Online social media have gained
astounding worldwide growth and popularity which has led to attracting attention
from variety of researchers globally. Although with time all generations have
come to embrace the changes social network has brought about, teenagers and
young adults are the most fanatic users of these sites. According to various
research studies in the field of online social networks, it has been revealed
that these sites are impacting the lives of the youth greatly. When using these
sites such as Twitter, Facebook or MySpace, there are both positive and negative
effects on the youth.
While on one hand social network sites seems to bring people together and
connected on the other hand it creates social isolation. As the youth tend to
spend many hours on these sites, they rarely have face-to-face interaction.
According various studies, scientists’ evaluation determined that social
isolation can lead to a host of emotional, psychological, physical and mental
problems which include anxiety, depression and somatic complaints among many
others.
Other negative effects of social networking various people suggested included
encouraging poor spelling and grammar, exposing underage to online predators,
allowing spread of misinformation that is perceived as fact, decreasing
productivity as those who are supposed to be working spend time in the sites to
chat, provide a perfect platform for cyber bullying and providing details that
increase risks of identity theft.
For their users the various social applications create updates to provide them
best features. This thing led to the great competition between social
application. For instance, if snapchat has introduced the feature to create the
stories for their users, Instagram, whatsapp and facebook has also introduce the
same after snapchat. There are many more other things that create the social
stream just to get more users and to be on top.