Negative Effects of Social Media on Society: Social Media and the Proliferation and Consumption of Sensationalized (Clickbait) Content This is evident with Twitter, which is a social media platform where individuals and organizations can share ideas, thoughts, and information with their followers. Social media, specifically, has made information more accessible to consumers. In addition to commerce, people use social media to keep up with the latest developments in the United States and abroad. Currently, Facebook users can pay other users through Facebook messenger. This is not surprising as social media, such as Facebook, is already changing the way we pay. For example, as of 2019, Facebook is developing a cryptocurrency system called Libra, which, some argue, will soon go mainstream with help from major banks. Increasingly social media will be used to complete daily tasks, especially in the field of commerce. People use social media for different reasons beyond keeping connections with friends and relatives who live far away. Data from Pew Research Center show that roughly 75% of users visit Facebook and 60% of users visit Instagram at least once per day. In addition to the change in age among users of social media, the daily usage of social media sites, such as Facebook and Instagram, has also increased. In 2005, the few who used social media in America were young adults, but the user rates among older adults have also increased in recent years. They also found that as social media usage increases so does the user base. Data from Pew Research Center show that 5% of the American adult population used social media in 2005, as compared to 72% of the public today. While social media was considered as a passing trend by researchers just a little less than a decade ago, social media has proliferated into mainstream society. General Societal Effects of Social Media: The Pervasive Nature of Social Media Given the importance of this question, I wanted to dedicate some time to answering it here in detail. As the data from the article demonstrates, hashtags, such as #SayHerName, can be used to bring awareness, and, in turn, attempt to rectify systemic injustices that affect hyper marginalized groups whose lived experiences have often been neglected by mainstream media.ĭespite these positive impacts of social media, a first-year student in my sociology course asked me if I believed that social media was harmful to modern society. For example, in the article #SayHerName: a case of intersectional social media activism, Melissa Brown and her colleagues argue that #SayHerName, which has been retweeted many times over, is used to raise consciousness about the deaths of Black women, especially Black transgender women. Another method in which social media empowers its users toward collective activism is through the use of hashtags, which then could be retweeted on Twitter. For example, as a result of a tweet tweeted during the early stages of the coronavirus outbreak, online donors donated money to people who had student-loan and past-due medical bills. One way that social media facilitates social movements’ message of empowerment through collective action is through grassroots online fundraising. To this end, social media has been a place where social movements of different forms, and their messages of empowerment through collective action, are solidified. Social media is now a platform that brings social justice issues to the forefront of the American discourse, and arguably, has helped rectify persistent inequities. From a functional lens, social media, a type of mass media platform that facilitates the sharing of ideas, thoughts, and information between its users, which had been dismissed as a fad back in 2006, has had a functional, and arguably positive, effect on society in recent years by empowering its citizens toward solidarity through collective action. Therefore, the functional role of mass media is to teach and reinforce the norms, values, and belief systems of a society in order to further social solidarity. Talcott Parsons’ functional perspective espouses that society is comprised of interrelated parts in order to promote solidarity and stability. I teach a college-level introductory sociology course where we discuss the functional role of mass media.
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