Social Media Impact on Society: Guilt, Shame, Anxiety and Anger

Social Media enables people to connect from all over the world, spread news, share thoughts, poseur etc. It has actually become a fabric of modern life. There are various platforms for us to communicate which made a huge impact on our everyday lives. Social Media has become a big part of our lifestyle, our culture and it affect us too. As people might say social media has brought people together and also has expanded the horizon of thoughts and ideas worldwide. Social Media can add creativity to our thinking and let us explore without the fear of rejection. There are many pros using social media, along with the pros there are always cons too. Most of the negatives affects we don’t even notice. However, social media has its impact on society and in this essay we will find out how it affects human behaviour and society at all. 

Social Media Impact on Human Behavior

Humans have a wide spectrum of emotions. Social Media has also been used as a tool to spread negativity and rumours which leads to anger. Because of Social Media, there have also been negative influences on our lives which will lead to psychological issues, stress and anxiety. Social Media has also been associated with Cyberbullying and Cyber abuse, leading to problems with self-esteem and depression.

“Omg I look so fat in that picture, why would you post it?”, “Oh she’s so beautiful, why can’t I look like her? I should really hit the gym”, “She travels all the time, it's not fair”. Scrolling through social media, often those are the ways I respond but what we don’t realise is, it’s actually causing damage to our self-esteem which can also affect our confidence and leads to shame.

A while ago I went on a vacation with my family and I saw this beautiful view from the hotel we were staying in. The sunset and a beautiful lake. It was so beautiful that any normal person wouldn’t stop staring at it but guess what my first instinct was, to take out my phone and post it on social media instead of enjoying by gazing at it. Thinking about it I wanted to quit social media and I almost uninstalled all the social platforms that I had on my phone for a while. I realised I was checking my phone for no reason, I started suffering from phantom vibration syndrome - that’s when you think your phone is vibrating when it really isn’t.

Just like in sports, Social Media is our personal highlight reel. We post pictures or videos when we are with family or friends at a concert or some fancy restaurant. The thing is we compare our everyday life with everyone else’s highlight reel which leads to insecurity. We keep comparing ourselves with everyone. Yeah, of course, this used to happen before social media too through television etc but because of social media, the comparison has grown rapidly as it is directly linked to you.

These highlights are what people want us to see, so when these highlights do well we deal with another type of psychological issue i.e stress. The likes, comments and shares. So the last summer break I was in Manali and I posted a picture of me and unknowingly I was constantly checking my phone and the number of likes I received. Of course, there wasn’t any change in the number of likes every minute, I knew that and yet I was checking that post. This is the type of stress that you deal with before you are about to get your exam results and here we are stressing about something that doesn’t even matter in the long run.

In social media, the likes, the comments and the shares represent who we are. The likes that we receive, the dopamine that gets to us. We are like a product in marketing and let others attribute value to us. I, myself have took down a few pictures because it didn’t get the number of likes I expected it to get. This is changing our sense of identity.

There were many times I wanted to get rid of social networking accounts but if it wasn’t for the fear of being left out, I would have actually done it. It is abnormal now-a-days to not have Instagram or Snapchat. “You don’t have Instagram? That is so sad.”

People are so keen on taking pictures and posting them on social media which made me wonder if it was a mother giving birth would they take the picture of the baby instead of holding her? It’s a shame really that we are so addicted to such a thing.

“So what? It’s just one ugly photo and a bunch of mean comments”. These micro moments over time become a macro problem. Most of it has affects on our mental behaviour which go unnoticed. So it is important to not let these affect our emotional state.

People’s way of expressing their opinion has changed. In early 2000’s we didn’t use much of social media and there wasn’t much access to tell something or express something to someone. But now you just have to tag someone and boom they got the message. So depending on the people, it is directly connected to human emotion. It really isn’t a dark place, it is the people that make it dark by expressing something that isn’t supposed to be told, leading to anxiety and anger.

The Impact of Social Media in Society

We know that there is a correlation with the increase in suicide rate and the use of social media. It is deliberately and consciously designed to provoke the most repellent emotions in human nature to fulfil its social media’s capitalist ends. Social Media stocks have more value and more eye balls for the longer period of time. The way to captivate the most amount of eyeballs on the time for the longest period of time is to invoke anxiety, is to invoke anger, is to invoke the negative elements of envy and loathe. We are continued to think in a way and operate in a way and use social media in a way that if not encourage cyber bullying permits it and rewards it because it provokes an us vs them scenario. This is corrupting and perverting the whole social construct in which we live in, it's damaging the whole way in which we communicate with one another, the way we think about the world. It's actually breeding a very malignant broad scale.

Social Media usage is associated with increase rates of anxiety, depression, poor sleep quality, body image issues and cyberbullying. It ain’t no survey, I suffer from all of the above and don’t necessarily blame social media for it because I’m a social media addict. Electronic screens can disrupt sleep and a lack of good sleep can result in depressed mood and irritability which leads to anger.

In social media, we have a constant exposure to standards. A way that come up with images that we can compare against to do our judgement. What you are going to notice in social media is that people tend to post whatever they choose to post and its not always an actual reflection of reality. It's simply a selection from their experience or their images or their life that they have chosen to put up there intentionally. We start to compare our weaknesses to their strengths. So this is a pitfall and it can take a real hit on your mental health.

Now the other I saw a couple in a restaurant, I saw two people sitting at the same table with each other and they’re both doing what I call the cellphone prayer. You know, the cell phone prayer where your hands come together and you bow your head and you’re looking at this things. Social Media has a tendency to draw us in where we’re focused on a device instead of the person that we’re actually with so it become a substitute for a real connection with an actual person. This can actually lead to guilt and shame.  

To end up, it's undeniable that social media has impact on human behavior and society, this essay shows some argumentative statements that each of us is under the influence of social media impact. Every day each of us can notice in what way he or she behave due to 'norms' of media. With own awareness and self-reflection we can control this impact and avoid severe consequences.