With the increasing popularity of social media, there exists a growing concern for the negative effects of this invention on individual people as well as community. While this is true to some extent, I believe that social networking sites also have good aspects to consider.
On the one hand, it is understandable why this notion receives a significant amount of support. Because of the amount of time people spend scrolling down Facebook and Instagram, they run the risk of suffering from some physical and mental illnesses. This situation manifests itself starkly in the fact that there is a considerably high proportion of young people developing short-sightedness and mental problems when constantly exposed to social media. Also, a resulted sedentary lifestyle may lead to such long-term ailments as diabetes and obesity. In addition, people, especially the youth, tend to indulge themselves in the virtual world and become less involved in face-to-face conversation, which means that they no longer care about anything around them, thus contributing to the crime rates in the community. For the abovementioned reasons, people are becoming extremely worried about the overuse of social media.
However, there are also some benefits that social networking brings to human beings. First, it can be a great place for people to meet new friends and keep in touch with people more easily. In other words, with an access to the Internet, people these days can contact their acquaintances through chat boxes whenever and wherever they are. Another great thing about social media is the use of it to promote tourism, which encourages closer international relationships and integration. This can clearly be seen in a variety of photos and videos posted on Facebook recently that have contributed to the development of the tourism industry in Viet Nam. Therefore, the ubiquity of social media has to some extent brought positive changes to individuals and community.
In conclusion, despite some rationales behind the idea that social media has affected people and society negatively, I believe that it has also done wonders for the development of human beings.