The Dilemma on Our Social Media

The ‘social media’ term has been popularly spread in the whole world in every country through the barrier of either culture or language. Not even the popularity of the term, but the habit of using social media as the primary need has completely changed the world. The impact that social media has given to humans is beyond what is expected. The number of engagements for only two decades has beaten any invention of technology, for instance, the car and motorcycles.

Everyone has their own social media account, and they spend the day just looking at their phone screen. The screen time of social media usage among teenagers should be our main concern. How come the future generation might be, if they just spend their youth by scrolling the Twitter timeline, watching the random youtube content, or liking the photos on Instagram. As a result, most of them don't have a good social life, they are scared to interact with others in real life. They become an anxious generation, more vulnerable.

Social media is threatening their youth's life, considering their beauty by the people's judgments, carried away from reality. They cannot distinguish between the good and bad commentary in their post and pursue more likes from their picture. From this one phenomenon, we have seen the big impact of social media on teenagers’ lives.

Moreover, social media has influenced human behaviour, not just in teenagers but most of us. While waking up from sleep, the first thing that we grab in our hands is the phone. Checking any email received last night or replying to messages from colleagues. Without us being aware the social media era has changed most people’s behaviour, they serve what we want to see, something we would be interested in, and give more and more content just to keep us always accessing their platform. 

By reading our internet history and analyzing by using algorithm system they made, and then use it for commercial interest. What is the product that the platform gives? are we access it for granted? nonetheless, the product is our attention. They have a lot of our data to sell, so they have the determination of anyone who wants advertising on their platform to get more income.

The hoax or fake news is enormously spread on each social media platform, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Instagram. We altering the natural evolution from the era of full information to the era of disinformation. Because the hoax is six-time faster to spread than the truth. The fact why it happened is because that fake news is more interesting for people, it hooked the people to be more engaged. So the platform has more chance to place the advertisement.

These are the impact of social media from a Cyberpsychology perspective;

Undeniably, social media has influenced human behaviour and jeopardized human psychology day after day, month after month, year after year, even decade after decade. if it is constantly used by everyone, we probably lost control of ourselves. The algorithm has been created to predict our internet usage behaviour and we almost don’t have authority over what we see. 

One example that has appeared to the social surfaces life is the FOMO (fear of missing out). The social psychology phenomenon is when someone is feeling afraid of missing something new in the fast-spread news era. They feel anxious unfortunately while the notifications appear on the screen, pop out the messages from their crush, friend or someone liking their photos on Instagram. Yet it’s very impactful for psychological health that could trigger loneliness, depression, sensation seeking and subjective well-being.

Secondly, psychological need satisfaction which refers to the extent to which an individual feels that a range of fundamental psychological such as autonomy, competence and relatedness are being satisfied on a day-to-day basis (Deci & Ryan 1985). Regarding current social media issues, what is the actual psychological need has been satisfied. 

Those fake popularity, temporal satisfying feelings of gaining more followers are just a mirage in the desert. And this has a correlation to public self-consciousness, it’s a theory that was proposed by Fenigstein et 1975 as an integral aspect of general self-consciousness. This term refers to the extent to which is aware of themselves as an object of social media attention in a social context.