According to this recent article on Mashable, studies have now shown that heavy use of social networking sites like Facebook among teens can lead to antisocial behavior, lower reading retention rates, lower grades, anxiety, aggression and sleeping problems. While many studies have surfaced in the past with some similar results, the young age of social media has made it difficult to prove the real cause of these disorders.
I wonder whether the rate at which we, and our children, have begun to do most of our social interactions digitally will eventually prove to be bad for our health. As one of our accounting professors once said, "what is better than a product that costs a penny to make, sells for a dollar and is addictive?" He was referring to cigarettes, but the analogy can be applied to social media.
While working on the final exam for this class I realized that the interconnectedness of user generated content and the social graph is a marketers dream come true. But like cigarettes, products that seem to good to be true from a businessperson's standpoint can sometimes prove to go out of style as we learn of the potential risks they pose to the health of our society.
1 comment:
It is unquestionable that taking part of our social life to the cyberspace has tangible benefits, thus a full analogy with any product that only has deteriorative effects and no tangible benefit (i.e. cigarettes) cannot be drawn.
However Your post proves the point that something that is beneficial in the correct doses can be a poison if taken too much of. The golden mean rule applies to social media as well. Every human being needs time alone, in an environment when impulses from the outside world are limited. This is the time of reassessment and it energizes. With the emergence of cyber social networks and especially since the emergence of mobile web, people find it harder and harder to block out the outside world because it is in their hands.
As with any new knowledge or technology, I think we need to give guidance to people (especially young people) how can they exploit the benefits without being poisoned by overuse...
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