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Social media, its positive and negative implications on society.

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SCHOOL OF DISTANCE EDUCATION
UNIVERSITI SAINS MALAYSIA

Social media, its positive and negative

implications on society

By
Adi Farhud
SOCIAL MEDIA, ITS POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE ANTHROPOLOGY & SOCIOLOGY
IMPLICATIONS ON SOCIETY JKA 101 2016/2017

Abstract

Social media continues to play an important role in defining how many of us communicate and
interact today. Sites such as Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram are some
of the well-known social networking sites whose primary objective is to facilitate such diverse
forms of communication and interaction. Also, with the advent of social media, we are now able
to create and share expressive and communicative contents at a pace the world has never seen
before. Such sites have undoubtedly eased mobilisation and resources, thus revolutionising how
we express, interact and communicate with one another for good. This manuscript aims to assess
its both positive and negative implications on society.

Keywords: social media, social network, cyberbullying, facebook, twitter, depression, suicide

Introduction

Social network sites (SNSs) and social media are not the same with each carrying a slightly
different meaning. Social network is a digital space which allows users to register, create personal
accounts or profiles, decide and select who should one make friends with, and communicate with
online individuals whom one has selected to be friends with (Agosto & Abbas, 2011). Social
media, on the other hand, are more about digital content sharing. YouTube is a good case in point.
The main purpose of YouTube is content sharing. YouTube users can upload videos in which other
users can also comment on the said video. The same is true of Facebook, a social media site that
enables its users to share pictures and videos where other users are also allowed to comment on
what other users have shared in it. It is agreeable also to say that both of their commitments, social
media, and social network, may occasionally overlap. In other words, social media are primed for
unidirectional information broadcasting. Social networks, on the other hand, are for bidirectional
information sharing and interaction (Agosto & Abbas, 2011).

A Brief History of Social Media

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IMPLICATIONS ON SOCIETY JKA 101 2016/2017

When writing about the history of social media, one must first acknowledge the very platform
which what made social media possible to start with. It all began when Tim Berners-Lee invented
the World Wide Web in 1991. The invention has established the underlying foundation of
networked communication. Web 2.0 came into the picture shortly after the turn of the millennium.
Web 2.0 transformed everything one could have possibly imagined about online interaction at that
time. Networked communication couldn’t have been more interactive with the advent of Web 2.0.
In short, Web 2.0 gave new impetus to social media platforms (Dijck, 2013).

The first ever known social network can be traced back to the year 1997, it was then known as
SixDegrees.com (boyd, 2008). SixDegrees.com has all these known features of what makes a
social networking website a social networking website. The site allowed its users to create profiles,
befriend other users, browse their friends’ profile and send messages. Users are also allowed to
view the page of other registered users in SixDegrees.com.

There were nevertheless a few other social networking sites at that time such as AIM, ICQ buddy
list, and Classmates.com, but SixDegrees.com was the first if not the only social networking site
with the hallmarks of social media features (boyd, 2008). SixDegrees.com, however, couldn’t
seem to sustain its business, closed down in 2000. Notwithstanding, SixDegrees.com has
undoubtedly altered the intrinsic nature of digital communication.

After the demise of SixDegrees.com, a number of similar networking sites began to emerge, such
as AsianAvenue, BlackPlanet, and MiGente, Livejournal, not forgetting a Korean made social
networking site called Cyworld and a Swedish made community site called LunarStorm. All of
which incorporated what one may call it the key attributes of social networking sites, such as
Friend List, Guestbook, and Diary Pages (boyd, 2008). Late 1999 onwards saw the rise of the
colossus of today’s social networking platforms, such as Blogger (1999), Wikipedia (2001),
Myspace (2003), Facebook (2004), Flickr (2004), YouTube (2005) and Twitter (2006).

These and numerous ensuing social networking platforms have not only opened new possibilities
of socialisation and communication but also revolutionised the way how humans interact between
one another (boyd, 2008). There were, in fact, scores of other social networking platforms to list
here, to list each and every one of them here would be undoable. For this reason, I will focus
primarily on the much known social networking sites, such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and
Twitter. Nevertheless, below, is an image depicting a set of launch dates of major social
networking sites.

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(boyd, Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship, 2008)

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Positive Implications of Social Media

1) Enhancing communication and social connection

Social media sites allow its users to stay connected with their families and friends. With social
media, social interactions can now be accomplished in real time, without being bound by
geographical and time constraints. Our conventional means of social interaction has always been
constrained by exactly these two, geography and time. Social media made it possible for us to
exchange pictures, writings, voice recordings or even videos with our families and friends,
whenever, wherever. It takes a user less than five minutes to register and create a profile page on
Facebook before one can start communicating with one's families and friends, regardless of where
they are and what time zones they seem to be in. If stills and words are too dull and boring, one
may then opt for a webcam application, a video camera that live-streams moving pixels in real
time to another connected user (Skype). Social media, if used correctly, they may strengthen
relationships, improve communication and assist socialisation. With the assistance of social media,
saying hello to our families and friends couldn’t have been more animated and interactive.

2) Political and civic participations

Political participation refers to activities whose aim is to exert influence on, indirectly or directly
in the selection of political officials, or in the introduction of the public policy. Political
participation, in other words, is meant solely to influence government action (Zukin, Keeter,
Andolina, Jenkins, & Delli Carpini, 2006). Civic participation, on the other hand, refers to
activities whose objective is to raise awareness among the general public. Of what sort of
awareness one wishes to raise however can be about almost anything, from raising public
awareness on climate change issues to asking the public to donate and volunteer to build homeless
shelters. Such campaigns are usually being accomplished through non-governmental or non-
electoral means (Zhang, Johnson, Seltzer, & Bichard, 2009). Both political and civic participations
are of paramount importance in building a healthy community. In the case of civic participation,
Facebook, YouTube and recently Twitter are a good case in point, owing to the fact that users can
make use of these sites to circulate awareness videos rather efficiently. In most cases, awareness
campaigns that are circulated in a form of a video, were in fact way more informative if not
effective, as opposed to campaigns that are endorsed through a digital poster.

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3) Augmenting learning outcomes

According to a recent research, seventy-five percent of millennials, preadolescents, and

adolescents, in particular, own a smartphone (Hinduja & Patchin, 2007). Thus, it is not an
exaggeration to say that most of our secondary, or even primary students in Malaysia own a
smartphone. 22% of them log on to social media sites more than 10 times a day. 54% of them use
a smartphone for texting, another 24% of them for instant messaging. The next question one must
ask is, how does social media improve learning experience among students? Social media
platforms, such as Facebook, allow students to congregate outside of their classrooms. What do
they often discuss online? They confer about assignments, homework, group projects to topics that
are educational. A digital space is also a place for these students to collaborate and exchange ideas
about educational topics. With social media, the intellectual adventure doesn’t only transpire in
classrooms, but also in digital spaces. It can, therefore, be said that social media, can facilitate
intellectual transactions among learners outside of the classroom. With the help of social media,
pedagogues can organise virtual meetings with the students. Academic quizzes, educational
projects, assignments to any sort of academic updates can now be delivered in real time. In addition
to that, students can respond, enquire and communicate directly with the teacher. There are indeed
reports indicating that some schools have even opted to use blogs as their teaching tools (O'Keeffe
& Clarke-Pearson, 2011).

“School in The Cloud” is yet another example of how the internet and social media can help to
improve global education. Pioneered by an educational researcher, also a professor, a winner of
the 2013 TED prize award, Dr. Sugata Mitra innovated a new educational system, called SOLE
(Self-Organised Learning Environment). According to Dr. Sugata Mitra, within SOLE, students
are expected to learn collaboratively with the assistance of the internet. Educators will also be
present. The Big Question, as for how it has been termed, will then be issued by these educators
to participating students. Students are then expected to seek an answer to the said Big Question.
Also, SOLE is a result of countless of Dr. Sugata Mitra’s “Hole in The Wall” experiments. These
experiments tried to substantiate the fact that children can teach themselves without supervision
nor formal teaching. Mitra, along with his colleagues dug a hole the size of a standard PC computer
in a wall in an urban slum located in New Delhi. An internet-connected PC computer will then be
placed inside the hole. A hidden camera was also installed, hidden at the corner of the wall. After
a few months, Dr. Mitra saw the footages recorded by the hidden cameras and found out that most
of the kids there were mostly intrigued by it, they played around with the computer. They managed
to learn how to use it and learned how to get connected to the internet. What they did next was
amazing, they taught each other how to use it. The “Hole in The Wall” experiment goes to show
that kids, in actual fact can teach themselves through self-instruction and peer-shared knowledge,
provided that the environment can stimulate curiosity (Mitra, 2013).

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4) Improving self-care and health outcomes

Hello Health is one of the health care providers that employs web-based social media as their core
medium of communication. Hello Health takes social media seriously. At Hello Health, patients
can instant message or video chat with the doctors online through its website. A basic enrollment
fee at Hello Health is as low as $35 a month. With this package, say you have developed a fever,
all you need to do is to send the doctor an instant message. In a message, you may describe your
symptoms and later ask for advice. If you think you need to see the doctor for a consultation, Hello
Health guarantees that you will get to see one within twenty-four hours. $150 if one needs the
doctor to come to their house. Hello Health believes that a conventional model of one-to-one
communication needs to be re-evaluated if not improved. With the advent of social media such as
Tweeter, Facebook, Wikis and Blogs, such communication can now be conducted from one to
many through a blog post or a tweet (Hawn, 2009).

Dr. Eytan, at Group Health Cooperative in Seattle, Washington, makes use of blogging to share
lessons with his medical colleagues. Blogging, he said, “helped me a lot especially at educating
my colleagues, I wrote what I learned the day before in a blog so that other people will also get to
learn what I have learned.” Since then, Dr. Eytan posted lots of additional lessons on his personal
blog, one of which was a post discussing one medical case that he thought was the result of
diagnostic error. Social media, according to him can be very beneficial not only to doctors but also
to patients. Unlike before, patients will now have access to all medical information imaginable.
This, in turn, will give the patients a heads-up they need before going for a consultation (Hawn,
2009). In Malaysia, there is such an app called Doctor2U. With Doctor2U, users can request for a
doctor, whenever, wherever, and the doctor will arrive within sixty minutes. All of this can be
accomplished via an app. Doctor2U offers six main services for patients of different age groups,
from elderlies to children. According to Doctor2U, there are top four reasons why did their users
choose to use the app, i) parents who are bedridden, ii) unexpected falls, iii) late-night coughs and
fever, iv) distance.

There are also numerous support groups in social media platforms whose aim is to assist patients
of a similar fate. In these groups, patients will exchange all sorts of posts, from topics that talk
about treatments that work to writings that motivate. There are also support groups dedicated to
families who have perhaps recently lost a loved one or survivors who maybe have been affected
by all kinds of diseases. They gather and share information that could perhaps be of further
assistance not only to survivors and their families but also to doctors. It must also be noted that
members of such groups may consist of ordinary individuals of different backgrounds to real-life
medical practitioners. There are also pages in social media whose primary objective is to fight
pseudo science. Administered by real-life doctors, such pages will write posts denying all sorts of
alternative medicines. Pseudoscience Watch is a good case in point. The page was created
collectively by Malaysian medical practitioners. Their posts are often bilingual catered to all levels
of individuals, low-income families in particular. Pseudoscience Watch’s recent effort at fighting
quack physicians and cures was a campaign to raise an awareness of the importance of vaccination
on infants and children.

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IMPLICATIONS ON SOCIETY JKA 101 2016/2017

Negative Implications of Social Media

1) Cyberbullying

Cyberbullying can be defined as online activities that are intended to humiliate and threaten
individuals of lower power. Examples of cyberbullying include sending unwanted, derogatory, or
threatening text messages or comments, rumours, embarrassing and offensive pictures or videos
disseminated by email or shared by users of social networking sites (Görzig & Frumkin, 2013).
Cyberbullying is not that much different than traditional forms of bullying. The effects of
cyberbullying are just as destructive as the ramifications of traditional forms of bullying. Both can
cause internalising disorders, externalising disorders, social difficulties, physical health problems
and suicide ideation (Görzig & Frumkin, 2013). If anything social media sites had only
exacerbated these effects. It must also be noted that online harassment has more negative long-
term effects on mental health as opposed to traditional offline harassment. This is due to the fact
that once the bully posted something offensive online, be they a picture or a video about its victim,
the victim may have the power to deny such allegations, but he or she doesn’t have the complete
authority to reverse or remove what has been posted. The victim will then be cyber bullied for as
long as until the bully has finally decided to remove the said post them.

Unlike traditional forms of bullying, rumours or derogatory posts that have been posted online are
instantly networked, meaning everybody with a decent internet connection, regardless of whether
or not the audience knows the bully nor the victim, will get to read what has been posted by the
cyberbully. Such a situation above, however, occurs if the society knows who the cyberbully is,
imagine what if the cyberbully chose to remain anonymous? It stands to reason that psychological
harm inflicted by cyberbullying can be much worse than traditional bullying. With the advent of
modern smartphone technologies, cyberbullying has since moved to a whole new level.
Smartphone these days are fully equipped with all kinds of cutting-edge technologies, such as
high-definition cameras that can live stream a video, pre-installed Instant Messaging applications,
not to mention Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Blogs and Google Plus. What it means is that
derogatory text messages, rumours, embarrassing images, and videos can now be instantly
uploaded and distributed. Remember when 3GP videos were a thing among Malaysians? Malays
in particular. Hundreds if not thousands of 3GP porn videos were being shared and circulated
across regions. These videos were said to have been recorded by a smartphone. Some of them were
recorded privately, unknowingly without the consent of individuals in the videos. Some were
betrayed, some of them nevertheless did it for fun. With regard to gender, it is of paramount
importance to note that girls tend to be cyberbullied more than boys, owing to the fact that girls
place more importance on social contacts and friendships through ICT (Ortega-Ruiz, Elipe, Mora-
Merchan, & Vega, 2015).

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2) Facebook depression

Researchers have since agreed that Facebook can cause mild depressive symptoms. This
phenomenon is called “Facebook depression.” Facebook depression develops when users spend a
great amount of time on Facebook. These frequent active members, in turn, will begin to exhibit
classic symptoms of depression (O'Keeffe & Clarke-Pearson, 2011). Adolescents of this era are
known to place more importance on the need to belong and the need to seek for approval, or to be
accepted for what they are. This is, in fact, their fundamental drive and motivation to use Facebook.
Facebook, like any other social networking sites, is perhaps a perfect virtual forum for them to
fulfill their belonging needs and to present their alternate selves (Seidman, 2012). And when such
expected needs are not fulfilled, they tend to get depressed. Moreover, according to a recent
research, Facebook users are more likely to suffer from depression when: i) they have more online
friends, ii) they have a habit of spending most of their free time reading social updates, most of
which tend to be of bragging nature posted by one's wide pool of friends. In other words, the more
one reveals oneself online, the greater is the tendency for negative social evaluation (Blease, 2015).

Another example of such scenarios is when a lonely individual logs onto Facebook, they will then
tend to compare themselves with other members of Facebook, whose posts on their timelines may
perhaps seem way more lively and triumphant as opposed to theirs. Such situations will result in
lonely individuals feeling more isolated. It is only reasonable to say that Facebook, unintentionally
allows social comparisons to transpire. It must also be noted that mildly depressed users are likely
to log on to Facebook than those who are not. They are often online on Facebook because they
wanted to seek social support to invalidate their depression. And this is where they get very
unlucky, If anything, Facebook use only intensifies depressive feelings among such users (Blease,
2015). Another cause of depression among such members is envy. We may call this phenomenon
as “Facebook envy.” Such envy may be triggered when a mild depressive user encounters a peer
of his/hers, whom he/she perceives to be of similar social status but faring way better in life. They
couldn’t seem to comprehend the thought that their online peers are doing much better in life
compared to them. They then get depressed over such an idea. It is rather poignant to think of what
a Facebook timeline could do to such a person. Notwithstanding the fact that there are 7 billion
people on the planet Earth, most if not all of them were connected through Facebook, doesn’t,
however, diminish the fact that many of us are still feeling lonely.

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3) Suicide risk

According to World Health Organization (WHO) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC), more
than 30,000 suicide cases have been reported every year in the Unites States alone, and nearly 1
million occur worldwide. The debate whether the internet and social media are a direct cause of
suicide is ongoing and is rather difficult for researchers to provide a rationale for such an argument.
Nevertheless, there are several ways on how social media can elicit pro-suicide behavior, one of
which are cyberbullying and online harassment. Cyberbullicide is when such suicides cases are
linked to cyberbullying (Luxton, June, & Fairall, 2012). According to a recent survey, victims of
cyberbullying are likely to attempt suicide than those who were not (Hinduja & Patchin, 2010).
Cyberbullying is but a serious problem, it can intensify victims’ feelings of isolation, instability,
and hopelessness, even worse if when cyberbullying victims have pre-existing emotional,
psychological, environmental stressors (Luxton, June, & Fairall, 2012).

The first ever documented suicide case believed to have been triggered by the internet was reported
in Japan in 2000. The rates have since increased since then. Not forgetting social media platforms
such as chat rooms and forums. There is a possibility that they may initiate such discussions whose
aim is to influence these vulnerable individuals’ decisions, also members of the forums to commit
suicide. Besides social media, the internet is also partly responsible for causes of pro-suicide
behavior. This is due to the fact that how-to descriptions of suicide can easily be obtained by
vulnerable users on the internet. Online forums and blogs have often been used as a platform to
disseminate such information. In Japan, 2008, there was once a suicide outbreak where 208 people
killed themselves using the gas-related method. The how-to descriptions of such method were
believed to have been shared and discussed through message boards on the internet.

A video-sharing website such as YouTube has also played a large part in increasing the risk of
pro-suicide behavior. A simple quick search on YouTube will tell you that how obtainable and
easy it is to watch how-to videos on suicide. In 2009, a research has been conducted to check the
rate of accessibility and availability of such videos on YouTube. The keywords “self-injury,” and
“self-harm,” were used. The result was rather shocking. It showed that the top two videos with
such contents had more than 2 million views. Not to mention that more than half of these videos
had no viewer restrictions (Luxton, June, & Fairall, 2012). It is rather baffling that YouTube allows
such contents to be uploaded to start with. The prospect of these groups of pro-suicide communities
circulating such videos in other social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Blogs is
both daunting and distressing.

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Conclusion

Every new and old creation that humans have so far invented has its advantages and disadvantages.
The Internet and social media are one of the many aspects of technology. We cannot deny the fact
that most if not all of our creations have its two-faced implications. Those were known risks that
scientists and inventors have to take to improve the quality of our life. The same is true of social
media platforms. They were created to ease our means of communication. With or without modern
technologies, humans have been suffering from such psychological disorders long before the
invention of social media. A journal issued by the Journal of Adolescent Health in 2013 posited
the view indicating that there is no such association between social networking sites use and
depression (Jelenchick, Eickhoff, & Moreno, 2013). Besides social networking sites, studies were
also conducted on other communication applications, such as e-mail and chat. One must also take
into consideration that these findings, however, were based solely on a single if not limited sample
size, participated only by older adolescents in one university. The said journal alone therefore
cannot approve or disprove the interrelation between SNS use and depression.

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