Do You Often Use Social Media? How Much you Trust the Virtual World? Here Are the Positive and Negative Impact of Using Social Media

          Days without checking social media is the most impossible thing in this digital age. Whether it's because we don't have a job or are curious about what's on our social media. As reported by the article djkn.kemenkeu.go.id, Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "A group of internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0 and enable the creation and exchange of user-generated content". We can easily access social media just by clicking login using our username and enjoy it only with a WIFI data signal without paying. Did you know how many hours of social media do you use in a day? Of course we don't feel it, sometimes we never know how long we use social media every day. That's one of the things that makes us lose track of time because we're too focused and engrossed in looking at social media, so it's impossible if we don't check it every day.

          Based on a report entitled Digital 2021: The late Insights core The state of Digital" by British media company "We are Social" in collaboration with Hootsuite. This report was published on February 11, 2021, which contains the pattern of social media usage in various countries. In Indonesia, as many as 61.8% of the total population in January 2021, which means that Indonesian people who are active on social media reach 170 million out of 274.9 million people. This figure is an increase of 10 million compared to last year. In January 2021, there were 202.6 million Internet users in Indonesia, of whom use smartphones to access the Internet. According to reports, WhatsApp users spend around 30.8 hours per month, Facebook and Instagram 17 hours per month, TikTok 13.8 hours per month and Twitter 8.1 hours per month.

          Social media has many positive benefits, such as as a place to socialize at home and abroad, open a business, business promotion, update the latest celebrity news and others. There are so many benefits of social media for our lives but behind it all there is another side that we never know. All our activities on the Internet will be recorded about ourselves such as what we like, what we admire, what we folowing and so on. Have you ever wondered why the homepage on You Tube, Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok, Facebook and so on will appear the same content after we like and follow these social media accounts? That is one of the tricks for social media companies in marketing their products.

          The virtual world created on social media is full of lies. For example, do you know what goes on behind photos or words that someone has updated? The daily activities of someone who always flaunts their happiness, but the reality is the opposite, haters who always leave negative comments and the emergence of hoax news that keeps popping up. This can make a person depressed so that he will do things that will harm him.

          On social media we have to know whether it is real or a hoax. The characteristics of hoaxes are untrusted sources, news titles that do not match the content, website addresses that are not credible and there is no information about the author. It is important for us to upload our own activities to social media because in a world created on social media, just 1 click to take a screenshot can be very dangerous. We should be aware of the real world that spends time with family, relatives and friends rather than just standing alone who only cares about the virtual world. Therefore, we as fellow human beings who understand the digital world must be smart in terms of sorting out social media.

So how? Are you going to continue to linger on social media every day? Or even lazy to use social media? It all depends on ourselves in sorting out social media. So be wise in social media!

Reference Source: 

https://youtu.be/Ms5L_lkl9I8  

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