Social Media's Negative Impacts

This assignment critically examines the negative consequences of excessive social media use. The author argues that social media can hinder personal relationships, compromise privacy, and distract individuals from meaningful experiences in the real world. The essay utilizes examples and research to support its claims about the detrimental effects of relying too heavily on social media platforms.

Running head: SOCIAL MEDIA EXPLOSION 1
SOCIAL MEDIA EXPLOSION
Pei Chin, Lin
ENG101 – Composition I
Colorado State University – Global Campus
Jennifer Naimark
March 22, 2016

SOCIAL MEDIA EXPLOSION 2
Social Media Explosion
Some people may be right to state that the social media can make our life easier and it is
the best way to learn new things through it. In contrast, the social media can also bring us lots of
negative affects. Nowadays the technology develops rapidly, from my point of view, people
should not rely on social media too much because it will make personal relationships more
difficult, destroying the personal privacy and distracting people from regular life.
First of all, there are more and more people know how to use social media especially the
teenagers. Young teenager spends at least 2 hours and 20 minutes on social media every day and
it will definitely make their personal relationships more difficult. In Marcia Clemmitt’s “Social
Media Explosion” article she brings up the fact that “Many kids say they prefer not to talk face to
face, they reply on written communication only, mainly via text or social media sites, especially
when communicating with adults.” In other words, the young teenagers don’t know how to talk
to people when they see their face especially with the people older than them because they use
social media to communicate frequently. Moreover, most digital natives- the generation that has
grown up online is less independent. They are the young generation with little experience dealing
with frustration or loneliness. They have lost the ability of communicating with other people
from the reality. They need to stay in the cyber world to get some attention.
Secondly, after the social media becoming a trend, personal privacy seems like something
we can only dream of right now. It is hard for the people to use the social media without being
stolen the personal information. There is only 30% of 90 sites guarantee they won’t sell people’s
information to other companies. Clemmitt makes a brilliant point in her article “Social Media
Explosion”, “Many social network users post and tag multiple photos of themselves and friends
can also be a risk of third-party hacking.” It means hackers can steal the information easily and
spread them to other websites because those photos are publicly available. Our life is not safe
anymore, it is also easy for them to send virus through the website and invade our laptop. Also,
the author mentions, “Our social media accounts offer views into our personal lives and expose
information that would be inappropriate to discuss during a job interview due to thee inherent
risk of creating bias.” In other words, you might get the rejection from the interviewers because
of the personal behavior online. Maybe originally they wanted to hire you but after seeing your

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post and pictures online, they decided not to hire you because they do not like the information
you post or the way you talked online so you missed the chance to get the dream job.
Third, the social media has become the most part of people’s lives and it starts distracting
people from the regular life. It will change your normal schedule and make you have some bad
habits. Clemmitt said, in her article “Social Media Explosion”, “The allure of socializing online
has created a nation of mobile-device obsessives, many of whom can go barely 10 minutes
without checking their smartphones for Twitter or Facebook messages.” The youth will not be
able to take the technology away because they believe they will lose people in minutes if they do
not use their phone to reply the messages immediately. In addition, in her article “Social Media
Explosion” she mentions, “You’re constantly interrupted, and you’re self-interrupting, too” and
“There are so many young teenagers who sleep with the cell phone and get up in the middle of
the night to respond to the texts.” However, I believe that being a human being is to control the
technology and use it well, not being controlled by them. We should manage our time and use
the social media as a tool to make our life easier. If we spend too much time on it or being
addicted to it, it will not only distract our regular life but also will affect our body health.
People may think it feels much safer to broach uncomfortable subjects when you do not
have to look someone eye. In my perspective, this is not a very positive attitude and it means that
you do not make yourself vulnerable. If your heart is that fragile, how can you stronger and
steady your personal relationship? In addition, people argue that if people could not get the job
offer because of their personal behaviors online are totally fair to them. They think job and home
cannot be separate. I refute the point because this is all about you only; if you can make profits
for the company then you are a good employee no matter what you do during your free time or
the information you post on the social media. Who says you could not have two sides of
yourself? Sometimes I like to post some crazy prank videos or share the stupid pictures with my
friends because this is how I release the pressure myself. If we always need to be the same
people during the job and home, you will be tired of yourself someday. Besides, if we didn’t do
any thing illegally, I think the boss should not micromanage every detail of us on the social
media. We live in the country with freedom.
Now we can safely draw a conclusion from above reasons that using social media too
much will bring us the negative effects. We should not rely on the social media because it will

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make our personal relationships more difficult and people start losing the social ability.
Moreover, it destroys the personal privacy due to the people put too much personal information
online. Finally, the social media can distract people from regular life because it makes people use
them everyday every minute and people start being addicted to them. I highly recommend all of
you should close the social media account for a week or limit the using time everyday; I can
guarantee you will feel you are alive again.

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References
Maria, C. (2013). Social Media Explosion. Do social networking sites threaten privacy rights?,
Retrieved from http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?
id=cqresrre2013012500