The social media

My Black Hole

A typical day for the average person involves a variety of different activities, most of which are time-consuming and not productive at all. These certain activities offer an individual the opportunity to escape the reality around them and seek refuge in another parallel world where priorities are different. For most of the youth in this era, this ‘black hole’ is social media.

Social Media has tremendously developed in the recent years. Social media’s main purpose was to connect people and businesses from opposite corners of the world. It was meant to create one system to bring people together online to share information.

. In practice, it does neither of these things in a meaningful way. What is nefarious and subtle is what use of social networks takes away.  Time that could be spent working on far more important things is wasted on social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Tumblr.

 Various studies have shown that the extensive use of social media can actually cause addiction to the users. Throughout their day, they feel the need to post something on their pages or check others status updates as it has become an important part of our life.

 Not signing in to a site such as Facebook for a single day, can and will live you a day out of date as the rest of the world around you advances forward. A lot can and does occur in the virtual world, most of it is irrelevant and meaningless but people are tricked into believing it contains a lot of significance.

 I once came across a tweet saying “I went on YouTube to see Justin Bieber’s new music video, an hour later I was watching a video on how to talk to a giraffe. I decided to try this out and I got almost similar results.An hour later, I found myself here;

 What im trying to say here is facebook, twitter, Instagram can all be very entertaining but at the same time it can also be extremely addictive and time-consuming. It all starts with just adding some friends and gaining some followers but as time goes on, its quite difficult to turn away from it.

There are several disadvantages of being addicted to the media and letting it be a time-consumer.

1: Detachment-Having an online account often leads to isolating yourself from the people around you and spending most of your time away from them. As a teenager, it is extremely important to spend time with Family and Friends, however this time-consumer often leads to the loss of charm of being under one roof.

2: Fraud- In todays world, it is not a difficult thing to hack someones account or pretend to be someone else through a fake account. Spending so much time on a site e.g facebook makes many people get to know who you are and increases your social media presence. Commenting on behalf of you or posting and inappropriate status or picture on behalf of you can damage your reputation on the site as well as on the minds of people whom you are familiar with outside of the web-world.

3: Bullying- There have been several cases of cyber-bullying around the globe. there is no saying on how or who is it going to happen to. excessive use of the social media increases the risk and can have a huge effect on the persons health and in many unfortunate cases, it may even lead to the person committing suicide. Thus, a limited use of appropriate sites can be advisable.

The list goes on and on. As time passes, more sites are being introduced to help teens socialise and communicate with people or friends who live far away from them. Due to this, students often tend to find studies less important than socializing .This affects not only their grades, but influences their minds as well.

Many moons ago if an important story broke often it wouldn’t get any detailed coverage until the next day, providing a company the time to develop a plan without any unnecessary public attention. Now, with (Sky News and BBC 24) 24 hour news coverage along with the speed of social media any big story can be around the world in a matter of seconds and trending.

 It takes mere minutes for half the world to be informed of a significant story e.g the death of famous actor Paul Walker was trending on Twitter 2 minutes after the news was released.

I carried out an experiment where I didn’t use Facebook for 24 hours, the next day, the conversation around me went like “ Did you see the pic Dani uploaded yesterday? Yes!!!! She didn’t look pretty, though. I heard she got 87 likes in 3 hours. Did you read the comments?

  

Michelle Kemp, a 16 year old student asks “Have you ever had one of those moments when you’re working on completing an important assignment that’s due the next day, and then you think, “I wonder what’s happening on Twitter right now?” Three hours later, you’ve scrolled through hundreds of tweets, and your assignment is left terrible and unfinished.”

Lorraine Dindi and Louloua Waliji