How New Media Affects Peoples' Lives

Name: Institution: Date: How Media Affects Peoples’ lives Technology has revolutionized our lives either directly or indirectly. Since the surge of social media networking sites nearly a decade ago, people’s lives have been transformed in unprecedented ways. With the development of technology, our interconnectivity now spans across the globe and we the world has shrunk. It is still unimaginable what the future holds but the far we have come in technology shows our ingenuity and shows our power to overcome the natural limitations experienced by all the other species on the planet. Today, people can easily get the newest information through new media such as Facebook, Twitter anytime, anywhere, on any digital device, as well as interactive user feedback. The traditional source of news who had been preferred source of information for the public have lost the crown to the new media. The people especially the younger generations have increasingly become dependent on new media as their information source and spend lots of time visiting their social media accounts. According to CITATION Smi18 \l 1033 (Smith and Anderson), ‘some 78% of 18- to 24-year-olds use Snapchat, and a sizeable majority of these users (71%) visit the platform multiple times per day. Similarly, 71% of Americans in this age group now use Instagram and close to half (45%) are Twitter users.’ This shows how social media usage prevalence among teens and young adults despite its adverse effects on them. New media affects social culture and people’s daily life in several fields including health and relationship to others by spreading information rapidly around the world. The new media has an adverse impact on the youth through various studies show it has adverse effects on their health, social relationships and cognitive development. According to a survey conducted by CITATION Roy17 \l 1033 (Royal Society For Public Health), 14-24-year-olds in the UK how social media platforms impacted their health and wellbeing. The survey results found that Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all led to increased feelings of depression, anxiety, poor body image and loneliness. There is a lot of peer pressure on these networking sites and teenagers and young adults do not have the mental capacity to resist the temptation to visit these sites. Online bullying among other things can lower their self-esteem and even cause depression. They spend too much time on their accounts which they are likely to absorb negativity. According to data from a cross-sectional study conducted by CITATION Ada14 \l 1033 (Adachi-Mejia, Edwards and Gilbert-Diamond), 454 adolescents revealed that >60% kept their mobile phones with them when they went to bed and >45% used their phones as an alarm, a reflection of the high prevalence of digital media in the sleep spaces of adolescents. With such amount of time spend online these users are under immense social pressure to ‘measure up’ which affects their mental health and cognitive development thereof. Addiction to social media has affected the sleep cycles of many people increasing sleep latency and adversely affecting their lives. They take their digital devices to their beds and check their social media sites before sleeping which accord...