I arrived almost two hours early for a public lecture at the University of Lagos two weeks ago and decided to use the extra time to visit my former lecturers. I was walking briskly to the Faculty of Arts complex when an elderly lady standing beside a young lady politely beckoned on me to come. After exchanging pleasantries I asked why she wanted my attention.
“Take a good look at this young lady and tell me what you see,” she said. Confused, I looked at the lady, who is probably between 18 and 19 years old and couldn’t immediately picture anything since I was seeing both of them for the very first time. When she saw my befuddled look she said: “Just look at what she wore, I know her parents and I know she can never dress like this at home. I have been talking to her for a while and she did not see anything wrong in dressing so provocatively. This is why I wanted you to be a witness that I voiced out my concerns.”
Not knowing what else to add, I appealed to the young lady to listen to the counsel of the elderly lady. One thing I deduced before leaving was the young lady’s disposition, she wasn’t rude or defensive. She said what she wore was what “my mentors wear on social media and I don’t see anything wrong with it.” Beyond this brief encounter, the social media may be controlling our lives more than we think.
The social media, a platform for social interaction among people in which they create, share or exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks has radically altered the way we live and interact. Anchored on mobile and web-based technologies to create highly interactive platforms through which individuals and communities share, co-create, discuss, and modify user-generated content, it is considered revolutionary. Like everything about life, it has both positives and negatives. This is where the issues lie because most people do not know how to draw the line.
On my way from work recently, I stopped at a provision store to pick up some items. As I walked out of the store something caught my attention, I saw a young man of about 22 watching raw pornography on his mobile phone. What however got me worried was a young boy of about 9 years watching with him, I stopped in my track and felt I have a duty to perform here, I told the child to walk away while I sat down with the young man to see why he would be so unconcerned showing such lewd stuff to a child.
It turned out that he’s an undergraduate of one of the universities in Lagos. He said he only watches it when he is “bored” and “it does not affect my being in any way.” Probing further, I asked “what about the child?” “Well, I did not invite him to watch” was his lame answer. The positive side is that when we met weeks later he proudly told me he does not watch “such stuff anymore because they are not good for my spiritual life.”
Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace allow us to find and connect with just about anyone, from a coworker to a long lost neighbour. Browsing these sites can make you feel connected to a larger community, but such easy, casual connection in an electronic environment can also have its downside. They can make it more difficult for us to distinguish between the meaningful relationships we foster in the real world, and the numerous casual relationships formed through them. By focusing so much of our time and psychic energy on these less meaningful relationships, our most important connections may weaken.
Some of us may have heard about cyber-bullying. Kids especially are vulnerable to the practice of cyber-bullying in which the perpetrators, anonymously or even posing as people their victims trust, terrorise individuals in front of their peers. Though not yet popular in Nigeria, the devastation of these online attacks can leave deep mental scars on kids as some have even been driven to suicide.
The veil of anonymity afforded online can bring out dark impulses that might otherwise be suppressed in real life. In the west – where we copy nearly everything – cyber-bullying has spread widely among youth, with 42% of American youths reporting that they have been victims, according to a recent CBS News report.
While many businesses use social networking sites to find and communicate with clients and customers, the sites can also prove a great distraction to employees who may show more interest in what their friends are posting than in their work tasks. Wired.com posted two studies which demonstrated damage to productivity caused by social networking: Nucleus Research reported that Facebook shaves 1.5% off office productivity while Morse claimed that British companies lost 2.2 billion a year to the social phenomenon. It is based on this that new technology products have become available that allows social networks to be blocked, but their effectiveness is not total.
It is now obvious now that most social networking sites encourage people to be more public about their personal lives. Because intimate details of our lives can be posted so easily, users are prone to bypass the filters they might normally employ when talking about their private lives. What’s more, the things they post remain available indefinitely.
While at one moment a photo of friends doing “funny stuffs” at a party may seem harmless, the image may appear less attractive in the context of an employer doing a background check. While most sites allow their users to control who sees the things they’ve posted, such limitations are often forgotten, can be difficult to control or don’t work as well as advertised just like the nude iCloud pictures of some celebrities that were released to the public after their accounts were hacked.
While on the surface it appears social networking brings people together across the Internet, in a larger sense it may create social isolation. As people spend increasing amounts of time on social networks, they experience less face-to-face interaction.
Scientists have evaluated social isolation in many studies, and have determined that it can lead to a host of mental, psychological, emotional and physical problems including depression, anxiety and many others. In fact, a University of Illinois, Chicago School of Medicine animal study showed social isolation impaired brain hormones, which is the likely reason socially isolated people experience tremendous levels of stress, aggression, anxiety and other mental issues.
While the above studies show actual correlations between social networking and negative consequences, others argue that many other negative consequences may exist that have not yet been studied.
What about it encouraging poor grammar, usage and spellings? Most youths these days find it difficult to write five straight sentences without abbreviation. Beyond that, it also allows the spread of misinformation that may be perceived as fact even in light of evidence to the contrary thereby creating a culture in which a single mistake, such as a careless picture or poorly thought-out comment, can cause irreparable harm to an individual’s reputation.
Even though no disease or disorder has yet been linked to social networking addiction, still a number of behaviours associated with excessive use of social media have lately become the subject of much discussion and research. A social networking addict could be considered as someone who uses social media excessively to a point where it interferes with other daily activities.
A research team headed by Wilhelm Hoffmann of Chicago University in 2012 concluded that twitter is harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol. The team used Blackberry’s to gauge the willpower of 205 people aged between 18 and 85. The results showed that with each day the ‘self-control’ dropped lower and lower and concluded that between social media, cigarettes and alcohol, the ‘self-control-failure’ rate was highest with social media. Other researchers have also linked anxiety, sleep deprivation, depression and some psychological disorders to people who spend too much time online.