Social Media - The trap that we walk in willingly

Social Media – The trap that we walk in willingly

“Oh! I miss my old school buddies, What may they have become now? Are they still living in the county? I wish I could find them,How can I connect with them again ?…”

This is a typical problem everyone had before the era of Social Media(SM) networks.With rapidly evolving concepts and use of advanced technology, SM has brought the whole world into one cyber cloud, connecting everyone to each other regardless thousands of obstacles. This can be considered as one of the greatest achievements of human history.

But is this greatest achievement failing the entire world?

SM connects people, shares valuable news, keeps people informed, good for marketing purposes and has so many other benefits. How can it fail us?

Through the SM now you know where your old pals live, how they are doing and even you can call or message them at any time. But do you really want to know what they ate last night, how many B’day gifts they got, what are the colours of their new phones… etc. ?
People are posting personal things unnecessarily on SM and our news feeds are filling up with tons of these unwanted irritating posts. Turning this from bad to worse there are always advertisements pop on our newsfeed. This is good for marketing but adds can be a headache when placed on everywhere.Basically, everyone is wasting hours of their lives daily on SM, looking at the things which have no value for them.And no one thinks that they are addicted to it.

If you think that you are not addicted to SM you can simply test it. You can just deactivate all of your SM accounts temporarily and use that time to do something productive such as read a book, do your studies or spend that time with the family. Then you will truly understand how addicted you are to SM. That urge to check the news feed, the thought about the people who may have commented or liked on your posts… Have you ever counted how many times you log into SM daily? It’s time to rethink about how you use SM and for what you use it for.

As we know SM has become a great medium to broadcast news. It’s very effective since millions of people are online at any given time. But there’s also a high risk of false news going viral.This news can be regarding national security, hazards or it may be a really personal information of someone. Even if it’s a false news, it can reach to thousands of people within a few minutes.

And people such as extremists and terrorists have picked SM as an easy and effective medium to broadcast their ideas and beliefs to the world. This has become a serious issue over the past years through the SM sites are desperately trying to control them. In addition, SM has gained more power to the point that it can push the ideas into people’s mind and turn the tides of nations to overthrow governments.If you have paid attention to the Twitter postings of US and North Korean leaders, you will realise that their war of words on SM can lead them to an actual nuclear war.That is the best example to describe how influential SM has become.

The biggest problem with SM users is not having a clear understanding on why SM was introduced and how it should be used. At the beginning of social media era, people logged on to SM with the idea of connecting with people. And that was the main purpose of SM. Everybody enjoyed SM and the number of users increased by millions.Then people saw the potential and started using SM in marketing campaigns. Any marketing campaign has both good and bad effects but basically, SM marketing is very effective and helpful for both marketers and customers. But then people started to gossip in SM and making it worse political campaigns came into play. Nowadays we can see people with ulterior motives, conducting huge SM campaigns, influencing others into their personal agendas.When caught up in the middle of such campaigns, users get confused to figure out which one is true news and which one is false news. Mostly what happens is false news and wrong attitudes getting into the society.

What you can do as a user is to be more careful when using SM. Most important thing is not jumping into conclusions on what suddenly appears on our news feeds. Because that news can be a false one. Best thing is just to search on that before you comment or share that news. Once you shared something it reaches to all your friends no matter if it’s a true news or a false one. So think twice before you share.

And be careful with fake profiles. SM is about connecting with people but there are millions of fake accounts and you may have already connected with them. These fake profiles and pages can imitate celebrities and respected people who got a huge number of fans and followers. If those fans are following a fake account which broadcasts false news regarding the person they love, then it is a big issue. And also these fake friends that you may have added to your account can be a threat to your privacy. We must always be careful when adding unknown people to our account. One of the best solutions for this is searching a bit about mutual friends and other friends of that new person you are going to add. Even if you trust all the friends and using privacy tools to be secured, still it’s a good thing not to share valuable and too personal details on SM.

Social Media gives a lot of benefits but as you can see, it also has a dark side. If you are not using with a proper understanding of how it works you will definitely be lost in Social Media, wasting your time and doing the things others want you to do. It’s time to be more careful and intelligent with SM in future and if not we’ll become tools of it without even knowing.

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