Social Media: Impacting Society Positively & Negatively - Essay Sample

Introduction

The emergence of social media has profoundly impacted society in many ways, both positive as well as negative. Social media has created an avenue where people can be able to communicate with one another easily, hence making the world to be a global village (O'Brien 32). Communication has been eased through the development of an application such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Whatsapp, and Skype. Furthermore, social media applications have created a reliable platform business to network with their customers. Education and also the entertainment sector has also improved through the use of social media. Mobile development has highly contributed to the drastic use of various social media sites. It is approximated that about four billion people in the world use social media for communication as well as conducting business processes. Social media has impacted society through easing communication, increasing social associations, and improve enhancing business practices like e-commerce. Nonetheless, it has also brought some negative effects in the society like lack of confidentiality and privacy, depression and also Cyber bulling.

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The development of social media has created an avenue where people can be able to voice their opinions and grievances' without necessarily having to take real action. This is as a result of social media creating connection and linkage amongst the people all over the globe. Social media users can be able to share their opinions on their social media profiles, page, and groups. This interconnection amongst the social media users guarantees an individual or group using social media that their intended message or post they share will attract the targeted audience (Gerber 263). This will, therefore, be mobilizing and creating a force geared to pushing for certain opinions' and suggestions. Social influence has enhanced how people fight for rights. The social media user, while propagating for their rights, creates video, publications, posts and also memes which portray their intentions.

The use of social media has also contributed to decreasing the environmental, social, and political mischiefs in society. Before the emergence of various social media applications, many tribulations, evils, and injustices were done in society. The evil doings could never get to the glare of publicity, and henceforth, the culprits would walk away freely despite conduction the ill doings in the community. Currently, the ill culprits irrespective of their power and class in the community are sure that any captured wrongdoing in the society will be posted on various social media platforms. And the public uproar in the society in enough to create a lot of destruction to wrongdoers (Misra 328).In previous instances, when the public has created online confusion, they have been able to assess various injustice cases, arresting the authorities people in the society as well as imprisoning the proprietors of the ill doings in the community. Nevertheless, the business has not been spared too, as they must observe their actions since any slight blunder posted on various social media platforms is sufficient to destroy their status, leading to the collapse of the business. This has prompted the businesses to conduct health practices like in marketing and well as treating their customers and employees fairly to create a good image.

Social media in society has also greatly contributed to the growth of many businesses, as well as the emergence of e-commerce businesses. Most businesses have used social media as their mode of advertisement as it is cost-effective and reaches a wider audience. Businesses have embarked on incorporating the use of social media sites to advertise their ads mostly on Facebook, Instagram Video, and YouTube ads. Currently, it is odd to find any big company without a social media account as wider customers are reached through social media. Social media has created a pool of customers in all the part of the world.

As a result, many businesses have established the value of maximizing social media as well as adopting proper advertisement and marketing strategies to be more appealing to the customers. The ease of accessing a wider customer base has encouraged individuals due to indulging in business activities with any fear of adequate customers. Social media has helped many small entrepreneurs to maximize their profit as well as expand their business operations (Misra 329). More so the social media has assisted much business in generating insights, increasing demand, and also establishing targeted customers. Many businesses are to establish the preference and even behaviors of their social media users; hence they can be able to produce more appealing products and adverts while trying to create their brand awareness and increase their profitability.

Not only has social media increased marketing, but also, many businesses have been able to appreciate the value of social media in improving employee incorporation, communication, and awareness in the workplace (Smith 12). Social media applications like Facebook brings workgroups in an organization together. The business which has embraced the use of social media in their operations has drastically improved on how they manage their various projects. The use of social media has increased skills development amongst organization employees by bringing workforce groups together as well as creating a friendly environment in the business. The dissemination of the information is an organization in enhanced henceforth faster decision making. More so, training of workers and conferences is conducted using social media applications like zoom and Skype.

The use of social media has also adversely affected politics in the current society. This is because approximately 60% of the people their news on social media, 20% of them often depending on social media as the primary source of information (Gottfried & Shearer, 15). Henceforth the use of social media applications has impacted political campaigns in comparisons to other media like Television and Radio. The effect of the use of social media in politics usually plays extreme roles in the election, especially campaigns. Many political parties can create political platforms where party members can be able to communicate and interact with one another.

Social media has also impacted substantially in the education sector. Students can interact with other students regardless of where they live. As a result of the interaction, students can share valuable knowledge and revision material to other students. In Facebook, mostly students and schools have created learning groups and pages where students engage in discussion. Most schools and institutions have used social media applications like Facebook and Twitter to disseminate information like the memo and vacancies to the students as well as outside stakeholders.

Also, the world of work has been affected by social media developments. Social media has widely been used in the hiring and recruitment of employees by many organizations. Many recruitments agencies and human resources managers use social media applications to advertise various job vacancies in their organizations. They also use various information on social media to search and identify suitable employees for a job opening. LinkedIn is one of the social media application that allows its users to upload their academic and professional qualifications in a bid to market themselves to potential employers in case of a certain job opening.

Regardless of the positive impact social media has brought to society, it has also impacted society differently. Before the evolution of technology, people used to interact face to face. But when the technology emerged, it eradicated the culture of face to face interactions and became anti-social. The majority of the people have been addicted to online meetings and chat, forgetting the physical interactions. This has prompted the current generation to lose the value of thinking independently, and these have led to psychological and physical effects which have impacted the society negatively.

The rise in the use of social media has increased cyberbullying. There has been the emergence of anonymous people with anonymous profiles whose main aim is to embarrass other people. While the primary aim of social media is to ease interaction and communication amongst people, it also presents a platform for evil-minded people whose main aim is to humiliate others. Mostly the victims of cyberbullying in the social media are the teenagers' (Palermiti 138). Cyberbullies mostly use social media applications to spread gossip as well as fake news to blackmail a certain individual or destroy individual reputations. The victims of cyberbullying have been left depressed while others commit suicide as their reputation has been destroyed.

The use of social media has led to a lack of confidentiality as well as individual privacy. Individuals some time use social media applications recklessly to stalk other people and also misuse other people's information for wicked intentions (Milosevic 22). At times an individual might share their private information with the social media accidentally due to the lack of sufficient knowledge of the social media. This has led to exposing individual confidential data to the public. Private information on social media has also been compromised by hackers. These hackers maliciously attack social media applications to access individual data, henceforth lack of data privacy when using social media.

More so, social media has been one of the contributors to fake news. This is due to the lack of established regulations to control the sharing of unverified information. People have abused social media platforms is sharing false and unverified information as through social media, and the information will reach millions of people within a very short time. Most of the social media users do not take time to verify the information they wish to share on social media, hence the rise in the misleading information (Shu et al., 31).False information and message are misleading to the people and might impact their decision making.

Even though the use of social media has brought the negative impacts to the society, it has impacted the society positively especially by easing communications, social interactions, business processes, sharing of information and well as job requirement by organizations. This has impacted the society economically, socially, and culturally. Socially the use of social media has enhanced communication of people all over the world. Also, the use of social media has economically affected society through enhancing the business process through effective recruitments, creating brand awareness, and even developing proper marketing strategies.

Work Cited

Gerber, Hannah R., and Tom Liam Lynch. "Into the meta: Research methods for moving beyond social media surfacing." TechTrends 61.3 (2017): 263-272.

Gottfried, Jeffrey, and Elisa Shearer. News Use Across Social Medial Platforms 2016. Pew Research Center, 2016.

Milosevic, Tijana. "Social media companies' cyberbullying policies." International Journal of Communication 10 (2016): 22.

Misra, Sutapa. "New media & social networks: A contemporary public sphere for social change." International Journal of Research in Social Sciences 9.6 (2019): 324-334.

O'Brien, Clodagh. "The emergence of the social media empowered consumer." Irish marketing review 21.1/2 (2011): 32-40.

Palermiti, Anna Lisa, et al. "Cyberbullying and self-esteem: An Italian study." Computers in Human Behavior 69 (2017): 136-141.

Shu, K., Sliva, A., Wang, S., Tang, J., & Liu, H. (2017). Fake news detection on social media: A data mining perspective. ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter, 19(1), 22-36.

Smith, Tyler. "Social Media Impact...