Is social media really serving the purpose of making people more sociable or is it creating an introverted generation - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages Despite these benefits of social networking, it has also resulted in undesirable effects such as widespread feeling of loneliness, loss of identity, and social alienation from the society. Thus, it is increasingly creating reserved individuals who are so much inclined to their thoughts and feelings with minimal societal interactions.
The anonymity and lack of face-to-face interaction associated with most social sites such as Facebook and Twitter provide an opportunity for dissimulation of feelings and personal traits during communication. People feel freer to express their thoughts, which are not sincere on many occasions, on social media than in real life situations because nobody sees them. This kind of anonymity is a crucial factor that triggers human feeling of freedom from social responsibility, which often leads to negative consequences (Zimbardo 255). Furthermore, social media allows people to create false personalities and identify themselves with individuals different from who they are. As a result, they start detaching themselves from the rest of the community and later, this may cause certain communicational disability, social anxiety, and even asceticism (Zimbardo 225). There is a likelihood that exposure of these individuals who have masked their personalities through social media communication would be a social catastrophe. For example, the case of Facebook privacy breaches that has become a nightmare for its users.
In addition, the fear of losing social media privacy has led to the appearance of cyberbullying, which is a huge problem nowadays. Social media bullies play on people’s dependency on social media images, so they often manipulate people by creating breaches in their social networking profiles’ security. It is also imperative to note that the cyberbullying contributes to the development of introspective tendencies of modern social media generation. Researchers in this area revealed that cyberbullying ...Download file to see next pages Read More