cause-effect
essay
The Effects of Social Media on Interpersonal Relationship
How much time did you spend on social media every day? Ten minutes? Two hours? Or even half a day lost in the digital world? According to Stacy(2023), in 2012 people spent an average of 90 minutes on social media platforms. But now, we spent an average of 151 minutes every day. Not to mention there are loads of tasks that we can’t complete without log in online. It seems like we are gradually moving towards a fully digital society. Social media can be a powerful tool; however it fundamentally changed human behavior on a societal level, such as the way we connect with people, market our business, and even find relationship online. These changes also come with some negative effects, such as content manipulating and echo chamber effects.
The contents on social media can divide people further. Social media allows people all around the world to meet and chat in an instant. However, social media also pushes away each other by manipulating contents. By targeting certain posts and news, social media creates an echo chamber effect, which makes similar ideology users stay in their own circle, unable to see the whole picture. The algorithm filters information into different prospectives, providing an illusion for the users. The users believe that their ideology is truly correct, which makes people violent toward other voices and opinions, Resulting inappropriate language usage and cyberbullying. Besides conflicts on the internet, pecuniary benefits can complicate things even more.
Social media e-commerce business model also furtherance crime and extremism ideology. Social media’s market function allows small business to reach potential customers around the world. It creates endless opportunities for small business owners to promote products to global audiences. However, with little regulations, the platform gradually filled with scams, useless products, and political or societal propaganda. Advertisement posts turned everyone’s feed into a massive catalog filled with misinformation, gradually lowering the effectiveness of small business profits and user experiences. For everyday users, the risk of fraudulent advertising not only threatens their wallet, people with bad intentions might also affect your value.
Social media also change the behaviors in love and relationships. Social media allow you to date anyone around the world, providing you with an access to a seemingly infinite number of your dream partners, which results in ridiculous arms race between men and women. In order to show off the luxurious lifestyle of themselves, people create fake lives with sport cars, fancy hotels, and yacht photos to boast their value in the mating market. This results in people having unachievable standards for their partners. Even if they find the one they desire, the unbalanced supply and demand often leads to frequent cheating and unstable relationships. Even though not everyone will cross the moral line, they consequently still face endless comparisons with random people online, resulting in meaningless arguments and conflicts in relationships.
Social media allows us to chat, buy, and mate in a click of a button; however the effect brought about by the technology fundamentally changes human behavior. It results in radical conflicts, scams advertisements, and deconstruction of the mating market. The value and standards between people have changed so much that pre-internet human interactions seem to be an ancient practice sometimes.
References:
Stacy J. Dixon. (2023). Daily time spent on social networking by internet users worldwide from 2012 to 2023 (in minutes), Statisia.
Retrieved from
https://www.statista.com/statistics/433871/daily-social-media-usage-worldwide/
