The Harm and Benefits of Social Media
Tuesday, October 15, 2019, 6:00 AM | Leave Comment
Social networks are today an integral part of human life. You can use it to chat with friends, watch videos, play, listen to music, find love and even make money.
This entertainment was a curiosity until recently, and now almost all young people, their parents, and even grandmothers have pages on Instagram. But how useful are such contacts, do they bring more good than harm?
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The benefits of social networks
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Of course, social networks allow you to receive in a fairly quick time a large amount of the necessary information. They provide the opportunity to communicate at a distance with a huge number of people living in different parts of the world, help to get to know each other, make friends, fall in love, discuss news and events.
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Social networks help you find lost friends, classmates, and colleagues. Thanks to Instagram, people reconnect, and subsequently, keep in touch with each other, find out news, and congratulate on holidays.
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Networks also help in finding a job, as they provide useful information about the employer and the organization itself. Also, a large number of niche groups have been created there that help to spend your leisure time profitably and not waste time on useless watching TV or computer toys.
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The downside of social networks
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Virtual communication replaces real interaction with people, a person has the illusion of a huge circle of acquaintances. However, this communication is not lively, fragmented, devoid of emotions in their usual sense.
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Social networks kill the time of a modern person because you can communicate in them endlessly, but at the expense of your personal life and even mental health. They can immerse a person completely in the surreal world, supplanting the desire to live an ordinary life that is not connected with a computer: play sports, read books, go out with friends
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Also, many scammers on the Internet hide behind masks of respectable people.
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Social networks are a good human invention, but you need to use them guided by reasoning and carefully monitoring the contacts of your children.
How social networks are useful
Social networks are becoming more popular every day, and many parents are worried about the time that their children spend at computers, chatting or reading other people’s pages on such networks. However, social networks can not only take time but also bring tangible benefits.
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Virtual friendship
The most useful feature of Instagram is the ability to communicate. It was for this that they were invented. Thanks to the Internet and a computer, you can instantly exchange messages with people, wherever they are.
Social networks made communicating with school friends, former classmates and colleagues are easier than ever. The consequence of this, by the way, is another non-obvious plus: having the opportunity to conduct non-binding conversations, people improve their communication skills and stop being afraid of communication.
Making virtual acquaintances is much easier than real ones, and even the most introverted people happen to find interesting people and friends online.
Instagram allows everyone to express themselves in one or another sphere. It can be photographs, notes, poems, needlework – in general, and creativity.
The fact is that most people almost always in need to evaluate others and seek recognition for their abilities and talents, and social networks, as a rule, have a friendly attitude, so new authors, photographers, and artists often choose social networks as a launching pad.
In addition to the much-needed recognition, social networks, thanks to the mechanism of “reposts”, can quickly gain fame. You can also buy Instagram likes PayPal to achieve fame.
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Information exchange
The possibility of “reposts” is another plus of social networks. It allows you to distribute important information in a short time, reaching many Instagram users. This can be an important news item, an advertisement for a sale, rental or vacancy, an event poster…
There is a specialization “Social Media Marketing”, where marketing students are taught to use the benefits of social networks in terms of promoting a product or brand on the market.
Many well-known companies, public politicians and public figures have personal pages on Facebook or Instagram. This allows them not only to report significant news and express their position on important issues but also to quickly respond to feedback from consumers, voters or fans.
Finally, a popular page, for example, on Instagram, can become an additional source of income, as many companies are interested in expanding their advertising platforms, and the Internet (and social networks in particular) is the most promising direction for advertising.
Some companies have various affiliate programs, the meaning of which is to pay agent fees to the user from whose page an order for a product or service was made. Naturally, for the page to be of interest to the advertiser, it must be sufficiently visited.
How social networks influence behavior
It’s amazing how firmly social networks have come into our lives. Some can’t live an hour without checking if someone has put a like on their new photo.
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Psychological addiction
About 80% of people who have an account on any of the popular social networks admitted that they check their page at least once a day for new events; one third is updating information on their page with particularly painful regularity. Thus, the psychological dependence of the user of a social network is almost as strong as the dependence of the smoker on nicotine.
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Jealousy
According to sociological studies, the cause of many divorces in the US and the UK was the excessive enthusiasm for social networks. Many people, trying to prove their spouse’s infidelity, logged into the account of the partner to search for evidence and found likes, reposts, and comments left on photos of supposed rivals. This could sometimes destroy someone’s marriage.
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At work
Social networks can not only ruin families but also help to relax during the work process. It was proved that short breaks in communication on social networks help increase employee productivity by as much as 9%.
