Social media exist. This is a fact. Another fact is that they influence our life a lot. It is not bad or good. It is just the reality of the modern world. We share information about private life thanks to it, we look after celebrities and read the news. If you don’t know what Facebook or Instagram is, you live in the previous century. It doesn’t mean that you must be online all the time or make a post every day, but you should be aware of it without any doubt. There can be a lot of discussions about social media negative effects and positive impact on students’ grades, but they definitely have an impact. Let’s review negative effects because when you know them, it is much easier to fix them.
- Stolen time. Social media steal time. This word is correct. When you open Facebook, you can spend hours there reading something, checking updates, following stories. When you spend more time on social media, you spend less time studying. The main problem is that you lose the feeling of time and think that you spend one or two hours, but you spend all evening actually and lose energy because you get a lot of information you must structure and remember. With every lost evening, time for studying shrinks, that leads to lower quality of knowledge and bad grades in the future.
- Lost concentration. A huge amount of online chats and chatbots catch your attention every minute. Even if you were strong enough to start writing your essay or prepare your speech, every minute blinking message interrupts your thoughts, and you should start from the very beginning. If you are double strong and turned off Skype, Telegram and Viber and a few hours you will be worrying about if you missed something. Anxiety is one of the common problems during studying and turning off the social world only makes it stronger. Because of all this, the quality of work falls, and grade falls as a result.
- Reduced self-esteem. Nobody likes to show their problems. You see only smiling faces, traveling, vacations, happy moments, and celebrations. You see only qualified opinions and reposts of famous people. All these things make a fictional world around people, and sometimes you forget that this perfect life is hardly possible. However, this massive attack on the brain is doing its job and killing self-esteem. It can be a reason for depression and will have an unexpected influence on studying in general and grades, particularly.
- Reduced value of education. If someone is always online, posting pictures and answering in a second, it means that this person is not busy at work or don’t spend time studying. At the same time, this person shows a perfect life with going out all the time. How is it possible? Does it mean that studying is unnecessary to be successful? All these questions are in the air. Mind answers that it doesn’t work like this, but on the other hand, if they can pay someone to write their papers and essays and spend free time having fun, why you can not? Unfortunately, it is the wrong direction. Only hard work can be a way to become a professional, educated, independent person.
We discussed the main negative aspects of social media, but this list can be longer. The only advice to avoid such problems is not to lose connection with reality, spend real (not online) time with friends and family and remember that what you see on your laptop is just a picture but not real life. Inspect your page on facebook and make sure that you probably do the same. Another time you will see someone’s perfect lifestyle, remember it and spend your resources on really important things like studying.
