Negative Effects of Social Networking Sites

Social media has many benefits such as sharing information between people, connect people, allows for communication, improve one's knowledge and improving one's professionalism by connecting with other professionals. In business, social media is used to advertise goods and products, converse with your customers and get customer feedback and thus one is able to improve his brand (Barker, 2002). Presence of a variety of social media sites leads to different uses of these sites. For instance, Facebook is common because friends can friend request and follow each other and keep themselves updated about current events and what is happening in someone else's life. Twitter is a place of #hashtags and a big platform to follow many people and stay updated on the currents occurring in the world.

You cannot tell whether a person is happy or angry. People have even gone further to the extent of wanting to solve problems of their workplaces through social media messaging. Most of the communication that takes place is non-verbal and it, therefore, requires additional means to enable people to understand one another. When one sends another a message, it is difficult to know the emotions that person has because one cannot see their facial expressions. Although most of the social media sites have the capability of expressing one's feelings by the use of “smiley” and other expressions, it is difficult to know the actual feelings one has (Strasburger & Jordan, 2010). Another major effect of social media sites is lack of privacy. Majority of social media sites lack confidentiality of their users.

This is true because ones you share a picture or a video with your friends, it is no longer private. This is because those in that network have access to it and they can download it and resend it to other people who were not intended to be the audience. There have been incidences of leaked videos and pictures which make the victims feel ashamed since some of the information is very private and confidential (Strasburger & Jordan, 2010). It also helps those who have limited mobility such as the old and the disabled to connect with people who are far from them. Social networking sites also have a variety of negative effects on one's health. These effects can be categorized into problems that affect the general body health and problems that affect the mind only.

Body problems can be further on into joint difficulties and sight problems while mind problems can oversee insomnia and depression. Social networking sites have negative consequences by causing problems to the general body such as back pains and joint pains because of bad sitting posture while using social media and eyesight problems because of looking for long into the screen of a computer or a phone. This can lead to permanent loss of eyesight or other eye-related problems (Strasburger & Jordan, 2010). Social media can additionally cause mental problems in an individual. Such problems can include insomnia and depression. Insomnia is a condition whereby an individual is having difficulties in finding sleep even when it is necessary to so. Research has shown that treatment can help, but the disease cannot be cured walk (Barker, 2002).

Depression is another significant effect caused by excessive use of social media. Depression is a feeling of no interest in anything, and one is continuously stressed. Social media triggers sadness in that people tend to compare their lives with those of other teens. More often people will make posts while they are having fun, if someone else who is not a position to afford such kind of fun sees such a post, he will tend to want to have the same fun and therefore start comparing his life with that one in the post. This also amounts to people being jealous of others depending on how many likes and comments they receive from their posts. Professional results can lead to educational problems and also financial problems.

Social media can have positive impacts on an individual in that students can collaborate in matters of education and share meaningful information. This can lead to improvement in class work. Again, social media is very useful in business. Therefore, students who wish to engage in business learn a lot of skills such as advertising within the social media Also, a study showed that the more time one spends on computers and other gadgets, the more he becomes familiar with them (Dittmar, 2009). Checking social media very often while in class could result in poor performance. This is because the concentration of a student is drifted to the gadget and therefore making one not to concentrate (Dittmar, 2009). Some students also over-rely on social media to answer or to tackle a quiz.

This may lead to reduced focus resulting in distractions and the mind is not involved. This can make to be a dummy. A study carried out by American Institute of (CPAs) showed that thirty-nine percent of adults think of having a vacation when they see others post pictures while on vacation (Gensler et al, 2013). In conclusion, while social media is good at connecting people and sharing information, it tends to have many adverse effects on individuals. This is true for the reason that there have been cases of marriage breakages because of social media. Since media is not only addictive to teens but also to the adults, great care should be taken to prevent one from becoming an addict of the social media.