Have you ever thought about that social media may influence your interpersonal relationships? In these years, social media has been widely used by people, so having great impact on people is inevitable. Although social media is a useful tool for people to contact others, it brings some negative effects to us, such as mental problems, cyber risk and poor expressing ability.

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　　First, if you tend to over rely on using social media to maintain relationships with others, you will probably encounter some mental problems such as anxiety. For the reason that most of the people who frequently use social media like to put their photos or some personal information on their own websites to capture others’ attention. This is a good way to promote people’s interaction and communication. However, you will therefore concern a lot about how others think about your information shows on your sites, and even this situation will control your emotions. Consequently, over using social media may be a source of long-term mental distress that can affect your daily life seriously.

 

　　Second, if you keep sharing everything about yourself through social media without awareness, it would become a way for those unscrupulous people to make bad use of your information, which would cause huge cyber risk. This is a serious problem people cannot ignore. For instance, some unscrupulous people will collect the information you have uploaded on your sites, and then abuse the information to defraud you. As a result, when you use social media, we have to check if your information can be exposed on social media. In other words, do not easily upload any information that involves personal privacy to social media, or you may expose yourself to cyber risk.

　　

　　Last, drowning in social media will make you less adept at socializing with others in reality, because you will become accustomed to typing on the screen instead of facing people. The US Surgeon General Murthy (2023) reported that research had shown that prolonged use of social media could lead to weakened literacy and expression abilities, especially at a young age. Therefore, you should consider a problem: How many times do you open your social media to contact with others a day? If you can’t count the number of times, then you may have become addicted to it.

　　

　　Social media is a very useful tool for people to interact with others, however, if people can’t use it moderately, it will not only bring you some mental problems, but also cause cyber risk. What’s more, it will make you decrease your ability to express your opinion, viewpoint, and even emotion in the long run. In other words, you should view social media as a convenient tool to connect with others, rather than a means to replace socializing with others in the real world.

 

References

Murthy, V. (2023, Jan 29). Surgeon General says 13 is ‘too early’ to join social media.

CNN. https://edition.cnn.com/2023/01/29/health/surgeon-general-social-media/index.html