Author: Maxime Bainbridge

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    Digital technologies have, for better or worse become an intergral part of our modern day society and with the rise of societal interconnectivity with technology data driven adversisment and marketing have begum having profound impacts on individuals’ lives.

  • Blog 1

    Social media has rapidly become part of most individuals daily lifestyles. Whether that be posting pictures to Facebook or Instagram, creating a short or long form content for TikTok or YouTube or even writing about mundane instances in an individual’s life on X/Twitter, it can very clearly been seen that social media has a profound impact on its users, be that as it may, can it be confidently said that social media can have both a good and bad impact on its users, but it can be observed that there seems to be more negative impacts experienced than positive ones.

    But what is social media? While social media is an extreme board platform and can have many different working definitions, it can all be summarised to some very simple components in the fact that the platform is heavily user based with the generation of user-based content as well as interactive in nature.(Osborne‐Gowey, J. 2014)

    An individuals’ relationship with social media is a complex and integral to many individual’s personal and professional lives, especially young people and or younger generations. Social media has a profound impact on individuals mental wellbeing and self-preservation, as through social media sociotechnical images of influencers lives may cause the consumer to compare their lives, which could lead to social comparison (Chen, Y. A. 2023), which can have an overwhelming negative impact on a users’ mental health.

    Another negative concept that has immersed from social media is the idea that the individuals who use the social media are solely responsible for their usage and what they see within the social media app. This does not take into account any societal factors or the social media companies platform design. This concept that the individual is responsible for all that they see on social media completely undermines the neoliberalization of social media well-being(Docherty, N. 2021). The entire concept can have a negative effect on any user’ss mental health for it can cause fear of helplessness for having lack of any digital self-control over their own social media usage.(Docherty, N. 2021)

    With the dramatic shift of having individuals’ entire lives all over social media, more and more individuals have started posting curated images of their supposedly perfect lives. The individuals consuming this type of content may begin to feel as if their lives do not reflect or even look similar to the content that is being consumed. The issue with comparing an individuals’ real life experiences to those influencers curated online identity can cause feelings of inadequacy due to social comparison, social envy and even a loss of self-identity, which is overall causes a negative impact on the consumers mental well-being.(Saudi, K. 2021)

    Most social media have a certain design integrated into the platform which allows for infinite scrolling from the user, which may lead to an endless amount of scrolling through the social media app, which has been colloquially coined to be “doom-scrolling”. This action may cause feelings of existential dread, stress, depression and even emotional exhaustion, however it can also have a physical effect in reducing sleep quality and having feelings of less self-control over the individual’s self-management over social media usage. Over all, the infinite scrolling feature that most social media has is a bad for its users’ mental and physical health.(Vahid Nakhzarimoghaddam et al. 2022)

    Whilst on social media it is common to advertisements during any time spent on social media, yet a good majority of the time those advertisements can feel as if the consumer using social media was the intended target for that specific advertisement. This can be due to the business models that social media platforms use to collect highly personalised data about that individual is curated to ensure the right advertisements are more personalised to that user. (Kim, H. Y. 2024)

    These adverts degrades the lines of the public spheres hindering discord between individuals from different fragments of the public spheres, which can be an isolating experience and then brings into question what autonomy users’ have over their own data that could cause anxiety, stress and even feelings of helplessness (Kim, H. Y. 2024), all these actions cause a negative effect on the consumers’ mental health further reiterating the point that social media is, in fact, bad for its users’ mental health.

    Although it can be confidently argued that social media and all that accompanies the engagement of social media is over all bad for its users’ mental health, it can also be somewhat argued that social media can have a good impact on its users’ wellbeing. Social media usage can encourage and help maintain genuine social connections with the users’ friends and family through focusing on the quality of the social interactions and engagements on each platform, rather than the focus being on the time spent on social media.(Oxford Saïd Business School 2023)

    Social media can have a profound negative impact on its users’ mental, physical and emotional well-being through many different avenues. The design of the platform may facilitate endless scrolling, social comparison, social envy and many more features that can cause harm to its users to ensure the engagement within the application is still relatively well maintained while not caring about its impacts of design. The business designs that collect personal data on its users’ to more personalise the users’ feed and advertisement can cause the question of data autonomy to be asked as well as cause the decay of the interactions between the different public spheres, however more than anyone social media has a more profound negative impact on younger people who even though maintain genuine friendships through social media, also have to constantly compare their lived to influencers who curate their “perfect” online personas. It can clearly be seen that from almost all the angles one can look at social media and its effects on its users’ well-being, the overall impact of social media on its users is negative.

    Bibliography:

    1. Chen, Y. A. (2023) Beyond Good or Bad: Relationships Between Young Adults’ Social Media Self-presentation and Well-being. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.
    2. Daily Bruin (2022) Illustration of a hand reaching out of a smartphone, surrounded by social media icons [image]. In: The Quad: Social media burnout can lead to negative mental health consequences for students. [online] Daily Bruin. Available at: https://dailybruin.com/2022/01/20/the-quad-social-media-burnout-can-lead-to-negative-mental-health-consequences-for-students
    3. Docherty, N. (2021) Digital Self-Control and the Neoliberalization of Social Media Well-Being. International Journal Of Communication, 15, 20. Retrieved from https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/17721
    4. Kim, H. Y. (2024) ‘What’s wrong with relying on targeted advertising? Targeting the business model of social media platforms’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, pp. 1–21. doi: 10.1080/13698230.2024.2309047.
    5. Osborne‐Gowey, J. (2014) ‘What is Social Media’, Fisheries, 39(2), pp. 55–55. doi: 10.1080/03632415.2014.876883.
    6. Oxford Saïd Business School (2023) Social media can have a positive effect on wellbeing, Oxford Saïd study finds. Available at: https://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/news/social-media-can-have-positive-effect-wellbeing-oxford-said-study-finds
    7. Saudi, K. (2021) ‘Are the activities of “influencing” and “following” on social-media driving users into an existential crisis?’, Aleph (Alger. En ligne), 8(3), pp. 197–221.
    8. The United Indian, n.d. Illustration of a person surrounded by social media icons representing overwhelm [image]. In: Good and bad effects of social media. [online] The United Indian. Available at: https://theunitedindian.com/news/blog?Good-and-Bad-Effects-Of-Social-Media&b=163&c=2
    9. Vahid Nakhzarimoghaddam, E., Geraei, E. and Farashbandi, F. Z. (2022) ‘Doom Scrolling in Health Science’, Mudiriyyat-i Ittilaat-i Salamat, 19(4), pp. 160–162. doi: 10.48305/him.2023.41639.1104.