, following the acquired habit, begins to jump from one object to another. Therefore, there are difficulties in order to consistently ponder, ponder one problem: attention constantly “floats away”.

Especially this problem is acute in the context of the younger generation. Children's thinking is much more plastic than the adult one and therefore it is easier to adopt the harmful standards of thinking that form, including the social network.

Information Manager