&&. The Good and the Bad: How Social Media Affected Me as a Gen Z Individual
Have you seen a tossed coin that bears both sides with heads or tails? Or have you seen the sky in either daylight or nightglow for the entire hour? Nothing in these ideas truly exists because a tossed coin should consist of a head and a tail from side to side, and the sky must embrace between the sunrays of morning and moonbeams of night. So much like social media, it is a medicine for the youth and at the same time could be a poison to them. Thus, it possesses both positive and negative impacts on the lives of Gen Z individuals. As a Zoomer (as what they call for those who belong to Generation Z), social media acts as an open portal for wide communication and to keep in touch with friends, mentors, and coworkers we might not see. This technology engages us to be interactive, light-free, and empathetic towards other users. Getting regular updates online with photos and videos via Facebook provides a convenience that texting, and phone calls cannot provide. Online chats are also low-pressure, with tools like Instagram Stories providing brief bursts of information without requiring a significant time commitment. Because social media is wealthy in information, it turns us into curious, adaptive, and innovative individuals in modern society. However, the life of having social media is not all bout rainbows and unicorns; most of the time, it could be a hurricane that might destroy our lives into shreds.
In recent studies, social media is a significant factor that causes stress, anxiety, and depression among teenagers. As an overwhelmed Zoomer, social media can be a source of addiction such as chatting, computer games, binge-watching, or even cybersex and pornography. These could be a bad impact on our health since media-compulsion can distract us in many ways. It could disrupt our sleep hours, expose us to bullying, rumor spreading, false views of other people's lives, and peer pressure. At some point, social media will affect the way we see our self-worth. It turns us to be extra-conscious in our self. By this, we became careful on portraying and displaying our virtual self just to protect our image and reputation. And as a result, we have lost our authenticity as a youth and lost our genuine selves. As Gen Z, we are influenced by the 21st century and connected via digital gadgets and social media. But we need to use these platforms in moderation for personal development and self-improvement. There is a hidden power that social networks could give us, and that is the quest we need to jump over. After all, social media may affect us both to a negative and positive degree but let us try to convert it into a ray of total sunshine rather than a complete storm of self-destruction.
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