Social Media and its Effects on Society
Gargi Barve*
Department of Mass Communication, Amity University, India
*Corresponding author: Gargi Barve, Department of Mass Communication, Amity University, India, Tel: +91-956-006-3336; E-mail: [email protected]
Rec date: Feb 29, 2016; Acc date: Mar 02, 2016; Pub date: Mar 08, 2016
Copyright: © 2016 Barve G. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use,
distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Opinion
With the technological advances and the increased scope of media,
communication with anyone around the world has become easy.
Earlier we had to wait for days or sometimes months for a beautiful
handwritten letter sent through post from close and loved ones. But
now any dialogue happens in a fraction of seconds.
Social media is one of the major platform communications. We
cannot imagine our daily routine without it. Internet penetration has
brought the world together on one platform. Now we can easily
connect with anyone from a different city or for that matter, a different
country. With the pictures or videos that are overflowing the social
media platforms like Facebook and Twitter one is constantly updated
about near and dear ones.
But nothing comes with all good or best. Every coin has two sides
and so does social media.
While talking about the positive side of the coin, social media has
been one of the best source of communication, and advertising because
of its ever increasing scope and reach, cost effectiveness, business
development features, worldwide connectivity, matchmaker or find
ones romance, opportunities for job, free publicity, real time
information sharing, platform to share cultural information, and much
more.
But one cannot neglect the fact that there is also a negative side to
the coin. Social media keeps you hooked up for hours and your time is
wasted. Hence, it can be called as addictive. The other negative aspects
would include the increase in crime (cybercrime), increasing fraud,
hacking of information, virus attacks, low productivity in work,
negative publicity and low internet penetration in some parts of the
world. One cannot just overlook the unfavourable aspects of social
media.
Hence, when a person learns to balance his time for social media
keeping in mind the other activities in his daily routine and taking care
of his security, social media can always be a boon.
