Social Media is a prevalent tool that allows worldwide people to share their interests and communicate. Because Social Media is unlimited by time or place the new word nomophobia, or the psychological condition when people have a fear of being detached from mobile phone connectivity, has been made to describe people’s current status. People’s usage of SNS is growing rapidly as the Coronavirus disease outbroke roughly a year ago. Still, as Social Media’s negative impacts are being further studied, students have a responsibility to inform themselves about the specific aspect that Social Media can be detrimental for. Following the school’s motto, the possible negative impact of Social Media has been analyzed on 7 different aspects: Network, Mental, Brain, Moral, Leadership, Body, and Spiritual.
Considering that social media was found to be the prominent cause of the violent action, it certainly has a detrimental effect on the establishment of network power. According to professor Craig A. Anderson in the Iowa State University department of psychology, the correlation between the time watching television and its effect on adolescent’s negative emotional state was much stronger than the correlation between the time watching television and its effect on adolescent’s positive emotional state. To be specific, adolescents were more likely to have aggressive thoughts, angry feelings, arousal, hostile appraisals and aggression instead of empathy and pity. The negative internal state directly influences the decision process, which leads to aggressive and hostile behavior as an outcome. The significance of this research is that though videos or images that are categorized as violent demonstrated higher possibility of aggressive behavior, it similarly applied to other media in general. The aggressive behavior thus leads into the impulsive action without reasonable cognitive process against morals.
This becomes further considerable as reprehensive behavior frequently results in the conflict with people around, affecting the relationship and social network. According to Professor Lindsay A. Robertson from Dunedin School of Medicine, adolescents who spend more time on social media tend to portray higher levels of immoral behaviors that result in antisocial personality disorder. Jacqui Taylor- Jackson, the research from British Psychological Society agrees to Robertson’s idea on the detrimental effect of social media on network power by noting how network in social media cause the feeling of emptiness due to the discrepancy between the relationship in the real world and the pursued network in the internet based on the online identity. She further states that when the online identity dominates the adolescent’s mind, they find less contentment in the real-world network and begin to prefer individualism instead of having an active exchange among people.
Both mental and body power of students can also be exacerbated by social media’s negative impacts. Social media provokes people to share their interests and stories, which might be regarded as good. However, such benefits often work as a toxic drawback by making people compare themselves to others. According to Jacqueline Sperling, PhD, a psychologist at McLean Hospital, people tend to make comparisons by asking a question like this: “Did I get as many likes as someone else?” Furthermore, a 2018 British study reported, “social media use is related to decreased, disrupted, and delayed sleep, which is related to depression and memory loss.” Furthermore, being mentally ill also lets people to be physically ill because anxiety and depression result in muscle tension and headaches. Such research results confirm that social media has detrimental effects on people’s mental and physical health.
In conclusion, social media has a negative impact on 7 powers that are required for students to grow up. However, the limitations of this paper should be considered. Since spiritual power cannot be investigated through scientific measures, this paper was not able to clearly show the negative impact of social media on spiritual power. However, considering that other six powers can be undermined through social media, it is clear that the negative impacts of social media outweigh the benefits of social media.
Writer: James Ko
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