By: Siraj Ahmed Meerwani
Social Media is the most popular and powerful mean of exercising one’s freedom of expression in the modern age. Usage of social media has become the most common activity among the teenagers especially students. Any platform which allows social interaction or provides a mean of communication is considered as a social media platform. Over 800 million people are using Facebook and countless others enjoying services of Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram, Myspace, Skype, YouTube and Google plus etc.
The core objective behind development and introducing social media was to set a proper stage for social re-union with college and school mates plus slight entertainment including social interaction and innovative learning. Through the evolution of such technologies, the users are enjoy connecting to their teachers, classmates and friends at a time to debate over their routine topics, assignments whenever required in order to get an instant feedback. Combined study communities/groups of mutual interest can be created to collaborate on projects topics assigned by the institution just by using the mentioning the topic started by hashtag. “Hashtag is a unique strategy for linking posts or discussions relating to a definite theme of mutual interest. Some hash-tags become so popular that just in a few days they go viral and become a trend among the users.”
Such social interactions boost the creativity and innovations among the students and also a kick-start to the confidence of the youngsters.
Blogging is also another source of information which seems familiar to article writing. Blogs are created and published online. Bloggers usually write in a non-formal way to express their ideas and thoughts. It is very popular among the young generation which include research scholars, journalists, and teachers and mostly by I.T professionals. Blogs are created by posting some useful content such pictures, slide shows, animations and sometimes interactive multimedia content. Blog are websites of descriptive content created by individuals to share mixed content including Video sharing services, informative content, sharing videos photographs and other formats of images.
YouTube is also a video sharing website which provides free services to users who can watch the videos, share, like and comment over the videos which they like or dislike. YouTube is the largest source of information especially for student and scholars as compared to other platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram etc.
There are also some uncountable abuses of social media which cannot be ignored and became one of the main reasons of depression among the parents regarding their children. The youngsters are addicted to use social media whether via smartphone, tablets and computers this is also known as digital addiction.
The excessive usage of social media has become main reason behind the distraction from the studies and school. There are also schools which do not discourage the usage of smartphones during the lectures. Students are not aware of the security concerns of the social media. They share their personal information on internet which in return causes them to be victims of cyber bullying and online harassment.
Although lots of criticism is leveled upon social media to distract the students from their studies as they prioritize usage of social media over their studies and rest. Many of parents consulted psychiatrists to get rid of the problems pertaining to distraction from studies and less sleep due to the addiction of social media.
The usage of social media should be barred in workplace and schools to discourage the excessive usage as they create biggest distractions in society. The smartphone must be switched off during the class lectures, block access to internet and reduce the usage the stuff that distracts them from the in-class lecture. Parents should implement a time limit for usage of internet at home. Online monitoring software can also installed to prevent the children from accessing internal or social media during a particular time limit.
The writer is an I.T Professional with a master’s degree in Computer Science.
Published in The Balochistan Point on August 16, 2017