Negative effects of social media

My Belief is that the social medias is making people spent too much time in front of their computer. I state this from my own experiences and from people around me.

When MSN and different kinds of chat programs became popular I was then quick to adapt this new way of instant communication with my friends and use it in my everyday life. I realized often, when I was done chatting for the day, that I had spend a lot more time chatting than I had planned to do. I therefore started to use “offline” mode to be able to reduce time spent and only chat whit the people I really wanted to at that time.

When Facebook then were becoming more and more popular I straight away realized that this was an even more time consuming product/service. Now, was we not only supposed to talk/chat with our friends but also supposed to upload pictures, participate in games, quizzes, groups and other services with our friends and check out their profile. I was therefore very reluctant on creating an account there, but in the end did the social media win. In order not to fall out of this community of information sharing and receiving I created an account. I can almost say that I was pushed into creating an account.

These social Medias have on most people some sort of stickiness. I believe this goes hand in hand with the curious mind of people. We generally want to know what happens around us and with our friends. With these Social Medias we have the benefit and possibility to keep touch and maintain friendship with a lot more people simultaneously; on the other hand must this take away some of the important quality time spent with some other people or friends. Otherwise cannot I see how the time equation should be solved, the one must take out the other. By this I do not mean that using these services is something wrong, but that many people need to find a way to use them more efficient. I do think and feel that excessive time spent on these social medias is not justified compared to other physical activities that we can be doing with our friends instead.

Some ideas that are used in other time consuming products such as World of Warcraft is that they have a clock or a timer so that the user can know how long time they have used it and when they should stop playing/using it.