Social networks have significantly changed the lives of all humanity. Nowadays, people can send a message that they have bought a new chandelier on WhatsApp, share a photo of it on Instagram, and do not forget to throw off a couple of memes on Facebook. Moreover, all this without seeing their interlocutors in real life. Social networks have many advantages, such as instant communication, the ability to contact people from anywhere in the world, showing their position on a particular issue with likes and comments (Rubin and Beuk 2). However, many do not even think that several negative factors exist behind the beautiful facade of accessible communication.
Social media plays a huge role in many Americans lives day to day. Many use it to keep in touch with old friends and family that’s away, and some use it just to keep up with things that are going on in the world. It gives an insight on what is going on around the world, but in a way, people could only get if they are on social media. With Facebook being one of the most popular social media outlets where people can create profiles to interact with others, comes with problems behind it. Many people are faced with the harsh reality of criticism from users around the world, some of which they may not know.
During the work of the services, tools that affect a person more than others were discovered — likes and a news feed. The article’s author defines these features of social networks as adversely affecting users. The Like button allows users to show interest and belonging to a particular idea quickly. Nevertheless, at the same time, a universal metric is being introduced by which a person can judge the influence, the value of information within the platform, and about themselves (Rubin and Beuk 5). A button created as a simple equivalent of a minimal social action has become a digital currency.
With the creation of likes, the value of the information and personality expressed can now be accurately measured. Thus, the metric of our life that has always been hidden from other people has become publicly available. A new level of frankness could not affect people’s minds; the number of insecurities, anxiety, depression, neuroses among people who could not integrate into the platform increased dramatically (Rubin and Beuk 7). Teenagers trying their best to fit into life receive feedback in the form of likes with which they judge their importance and value. At the same time, the understanding of a person as someone suffers because such complex views that require prolonged reflection are lost in rapidly changing, stimulating information. It is worth noting that “the lower response on social network may make a person feel more dejected and it may validate his/her poor self-esteem” (Srivastava 156). Thus, such information does not receive a proper response in social media and is interpreted as unclaimed, complex, and unnecessary by the end-user.
Social networks have a powerfully negative effect on the subjective well-being of people, their state of self-satisfaction, and their own life. There is another factor that people do not pay attention to: communication on social networks has a fundamentally different emotional coloring (Rubin and Beuk 3). The fact is that people in them are forced to defend their point of view in front of a much wider audience. It includes people with whom they are not familiar in person and with whom they are unlikely to have ever made friends in real life due to too different characters and beliefs. In other words, people form their social circle based on mutual sympathy and shared beliefs in real life. It is impossible to form such a circle in a social network. Therefore, in real life, communication with friends causes positive emotions and increases self-satisfaction and life, but this does not happen on the Internet.
It is important to note that the attitude to someone else’s life in social networks depends on how well the user knows people. The fewer online friends people know personally, the more likely they are to think that life is not as colorful and diverse as theirs. This phenomenon is called compliance bias, which means that clear conclusions about other people’s lives are made based on a limited amount of information from Facebook or Instagram accounts (Rubin and Beuk 20). However, in the case of a familiar person, the user understands that life consists not only of those aspects demonstrated on social networks.
Facebook distorts our perception of reality and how other people live. By visiting a page on a social network, users constantly compare themselves with other people, and since most people prefer to post only positive, this gives them a very wrong perception of reality. Since people on Facebook talk about how they spend weekends, not gray days, that they write about their children’s achievements, and not about their whims, readers quickly get a false sense of a world filled with only bright sides.