Analyzing Social Media Addiction: Ethical Considerations & Media

This report critically examines social media addiction and its impact on individuals, referencing a media product to highlight the issue. It discusses the narrative of increasing social media use and its potential for misrepresentation, emphasizing the addictive nature of platforms like Facebook and the dopamine-driven reward system they create. The report outlines negative effects such as low self-esteem, isolation, sleep disruption, and decreased physical activity, further exploring how the Equality Act 2010 in Britain addresses discrimination related to social media use. Ethical considerations within social media, including oversharing information, email security, and the use of client reviews, are also analyzed. The report concludes by suggesting strategies for reducing social media addiction, such as turning off notifications, digital detox, and engaging in analogue activities, advocating for a balanced digital life. Desklib offers a platform for students to access similar solved assignments and study resources.

Critical Reference of
Individual Media Product

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1
MAIN BODY...................................................................................................................................1
A brief account of the narrative and its purpose that you are seeking to highlight...................................1
How this has been influenced by Equality Act 2010?.................................................................2
What were the ethical considerations in your project?................................................................3
Apply your understanding of the genre and conventions: How does the production adhere to the
modes and conventions, as you understand them? What dramas have you watched that influence
some of the decisions you made in the production?....................................................................4
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................5
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................6

INTRODUCTION
Individual media product can be defined as the product used for interpersonal communication.
Whatever equipment’s we used for expressing personal expressions like mobile phones, mails,
messenger, online platforms and many more. Individual media product are of three types which
are broadcast media, online media and print media. In this report we will study about how social
media is becoming an addiction for the people and what are the effects and challenges of social
media faced by today’s generation. We will also discuss on the equality act which was published
in 2010(Eslami,., Ghasemaghaei,. and Hassanein,., 2021).
MAIN BODY
A brief account of the narrative and its purpose that you are seeking to highlight.
From the last decade scrolling and net surfing is becoming very popular activity. Everyone use social
media for some kind of entertainment or getting updated but not all are addicted to it. Addiction of
anything is dangerous to health. There is also a saying that “excess to anything is poison” which
means one should not be addicted of anything. A person should use every substance in a limited
manner. Here we will discuss about the social media addiction through which individuals are
misrepresenting themselves. Social media addiction is defined as a behavioural addiction in which
individual spend most of their time in surfing social media, it becomes a need for them to log in their
social media account continuously and which becomes a threat for their life and wellbeing.in the
report priyanka used to surf her social media accounts like Facebook very frequently and that
becomes her habit. She likes to take picture at every moment whether she is her university or in her
classroom or at some garden. Rather than enjoying the view of the place she like to take picture of her
own and then upload her picture on Facebook so this is a type of addiction. Most of the people are
going through this type of addiction( Dalvi-Esfahani., Niknafs, and et.al., ) .From some studied it
has been concluded that these likes and sharing of pictures triggers the brain rewarding area in the
same way drugs do like cocaine. With social media addiction dopamine is injected directly into the
body. The feelings which we get from social media is temporary. In the case study also it has been
studied that real life is much different from reel life. There are so many negative effects of social
media and some of them are as follows:
 Low self-esteem which comes from social media in which people think that other lives are
better than theirs
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 Excessive use of social media increase isolation and loneliness as while engaging in social
media a person loves to enjoy alone and that turns into isolation.
 Disruption in sleeping patterns, if a person use social media at night time then this increases
the deficiency of sleep for the individual.
 A fear of missing out when a person uses more social media platforms and this even lead to
more usage of social media( Hou., Xiong., and et.al., 2019).
 It also decreases the physical activity of an individual which affect the overall health.
 Increasing use of social media is making the generation more depressing in their personal and
professional life.
 By using social media more in real life people start ignoring their real life and real
relationships.
 It also reduces the ability to empathize with others.
How this has been influenced by Equality Act 2010?
The equality act which was came into law in 2010 in Britain. This law protects people from
harassment, discrimination and victimisation. Every person in Britain is protected because of
equality act. There are nine factors which came under equality act like age, disability, gender
reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy, race, religion, sex and sexual
orientation.in the equality act a person is protected from discrimination. discrimination can be
faced by a person anywhere like when is in his office, when a person uses public services like
visiting doctor or college or school, when you are travelling and using transportation system.
Similarly this can also help in the addiction of social media.it has been studied that there are
major three reasons for the addictiveness in social media like tendency of being imprudent, need
of growing socially, the need of confirm their identity. There are many symptoms of using social
media addictions like feeling low when there is no internet connection, checking social media
every hour, feeling exhausted when smartphone is not in hand, using social media while
morning walks, prefer to communicate with people socially rather than on face to face( Cao, and
et.al., 2020).
There are many ways of preventing addiction from social media. Some of them are as
follows :set a minimum time of 15 min between connections, do without your mobile at key
times of the day like lunch , breakfast, dinner, switch off automatic notifications on phone, put
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your phone on silent and don’t even use it as a watch or alarm to avoid temptation., set a
minimum time each day for completely offline activities such as sports, reading or listening to
music, cut down your number of social media friends and the last one is to delete unnecessary
apps and what Sapp groups. All these activities should be done by a social media addictive
person to stop his habit.it has been studied that social media addiction is more dangerous than
drugs as it is free and easy to use. While social media can seem like mindless and relaxing fun
bit it is actually has a significant effect on your brain. Low self-esteem which comes from social
media in which people think that other lives are better than theirs. By using social media more in real
life people start ignoring their real life and real relationships ( Haand., and Shuwang.,
2020) .Disruption in sleeping patterns, if a person use social media at night time then this increases
the deficiency of sleep for the individual. Therefore one should live a life of this quote which states
that “lets drive real life”.
What were the ethical considerations in your project?
Social media is used by almost every generation at this present time. The technology is
developing very rapidly in the world like people are using social media platforms like facebook
and instagram on a very large scale.it is very important to use some professional associations
and licensing to identify some professional standards for using social media in the workplace.
Many ethical issues were faced by individuals while exploring with social media like secrecy,
confidentiality, validity, data security, data management, selection and reducing harm (Grau.,
Kleiser., and Bright., 2019).There are many other ethical issues of social media .some of them
are described as follows:
1. Oversharing client information in online forms when requesting referrals-
oversharing of data is one major ethical issue faced by the individuals while using social
media platform. While using social media platforms like facebook or instagram there are
many referral pages in which online forums have to be filled by the people which further
leads to the distraction of privacy and authenticity.to solve this issue one can use client’s
initials rather than using their full names in the online forums.
2. Messy emails and texting boundaries-getting messy emails and messages is also an
ethical issue faced by people while surfing the social media platforms. Whenever a
person search something on the internet, they started getting some emails regarding to
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their research and getting subscription links of that site which all are junk mails.to reduce
this do not log in any website with your email address if it is not required there.
3. Using the right email or texting services-one should always use right email address ad
texting services for communication.in todays era the communication part is so strong ,
convenient and inexpensive so it is better to use secure mails and texting services rather
than using conventional email address .the secure technologies do not require client’s
sign up for accessing any website.
4. Non secure “contact me” pages on website-whenever a person visits any website they
need to fill their personal information for accessing that page and from their this
information has been directly send to the therapist web hosting companies and from there
they start sending conventional emails where contact me is an option for the viewers.
There is a way of converting these insecure pages into secure forms which is provided by
some companies like hushmail, paubox and many more (Hawi,. and Samaha., 2019).
5. Using client reviews on websites and in Google, facebook and other profiles-getting
online reviews is one of the best business strategy used by the companies for running
their business. This is one of the major ethical issue faced by the generation in social
media addiction and one should not click on any review page showing on the social
media platforms.
Apply your understanding of the genre and conventions: How does the production adhere to the
modes and conventions, as you understand them? What dramas have you watched that
influence some of the decisions you made in the production?
It has been studies that more than two hundred and ten million people are suffering from internet
and social media addiction and this issue is increasing rapidly as digitalization is also increasing
drastically. Digitalization has benefited a lot of people as it becomes every person to do
everything through online mode but using social media in an excessive mode is dangerous for
mental health. Social media addiction cannot be removed so easily by overnight it require lot of
efforts to maintain a good digital life(Khan., Khan., and Moin., 2021) There are some ways by
which an individual can reduce their social media addiction and can control the habit of being
dependent on social media.
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1. Turn off notifications-it is very distracting for everyone to check their smart phones
notifications every moment so it is better to turn off the notifications. Counting likes on
facebook is very dangerous for mental health and produce anxiety. After posting any
status on social media it is better to leave that for a period of time so as to decrease the
dependency of social media addiction.
2. Don’t keep your phone with you while sleeping-it is not advisable to keep the phone
with your bed while sleeping as it becomes a habit of checking and scrolling the phone at
bed time and this reduces the sleep and produces anxiety.to overcome this one should
keep the phone on airplane mode so as to have a fresh and better sleep.
3. Digital detox-the best way to reduce the social media addiction is to digitally detox
yourself. It does not totally absconding social media nut to give less time comparatively.
There are also some courses for digital detox which helps in reducing the use of social
media and makes you feel that it is more important to have time for yourself (Acar.,
Avcılar and Bostancı 2020).
4. Opt for analogue alternatives-for reducing social media dependency one should opt for
analogue alternatives like spending more time in hobbies or interest level and start doing
something innovative. Set some time for yourself in which one can engage themselves in
non-screen actions like art and crafts, cooking and many more. Dedicate time to yourself
and let’s drive for real life.
5. Place less weight on your personal social media appearance-one of the most
dangerous thing done on social media is posting the status of particular action and then
start overthinking and over planning about that makes the person irritating and develop
anxiety in them.it is better to free yourself from stress by not giving so much importance
to the post or to the status.
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CONCLUSION
From the above report it has been concluded that social media addiction is a behavioural issue
Faced by almost every individual. There are some positive and some negative points of this but
in this generation this is becoming an addiction and affecting the personal and professional life
of people. In this we have studied a drama in which one girl is very much addictive on social
Media but later she understood the fact that it is better to live in the present and enjoy the
moment of life rather than clicking everything and uploading on social media
platforms(Demircioğlu,. and Köse, 2020).
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REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Eslami, S.P., Ghasemaghaei, M. and Hassanein, K., 2021. Understanding consumer engagement
in social media: The role of product lifecycle. Decision Support Systems, p.113707.
Dalvi-Esfahani, M., Niknafs, and et.al., 2019. Social media addiction: Applying the DEMATEL
approach. Telematics and Informatics, 43, p.101250.
Hou, Y., Xiong, D., and et.al., 2019. Social media addiction: Its impact, mediation, and
intervention. Cyberpsychology: Journal of psychosocial research on cyberspace, 13(1).
Cao, X., Gong, M., Yu, L. and Dai, B., 2020. Exploring the mechanism of social media addiction:
An empirical study from WeChat users. Internet Research.
Haand, R. and Shuwang, Z., 2020. The relationship between social media addiction and
depression: A quantitative study among university students in Khost, Afghanistan. International
Journal of Adolescence and Youth, 25(1), pp.780-786.
Grau, S., Kleiser, S. and Bright, L., 2019. Exploring social media addiction among student
Millennials. Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal.
Hawi, N. and Samaha, M., 2019. Identifying commonalities and differences in personality
characteristics of Internet and social media addiction profiles: traits, self-esteem, and self-
construal. Behaviour & Information Technology, 38(2), pp.110-119.
Khan, N.A., Khan, A.N. and Moin, M.F., 2021. Self-regulation and social media addiction: a
multi-wave data analysis in China. Technology in Society, 64, p.101527.
Acar, I.H., Avcılar, G. and Bostancı, S., 2020. The roles of adolescents’ emotional problems and
social media addiction on their self-esteem. Current Psychology, pp.1-10.
Demircioğlu, Z.I. and Köse, A.G., 2020. Mediating effects of self-esteem in the relationship
between attachment styles and social media addiction among university students.
Vancouver
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