PROS AND CONS OF SOCIAL MEDIA
PROS AND CONS OF SOCIAL MEDIA
Simply imagine that one day you wake up to find out that all social media platforms are no longer working. You try to check your phone and you are shocked to see that there is no more Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok even Google everything is gone! You can no longer communicate with other people like before. And suddenly it looks like we are back to the stone age. Scary right?
In the last two decades, social media has come to hold an incredible place in the lives of everyone, especially the younger generation. It takes up a big chunk of our time. It has been researched that an average person spends at least 2 hours 25minutes browsing through different social media sites.
Can that be called a bad or good thing? Let us consider some of the pros and cons of social media.
Pros;
1. The main benefit of social media is that it is an amazing way to stay connected to family and friends especially when they stay far away from each other.
2. Social media is a great tool that helps people find job opportunities. For instance, Linked In, and MySpace is a platform where job hunters can connect with potential employers.
3. Another benefit of social media is that it provides a big platform for pushing awareness about different issues. It brings to the limelight all manner of information about a variety of topics.
4. Social media provides entertainment. There are a lot of fun activities to do like sharing your pictures, tagging your friends, cracking jokes on pictures, watching funny skits and comedy.
5. It enables faster communication. You can easily communicate and gather 100 people together with just a single message. Imagine having to go to their houses one after the other telling them the same thing. Hectic right?
Cons;
Cyberbullying. These days, bullying is no longer limited to schools. It has found its way into cyberspace. Cyberbullying is done by people of different age groups. It has in turn increased the rate of emotional distress, depression and suicide in society.
Addiction is also a negative impact of social media. A lot of people battle an addiction to social media and have a hard time breaking away. This addiction brings adverse outcomes on people's well being and mental health.
Social media can also negatively impact the academic performance of students. According to recent studies, spending too vastly time on social media spurs students to disregard time meant for school work. And this will consequently birth low performance in grades.
Furthermore, social media can prevent you from having real human interaction and connection. A lot of users are so engrossed in keeping up with their lives online that they forget their real-life friends. They ignore developing interactions with real people around them. The height of it is that some may have over 5000 friends on social media yet suffer from terrible loneliness in real life.
Social media is good but it can be bad too if it is not used moderately. You can find good or bad people and organizations too on social media so you need to be wise enough to choose your friends.
