When social media becomes anti-social

Social network and microblogging apps help us connect with a wider world. But they are also trapping us in a vicious cycle of psychological disorders

- Aryavani Arya

“Social media is not a media. The key is to listen, engage, and build relationships.” Well, that’s what David Alston said.

Social media is a tool created to connect people over the globe, to facilitate easy access to people across countries. It hasn’t been long since we started to breathe social media. young adults, in the age group of 18-29, are most likely to use social media, almost 90% of them do. But others are not left out. In a study report by Smith and Page (2015), social media usage among those above 65 years of age has increased three-fold since 2010 when only 10% of people used social media. It won’t be an exaggeration to say that social media is not a trend that only the youth follows; it’s a habit that prevails for the entire population.

Today, social media is not just any mode of connection. Rather, it has become our mode of survival. Try keeping us without being in touch with Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram; it feels like a fish out of water. There would be few phenomena in human history that compete with the dizzying growth social media has witnessed.

This phenomenon, of course, is not without its downside, as every parent of a teenager have found.

NEGATIVE IMPACT ON MENTAL HEALTH

There is an overload of information that can severely affect mental well-being causing mental fatigue and energy drainage. A relevant study was done by Dhir (2018), the findings of which suggested that using social media compulsively resulted in mental fatigue. That is not all. There are several troublesome patterns emerging from the world of social media.