Pros And Cons Of Social Media

Pros And Cons Of Social Media – In the digital world, we know that social media has always played an important role in today’s life. Social media has become an online tool that allows people to find and learn new information, share ideas, and interact with new individuals and organizations.

How about the effect? Various studies have shown that excessive use of social media leads to stress, bad mood, and negative mental health. Many people wake up in the morning and immediately check their Instagram, Snapchat, or Twitter. This has changed the way we live today, which has changed the way humans become modern social beings.

What Is Social Media?

In general, social media is a computer-based technology that facilitates information-sharing systems via the internet in a virtual community. Social Media is designed around electronic forms of communication (such as websites for social networking and microblogs), where users create online communities to share information, ideas, private messages, and other content.

And why is social media so important today? In the author’s own opinion, social media plays an important role in connecting information from one person to another. Even in business sectors such as buying and selling, social media can provide a great opportunity to build service between sellers and customers in ways such as gathering input (providing suggestions), answering questions, or listening to their feedback (Feedback/Review of merchandise).

History of Social Media

Since the creation of the Internet in the 60s, the first social media site was created in 1997 under the name Six Degrees. This site allows users to upload profiles and make friends with other users. Then continued in 1999, the first blog site became popular and created a sensation in the development of information that was in great demand at its time.

After the invention of blogging sites, social media began to explode in popularity until sites such as MySpace and LinkedIn became popular in the early 2000s, and sites such as Photobucket and Flickr facilitated online photo sharing. It was also the birth of YouTube in 2005 which created a new way for people to communicate and share information over great distances.

And in 2006, Facebook and Twitter are available to users all over the world for free to this day and have become the most popular social networks on the Internet reaching billions of users. Thanks to the emergence of Facebook and Twitter, many other sites such as Tumblr, Spotify, Instagram, TikTok, Foursquare, and Pinterest began to emerge to fill certain social networking spaces.

Types of Social Media

It should be noted that social media is divided into several types based on their functions and roles. The following is more detailed information about the types of social media.

1. Blog service – A blog service is a website that allows you to create, run, and maintain a blog. In other words, a blog service is an Informational website that displays information in chronological order by displaying the order of the most recent posts on the first page.
2. Social network – A social network is a website that allows people with similar interests to come together and share information, in the form of photos, and videos. Examples include Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
3. Microblogging – Microblogging refers to the act of creating concise posts for a brief interaction with the audience. This is often found on common platforms like Twitter and Tumblr. In addition to text and posts, users can include links, audio, images, and even videos on the microblog.
4. Media sharing – Media Sharing is a site that allows users to upload photos, videos, and audio with other people, although in a different scope through link embedding—examples such as Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, YouTube, and others.
5. Online forums – You could say online forums are internet message boards and are online discussion sites that are a place for many people to communicate in the form of posted messages (threads) that can contain questions, opinions, pictures, videos, links, and more. . Other users can also respond to and access these posts at any time, for example, such as Quora, Kaskus, Reddit, and others.

Functions and Benefits of Social Media

Behind the existence of social media technology, of course, there are several functions and benefits in aspects of everyday life. Among them can be used as a medium of entertainment, business to education. See the explanation in the following points.

1. Shorten communication

Social media can have a huge impact on society, both positively and negatively. It gives one a way (the media) to keep in touch with those who live far away. It lets people share fun, interesting, and informative content.

2. Community Media

Social media is useful for the community because it allows you as a user to create threads for people when they need help somewhere.

3. Source of entertainment

Entertainment is a type of show that gives pleasure to people, that’s why social media fulfills this function by providing entertainment and helps reduce tension among its users by providing online media that offers stories, movies, comics, magazines, memes, and so on to entertain the audience.

4. Business Media

Social media is an internet service that allows you to interact with others and share information and create content (posts) through online communities. With this, social media presents a great marketing opportunity for all areas of business. Starting from promoting brand names to directly entering the realm of commerce (selling/buying).

5. Useful for education

Social media plays an important role in the life of every student today. The reason itself is that through social media it is easier and more convenient to access information as well as provide information and communicate. Moreover, it is not uncommon for a teacher and student to connect to be able to take advantage of this platform for the benefit of their learning and teaching.

Pros And Cons Of Social Media

Apart from the functions and benefits of social media, of course, there are some pros and cons that many people may not know about. Here are the pros and cons.

Pros of Social Media

• Building relationships – Social media is a digital communication tool that connects one person to another. From a professional perspective, someone who is said to be a social media user can develop community networks and friendships. Of course with the aim of building scope for a productive exchange of information.
• Educate yourself – Social media allows users to control what they want to know and what they read. This means that you can easily organize and create lists of what is useful from social media. Instead of wasting time, at least you can educate yourself through social media.
• Communication and learning media – With social media, you can interact with others and exchange information through instant distance communication. You can even learn from people living all over the world about useful knowledge and creativity.
• Available for free – The most advantageous thing about social media is its availability. You are free to use all the features of social media in full without having to pay a penny. It is you who benefits from the availability of various kinds of information. From entertainment to trading you can access 24 hours non-stop.

Cons of Social Media

• Effect on productivity – If you are not smart in shielding yourself from social media, then you will become a victim of laziness. Even too much time on social media results in poor grades in a student’s learning outcomes. It is often found that employees waste their time surfing on social media, which affects their productivity. It is for this reason that many offices/companies block social media sites from their internet network completely.
• Sources of contention – There are many groups and pages on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram that are created to publish false information to be misused. Individuals often bring up new perspectives in posts to harass or attack with hate speech about religion, personality, nationality, ethnicity, etc. It is even sometimes used to mislead people and increase hatred through discriminatory activities which are often racist things that are not accepted by society globally.
• Spread of spam – With a large user base in content-sharing systems on social media, making sites like this an easy targets for viruses. Although many social media are trying to prevent malware and virus infections. However, when a user’s account is attacked by a virus or malware, it will automatically post links and status updates in an attempt to deceive other users. If you click on any of these spam links, your account may be compromised. Try to be careful to click on mysterious links on social media carelessly to avoid this kind of thing.
• Addictive – Why is social media so addictive? While social media can seem fun and relaxing, it has a significant effect on your brain. Every time you log into your favorite app, the dopamine signal in your brain increases. This neurotransmitter is associated with pleasure. Because of its effect on the brain, social media is addictive both physically and psychologically. According to a new study by Harvard University, self-disclosure on social networking sites has the same effect when the human brain receives or consumes addictive substances.

Conclusion

Social media plays a very important role in today’s life, social media is a web-based online tool that allows people to discover new information, share ideas, and interact with new people and organizations. It has changed the way people live human life today, it has made communication much easier. However, if it is accessed excessively, it will only have a bad effect on the user.

So a brief review of the meaning of social media and its history, types, functions, benefits, advantages, and disadvantages. Share the article on your social media to make it more useful and useful. If you have any questions or comments regarding the reviews above, please write them in the comments column below. Thank you !!!