Research Paper On Social Media Addiction

Social Media – A Modern Addiction
Social media are now popularized all around the world. With the development of technology, social media and social networking is gradually affecting our life styles and interpersonal relationships in many aspects, consciously or unconsciously. However, besides consuming so much time on the social networks, something else important is being taken away. As is noticed, an increasing number of people is somehow addicted to the social networking, spending hours in front of screens without doing anything meaningful to the daily life. Thus a serious issue occurred— Is social networking really significant or is it gradually becoming a modern addiction?
In writer’s perspective, being addicted to the social networking,
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E.g. insomnia, irritability, procrastination and anxiety. “Individuals who engage in social media discussion fear that interaction with people will bring sense of self-consciousness, judgement, evaluation and inferiority. Often it leads to feelings of inadequacy, embarrassment and depression. In the US, Social Anxiety Disorder is the third largest psychological disorder, after alcoholism and depression at 13-14 % of the population. As an emerging trend in a technologically depended society, social media anxiety also includes the symptoms appear in social anxiety disorder.” (Anxiety.Org (Ed.). Is your online addiction making you anxious? Retrieved September 04, 2016, from https://www.anxiety.org/social-media-causes-anxiety). Besides, being addicted to social networks also takes too much time and caused insomnia, which is quite common among young people. When it comes to procrastination, study found that “easy social media interaction is becoming a placeholder to fulfill the social interaction needs that we necessitate as humans. Social media sites, as far as human brains are concerned, are actually fulfilling basic human needs,” which explains the phenomenon that people continuously immerse in social networking and delay or even totally forget about other important things to
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“Business Insider reports that social networking is the most popular use of the Internet - surpassing email - and smartphones and other mobile devices seem to be the driving force behind this trend since 60 percent of the traffic is from a mobile source. The Global Web Index poll shows that 28 percent of the time spent online is on social networks. With these type of numbers, some of the time spent on social media occurs at work.”(C.R.Claywell (2014) Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Networking retrieved from http://socialnetworking.lovetoknow.com/Advantages_and_Disadvantages_of_Social_Networking) Using social networking without control while worktime contribute to the loss of productivity. What’s worse, people may lose more in the reality from the emotional angle. A common phenomenon occurs on family dining or parties. Taking selfies and upload them into the social networking seems becoming the major thing on a party. Communicating with people face to face is gradually substituted by commenting in the virtual world. Thumb-ups in facebook or Instagram may bring satisfactory to some extent. However, it is absurd intending to gain virtual satisfactory while ignoring people next to