Is Social Media Making People Crazy?

Remembering my initial exposure to social media, Myspace, and comparing it to the forms of social media I frequent now, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. it is impossible to deny how rapidly social media has grown and infiltrated the communication world. When I first began using social media websites there was a large emphasis on the sharing of music and showing off who were your “Top 5 Friends” on your profile page. In present day social media, the trend seems to be sharing videos and pictures you find entertaining or important, as well as updating “followers” on occurrences in your daily activities. Also, social media seems to have migrated towards networking opportunity for people, allowing them to connect with companies they are interested in or prospective employers they follow.

I feel social media has become slightly intrusive because people have developed the habit of posting every thought and feeling on their profiles, which brings with it the chance for hundreds or even thousands of followers to comment back and pose judgement against those thoughts and feelings. An example is celebrities and social media, thousands of people feel the need to comment on their posts asking questions or try to pry into a public figures life when really they are people too and should be allowed to have social media without these issues.

My views on responsibility and social media is that although everyone has the right to freedom of speech, harmful or slanderous comments just don’t have a place in cyberspace. Also, anyone in the world can view what you post on social media, it is there forever. Posting personal information can be dangerous, as well as posting embarrassing or compromising pictures. The main thing to remember when using social media is that whatever you post is being used to create an image of you in people’s minds that may not know you, how do you want to be seen?

Social media has many positive aspects and has introduced great things into our society but there is a very dark side to social media that has begun to emerge in just the last 5-10 years. An example of this is when an enraged man killed his wife for changing her status on Facebook from “married” to “single”, even though they had been separated. Another example out of hundreds, a woman killed her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend because this new girl kept posting pictures of her and her new man on the web, which did not please the ex-girlfriend, so much so she stabbed her in the chest. These are just two examples of horror stories and I found hundreds on the Internet.

Social media is beneficial and can connect families and friends, but there are those few people out there that need to find a way to defile it. In the future I see social media continuing to inform, entertain, and connect people, but I also see it taking over the younger generations to the point of becoming a detrimental obsession.