When you think of social media you think of communicating with friends, or posting things you do in life.
Things we don’t think of is the mental toll it takes on certain people. Keeping up with the social image of yourself on social media can be a burden. When the Covid quarantine hit, people spent more time interacting on social media than in real life.
Around 64% of people in the United States think that social media has been a bad thing. Their reasoning for this is that social media is addicting, or the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) phenomena that occurs.
Social media could be addicting by wanting to be updated with any little thing that happens on Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook. People don’t want to miss any updates.
However, others agree that social media is not the problem. It is the way people use it that is a problem. Most experts say 1-2 hours of screen time is a good amount of time to spend on social media. Spending 6-8 hours on social media is a problem.
If you are chronically online, you may fall into the addiction of social media. Which can cause a problem. If you are spending too much time online, it may cause you to not communicate as easily in real life.
So the problem is real. State legislators have written laws to ban phone use in schools in an effort to get students more involved in live interaction and bills are currently being discussed that would require parent permission for teenagers to have social media accounts.
Pay attention to what is going on and learn to use social media the right way. Over use of it is a bad thing.