Faizel Patel, Radio Islam News – 14-03-2017
A study has found that young adults who spend more time on social media may end up feeling more isolated in their daily lives.
About 1,787 adults aged 19 to 32 in 2014 were surveyed about their use of the 11 most popular social media platforms at the time: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google Plus, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest, Vine and LinkedIn.
Researchers focused on how often users of these services experienced what’s known as social isolation – when a person lacks a sense of belonging, connections with others and fulfilling personal relationships.
Director of the Centre for Research on Media, Technology and Health at the University of Pittsburgh and Lead study author Dr Brian Primack says compared with people who spend no more than a half hour on social media each day, people who devoted at least two hours daily to these platforms were roughly twice as likely to report feelings of social isolation.
“These results might be a bit of a cautionary tale. That’s because social isolation is associated with worse health outcomes, including the potential for people to have worse symptoms of certain diseases and worse survival odds.”
However researchers note in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine that the study doesn’t prove social media causes isolation, and it’s possible that people who already felt less connected to other people in real life spent more time on services like Facebook or Twitter.
But Primack says it may also be that people who use social media a lot tend to feel like everyone else is strongly connected to each other, because everyone tends to put on their best face for social media.
“Then, in comparison, they might feel that they themselves are more socially isolated.”
The study also found that Roughly 26% of participants said they spent more than two hours a day on social media, and about 23% said they visited these platforms at least 58 times a week.
Previous research looking at social media and wellbeing has had mixed results, notes Holly Shakya, a public health researcher at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, who wasn’t involved in the study.
“Another drawback of the current study is that it doesn’t look at how close people are in real life with their social media friends. There’s some evidence that social media use among people who have close relationships in real life can help make those human connections stronger.”
Primack says Rather than get rid of social media, the findings suggest that users should be conscious of how much time they spend with virtual friends.
– Reuters
0 Comments