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Does Social Networking Services Have More Negative than Positive Impacts

Jinhan Chen (Judy)

Wells International School Bangkok, Thailand

Does Social Networking Sites Do Greater Harm Than Good?

Social networking services (SNS) are not a new phenomenon, and it is absolutely indispensable for the people of this generation. The social networking site MySpace ranks sixth in overall web traffic, with over 47 million unique US visitors each month (QuantCast, 2007b). SNS, as we all know, provide a platform for us to improve interpersonal connections, exchange knowledge, share experiences, and so on. Although, SNS’ main goal was to bring people closer together and develops a more humane society and yet, it begins to be some how self-destructive and going against its original intentions.

Passed studies insinuate that SNS like Facebook, in reality, contributes to more social isolations. (Downran, Sohrabi Haghighat & Mohseni, 2008) Researchers have also established that Internet addiction as an actual clinical disorder and other health issues. Other than such psychological harm; it also led to diminishing privacy through the modern society. Thus, a research question is then conducted, “Does Social networking services lead to greater negative than positive impacts?”

Although, SNS’ primary intention was to connect people over the existence of internet, but, in a deeper sense, the usage of social media creates social isolation. “The more time students spend on social sites, the less time they spend socializing in person. Because of the lack of body signals and other nonverbal cues, like tone and inflection, social networking sites are not an adequate replacement for face-to-face communication.” (Dunn, 2011) When adolescents spend a great deal of time interacting different people online, their face-to-face communication skills are weaken. Due to the fact of inadequate communication in person, people tend to not communicate anymore, in which led to social isolation.

Social networking sites have played a significantly important role in making people become more isolated. "Social networking sites should allow us to embellish our social lives, but what we find is very different. The tail is wagging the dog. These are not tools that enhance, they are tools that displace." (Aric, 2009) there are researches that insinuate the number of hours people spend interacting face-to-face has lessen dramatically since 1987, as the use of electronic media has increased. Therefore, Social networks led to such negative expansion and influences among society does greater harm than good.

People’s health could be harmed due to the existence of social networking sites. Past research developed by the Western Reserve School of Medicine shows a high correlation between hyper-networking (more than three hours on social networks per day) and unhealthy behaviors. According to the research, Hyper-networking was associated with depression, substance abuse, poor sleep patterns, suicide and poor academic performance. (Frank, 2010) depression, substance stance abuse, and poor sleep pattern are considered psychological concerns, and it gets more severe as time gone by (Kessler, R. C. and Walters, E. 1998). Not only mental health problems SNS has led to, also with the use of SNS’ teen encounters physical health problems as well.

SNS nowadays, causes internet addition. Victims of internet addition have encountered a great deal of physical effects. “Internet overuse can lead to sedentary lifestyles, weight gain and a decline in physical fitness. Other symptoms can include carpal tunnel syndrome, dry eyes, migraine headaches, a decline in personal hygiene and back aches.” (Cocke, 2010) Although the existence of SNS brought convenience to our community, but what’s more important is that it also brought physical harm to the people in the society. As of the knowledge of the general public, of course we would value health than convenience.

The growing of social networking sites brings up the concern of trust and social privacy. For face to face, trust is a critical determinant of sharing information and developing new relationships (Fukuyama, 1995, Lewis and Weigert, 1985). Trust and privacy are as important for online for social interactions. Privacy among social networking sites are often times undefined and not highly concerned (Dwyer, 2007). Billions of people would update and reveal personal information on these social networking sites, Facebook is undermined by three principal factors: “users disclose too much, Facebook does not take adequate steps to protect user privacy, and third parties are actively seeking out end-user information using Facebook.”(Jones 2005)

Netizens have absolutely no idea who is viewing his or her personal profiles due to the availability of Social networks.

When social networking users feel that their personal data are safe online, whereas they are actually just a fallacy. And in fact, Social networking sites record all interactions, and retain them for potential use in social data mining. Offline, most social transactions leave behind no trace. This lack of a record is a passive enabler of social privacy (Lessig, 1998). In other cases, there are those called identity theft, they are one of the main problems in the society today, and as the improvements of technology there are expansion of identity thefts as shown by past research. “A total of 806,000 Australians aged 15 years and over were victims of at least one incident of personal fraud in or identity theft  in 2008” (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2008). Often time those information are sold to the some swindlers or even worse. While billion of people, their privacy is under concern, and of course it lead to distrust among the community.

As a result of this entire analysis SNS seems to defeat its fundamental purposes and delivers more negative influences to the society. Firstly, People tend to loose the ability to contact and communicate with others face-to-face, and lead to social isolations. Secondly, under some severe cases, victims of hyper-networking suffer from depression, anxiety, and other clinical disorders. Victims of less severe cases tend to endure weaken eyesight, migraines, back aches, and a decline in personal hygiene. Lastly, the diminishing of privacy and trust led to distrust between people and the society and workspace. Even though, social networking sites brought convenience and allow people to create a positive self-image, but is it really more important than people who are suffering from clinical disorders and diminishing privacy due to the existence of Social networking sites. Therefore, SNS overall, has greater negative than positive influences to the society.

References

Acquisti, A. and R. Gross. (2006) “Imagined Communities: Awareness, Information Sharing and Privacy on The Facebook.” Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, Cambridge, UK, 2006.

Dunn, J. (2011, July 11). . Retrieved from

Aric, S. (2009, February 19). Bbc news. Retrieved from

Downran, B., Sohrabi Haghighat, M., & Mohseni, M. (2008). Does the internet make people socially isolated? a social network approach. Retrieved from 5[1].1 

Frank, S. (2010, November 09). American public health association. Retrieved from

Kessler, R. C. and Walters, E. E. (1998), Epidemiology of DSM-III-R major depression and minor depression among adolescents and young adults in the national comorbidity survey. Depress. Anxiety, 7: 3–14. doi: 10.1002/(SICI)1520-6394(1998)7:13.0.CO;2-F

Cocke, A. (2010). . Internet Addiction, Retrieved from .

Fukuyama, F. (1995) Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Lewis, J. D. and A. Weigert (1985) “Trust as a Social Reality,” Social Forces (63) 4, pp. 967-985.

Dwyer, C. (2007) “Digital Relationships in the 'MySpace' Generation: Results From a Qualitative Study.” Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), Hawaii, 2007.

Jones, Harvey and Soltren, José Hiram. Facebook: Threats to Privacy. (accessed on September 18, 2012) . p.1

Lessig, L. (1998) “The Architecture of Privacy, , (accessed on September 18, 2012).

Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2008). CRIME: Personal fraud, Nearly $1 billion dollars lost to PersonalFraud in Australia. Retrieved from

Appendix

Place supporting and bulky groups of information in the appendixes. A typical student paper should not have an appendix, but theses and dissertations usually do. If you have multiple groups of information, create multiple appendixes. Label each appendix with a capital letter—e.g., Appendix A, Appendix B, Appendix C—and of course you should refer to them in the text (e.g., “The full survey is available in Appendix B”).

Footnotes

1 Each footnote number must correspond to the same number in the body of the paper. Some professional journals ask authors to avoid using footnotes and in an undergraduate paper they are almost never necessary. Group all footnotes in the paper on this page.

2 As of 2009, I do not recommend using the footnote and endnote features in Word if you want to keep your footnotes in APA format.

Table 1

Correlations Among and Descriptive Statistics For Key Study Variables

| | | | | | | |Dist. Intol. |

| |M (SD) |Sex |Age |Income |Educ. |Relig. | |

|Sex |1.53 (.50) | |.07 |-.09 |.02 | .14 | .06 |

|Age |31.88 (10.29) | | | .08 | .19* | .20* | .01 |

|Income |2.60 (1.57) | | | |.04 |-.14 |-.09 |

|Education |3.44 (1.06) | | | | | -.29* |-.06 |

|Relig. |1.21 (.30) | | | | | | -.19* |

|Dist. Intol. |3.75 (1.19) | | | | | | |

Notes. N’s range from 107 to 109 due to occasional missing data. For sex, 0 = male, 1 = female. BHF = babies hoped for. Dist. Intol. = distress intolerance. Relig. = religiosity.

* p < .05.

[pic]

Figure 1. This simple path model, adapted from results in a Journal of Consumer Behaviour paper, is an example of a figure.

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Alcohol Consumption

Frugality

Amount that Gets Spent on Alcohol

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