Phase 1
Phase 2
The main question: what are the behavioral issues and overall impact of social media on society?
Secondary research question: in what way can the society target social media issues?
Primary sub-questions: what advantages and disadvantages characterize social media? In what way does social media influence marketing? What are the primary social groups influenced by social media?
Phase 3
Social media has become one of the vital parts of contemporary world which penetrates the life of every person. It is impossible to imagine a day without social media as one of the main informational and communicational sources. The digital era has made it possible to interact with relatives, friends, business partners, educators, and people working in different spheres of life with the help of social media. Today, it is common to see teenagers exchanging their ideas in the myriad of social networks. Internet as an outlining part of social media made it possible to connect millions of people from the most remote parts of the world. Nevertheless, an overwhelming desire to overuse the benefits of social media has made it necessary to reconsider its role in the contemporary lifestyle. In particular, the topic is alarming in the light of discussing behavioral issues and impact of social media on the surrounding world. It is worth paying attention to social behavior, business issues, and educational transformation along with advantages and disadvantages of social media.
Behavioral Issues
Social media plays a significant role in shaping tendencies in the behavior of people regardless of their age, gender, and occupation. The major categories of social groups include children, teenagers, and families. It became common to have a personal page in such social networks as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (Aljenaibi, 2015). Both children and teenagers can hardly spend their day without talking to their friends or making new ones via one of the aforementioned social networks. Nevertheless, such behavior leads to the development of abusive patterns of communication which transforms from routine life into virtual reality. Privacy issues, sexting, and cyber bullying are the most widespread issues resulted from social media use among youth. As a result, their overwhelming desire to interact via social networks leads to the development of family issues. Often, parents cannot find a common language with their children and feel alienation. In this way, families may lose connection and not understand how to avoid the gap between generations.
Education is another sphere of life which continues to transform under the influence of social media. On the one hand, social media can hardly change the quality of education. On the other hand, it changes the scope of students’ worldview based on their obsession with social media services. It has become common for students to experience lack of concentration and discipline during their learning process. Frequent usage of social networks distracts students from prioritizing their tasks according to their possibilities (He & He, 2015). Furthermore, students may find information irrelevant for their assignments due to the lack of high quality sources, which are present at the library (Aljenaibi, 2015). Finally, a narrow-minded worldview prevents students from looking for reliable sources of information. Instead, they prefer trusting social media rather than wasting time on searching for relevant information or consulting professors.
Business is another sphere of life which continues to change due to social media. The transformation also happens within the behavior of companies. First, the contemporary business makes significant investments in advertising, social networks, and marketing campaigns. It happens for the reason of rising rivalry based on online services of social media. Increased competition has become a widespread phenomenon among companies which penetrates online sources with rising intensity. As a result, social media has an excessive amount of advertisements presented in applications, social networks, websites, and e-mails (Zhu & Chen, 2015). In this way, it has changed the course of business development which must target social networks in order to achieve success. Otherwise, competitors will make it impossible to increase the market share and win loyalty of customers.
Impact
Regardless of the behavioral issues of social media, it is possible to discuss both advantages and disadvantages of social media in the contemporary world by assuming its role in different life areas. Since social media connects people irrespective of their distance, teachers have an opportunity to contact their students as soon as it becomes important (He & He, 2015). Students, in their turn, have easy access to educational sources in order to learn. In addition, there are some educational forums which foster learning different topics by discussing them with peers and professors. Another benefit of social media lies in its outlining influence on politics. People have gained an opportunity to influence the elections and make online petitions against unfair political acts and transformations. In this way, they have a chance to participate in historical development of the country. Finally, social media is a valuable source of job opportunities. The Internet made it possible for people to look for jobs in the comfort of their homes. As a result, social media plays an important role in reducing unemployment.
Nevertheless, there are several disadvantages of social media which should be considered in order to avoid its negative influence. As for the educational sector, social media influences not only grades of students due to cheating and plagiarism but also college admission. Admission officers tend to check students’ profiles, which influences the decision based on information presented by students. In business, social media reduces productivity of employees as a distracting factor. Employees tend to spend more time networking rather than working on their current tasks and projects (Kim, Sin, & He, 2013). In addition, employment depends on employees’ social media profiles. The companies make regular checkups of social networks on the topic of sexism, racism, poor grammar and spelling, references to drugs and alcohol, religious, and sexual content, which may become a background for dismissal.
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