The Impact of Social Media on Society

We are all learning about using social media, communicating, crafting messages with different purposes and intentions, and deciding if or how to reply. The more we learn, I think, the more we understand that there is expertise here, and it takes time and effort. Not many of us have enough time to become experts. The downsides are there, as in all social settings, though in social media with memory and in many platforms visibility simultaneously to many.  If you get it wrong, and text is not the most elegant or subtle way of communicating, it seems quite difficult to seek forgiveness, say sorry, and try to make things OK again.  Social media is quite good for sharing the news, even if it is risk-averse communication and is more like broadcasting.  However, this can become quite quickly a narrow thing.  And can provide anxiety of the fear of missing out and the fear of not living up to social expectations.  There are other risks in the aggregation of sentiment analysis.  Of all the worries, I think the impact on mental health is most concerning.  And this, put alongside the growing sense that social media is an area for expertise, makes me think, hmmmm, we’ve gone through cycle and perhaps we recognise that social media is best made bland, broadcast, and with platform providers providing a much greater sense of duty of care to its users.

Hi, prof. John, here are some questions, what strategies can individuals use to minimize the negative impacts of social media’s memory and visibility? and how can social media platforms make it easier for users to apologize and correct mistakes?