The effects of social media on a college student

The effects of Social Media on a college student

By: Jonah Wirrick

As discussed in my last article, social media is an extremely prevalent concept in today’s world. With more than 1 billion users of Instagram as of 2019 per Statista.com, it is no doubt that social media has begun to take over our world. While social media can open the way for some great opportunities, such as meeting people from around the world, expanding our worldviews, and staying in contact with friends and family no matter where they are, there are also places where social media can be a real burden on the lives of people, especially college students.

Image by Pixelkult from Pixabay

News Gathering

Social media often provides us with a quick and easy alternative form of newsgathering. Just a few years ago, people would have to watch the various news channels on TV to learn about what was going on in our world. That required them to have to find which one of the many different news channels they trusted. Before that, the news was shared primarily through the radio and even farther back, people had to read the newspaper just to find out what happened the previous day. Today, however, an individual can simply open the Twitter app on their phone and flip to the trending tab. There they can see everything that has happened in the past few hours and how the news has progressed all in real-time.

This can be dangerous, however. Not all of these people reporting on the biggest news of the day can be trusted. Many of the sources most prevalent in today’s media are biased towards one side. Due to wanting to get the news out as fast as possible so that they are the first people to be seen, sources can often report on unproven facts that they then need to go back and fix later on. Another issue is one that actually just happened. With President Trumps’ recent COVID-19 infection, Deadline wrote an article and drafted a tweet in the event the VP Mike Pence would announce his infection. When he tested negative, however, the tweet was accidentally sent out anyway. This lowered some of the trust that they had built up over their many years of news reporting.

Is social media a distraction?

While fact-checking news stories on social media is a relatively easy thing to do, the amount of time that an average college student spends on social media is hard to fix. As said in an article by Educause.edu discussing the daily life of an online student, college students tend to spend around 1-2 hours a day on social media. And that number continues to grow higher and higher each day. While that may not seem like a lot of time, considering that an individual should sleep for a recommended eight hours daily, that leaves sixteen hours left in the day. If two of those hours are spent on social media, that only leaves fourteen hours every day for our lives. That is only a little over half of a day. While fourteen hours may seem like a long time, that is where college students must fit things such as working, studying, completing assignments, going to the gym, going to class, hanging out with friends and family, and taking time to relax for ourselves. Social media tends to become a major distraction in our lives. For many people, however, it has started to become more of a chore than something designed to waste time.

Image by MarieXMartin from Pixabay

Social Media’s Importance

Ever since social media has grown in popularity, many articles have been written and studies have been done surrounding the difference between ones “Online Self” vs ones “Offline Self”. It has become obvious that people have begun to care more about their online presence than their physical ones. It makes sense with some people making social media such a prevalent part of their job. However, even the people who do not use social media as a career path have started caring more about the online presence. This is becoming increasingly more common among teenagers and college students. The feeling, or need, to make their online selves more prevalent is creating a massive disconnect in who they are on social media, and who they are in real life. This is the scariest issue caused by social media.

Social Media in moderation

Social Media can be a great tool in our lives but can be a major detriment if overused. That is why learning to use social media in moderation is incredibly helpful in helping us to enjoy the world outside of social media. However, this is not an easy thing to do, especially for someone who uses social media often. It takes a strong dedication to not pull out your phone every time you are bored and do not have anything to do. Social media was designed as a time-waster. It was designed to keep your attention and to keep you on the app so that the creators can make money. It is difficult to focus on other things than social media, however, coming from someone that has deleted most social media apps off of my phone, I find my time has freed up a considerable amount and I feel like I am getting more out of my life than I was before.

While social media can bring some amazing opportunities to the table, it can also completely change an individual’s life and focus for the worse. These are some of the many things that should cross a student’s mind before they decide whether to use social media or not.

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