Social Media Prevalence and Consequences of Frequent Use

SOCIAL MEDIA PREVALENCE AND CONSEQUENCES OF FREQUENT USE
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Introduction
Social media has revolutionized the world and especially how information is disseminated. It has also redefined formation of social bonds in the age of computing. Nearly everyone and especially the youth seem to be having at least one social media account. In 2018, it was estimated that the number of social media users worldwide was 3.196 billion, up 13 percent year CITATION Cha19 \l 1033 (Chaffey, 2019). The popularity of this trend is multifactorial but they are centered on advancement in technology, growth of internet infrastructure, R& D in features’ development. The consequences are mainly poor sleeping patterns and poor mental health. The popularity of social media is largely because of technological advancement in every sphere of computing though it has brought unintended consequences to frequent users such as poor physical and mental health and addiction.
One of the key factors that have contributed to growth of social media popularity is technological advancement. The processing power of handheld devices packed with many features such as cameras, audio recorders, etc has greatly contributed to growth of social media industry. This is because the social media content is largely multimedia and these devices provide the means to capture and store information in multimedia formats. Most of this content is taken and or uploaded by handheld devices such as phones. Since the devices have very high processing power and storage capacities, the media can be tweaked and edited with additional apps before posting. The devices have become so good such that no one social media can exhaustively limit a moderate smartphone in operation, rather nearly all smartphones can support as many social media sites apps as the user may want.
Since popularity is attributed to technological advancement, the tech giants behind the social media platforms have fueled frequent utility of their products through introducing innovative products. Many social media platforms are designed with an objective by the tech giant behind it to earn revenue from the users. Thus, they design and add features that make its use addictive. Many people especially college students are addicted to social media and it has many adverse effects. First, the devices people use to access the social media emit blue light which is unhealthy and it has been found to affect sleeping patterns and cause some eye conditions CITATION She18 \l 1033 (Sheppard & Wolffsohn, 2018). As for college students, they have ignored these warnings and they use their devices especially phones and laptops late into the night which affects their sleeping patterns and the body’s ability to rest properly. They also risk eye conditions related to degenerated sight owing to the damaging effects of blue light emitted by these devices. As for access thr...