BSL305: Social media such as Twitter and Facebook has been wildly advocated for social networking: Company Law Assignment, MU, Singapore

Social media such as Twitter and Facebook has been wildly advocated for social networking. On the other hand, others have criticized the use of it which leads to many problems. Which view do you agree with? Use the information from the text below as well as your knowledge to support your arguments.

When using the information from text A, you are expected to acknowledge the source of it. Text A New, More Rigorous Study Confirms: The More You Use Facebook, the Worse You Feel The average Facebook user spends almost an hour on the site every day, according to data provided by the company last year. A Deloitte survey found that for many smartphone users, checking social media apps is the first thing they do in the morning – often before even getting out of bed. Of course, social interaction is a healthy and necessary part of human existence.

Thousands of studies have concluded that most human beings thrive when they have strong, positive relationships with other human beings. The challenge is that most of the work on social interaction has been conducted using “real world,” face-to-face social networks, in contrast to the types of online relationships that are increasingly common.

So, while we know that old-fashioned social interaction is healthy, what about social interaction that is completely mediated through an electronic screen? When you wake up in the morning and tap on that little blue icon, what impact does it have on you? Prior research has shown that the use of social media may detract from face-to-face relationships, reduce investment in meaningful activities, increase sedentary behavior by encouraging more screen time, lead to internet addiction, and erode self-esteem through unfavorable social comparison.

Self-comparison can be a strong influence on human behavior, and because people tend to display the most positive aspects of their lives on social media, it is possible for an individual to believe that their own life compares negatively to what they see presented by others. But some skeptics have wondered if perhaps people with lower well-being are more likely to use social media, rather than social media causing lower well-being.

Moreover, other studies have found that social media use has a positive impact on well-being through increased social support and reinforcement of real-world relationships. We wanted to get a clearer picture of the relationship between social media use and well-being. In our study, we used three waves of data from 5,208 adults from a national longitudinal panel maintained by the Gallup organization, coupled with several different measures of Facebook usage, to see how well-being changed over time in association with Facebook use. Our measures of well-being included life satisfaction, self-reported mental health, self-reported physical health, and body-mass index (BMI).

Our measures of Facebook use included liking others’ posts, creating one’s own posts, and clicking on links. We also had measures of respondents’ real-world social networks. In each wave, respondents were asked to name up to four friends with whom they discuss important matters and up to four friends with whom they spend their free time so that each participant could name up to a total of eight unique individuals.

Overall, our results showed that, while real-world social networks were positively associated with overall well-being, the use of Facebook was negatively associated with overall well-being. These results were particularly strong for mental health; most measures of Facebook use in one year predicted a decrease in mental health in a later year. We found consistently that both liking others’ content and clicking links significantly predicted a subsequent reduction in self-reported physical health, mental health, and life satisfaction.

Our models included measures of real-world networks and adjusted for baseline Facebook use. When we accounted for a person’s level of initial well-being, initial real-world networks, and initial level of Facebook use, increased use of Facebook was still associated with a likelihood of diminished future well-being. This provides some evidence that the association between Facebook use and compromised well-being is a dynamic process.

Our results suggest that well-being declines are also a matter of quantity of use rather than only quality of use. If this is the case, our results contrast with previous research arguing that the quantity of social media interaction is irrelevant and that only the quality of those interactions matters. These findings then may be relevant for other forms of social media. While many platforms expose the user to the sort of polished profiles of others that can lead to negative self-comparison, the issue of quantity of usage will be an issue for any social media platform.