Social Media: Bridge or Barrier to Education

Let me ask you a few questions to find out if you have fallen prey to social media: When was the last time you uploaded a picture on Facebook, Instagram, or any other site? When was the last time you clicked a real trending picture with all the beauty apps available?
When was the last you were anxious by seeing the low number of likes compared to those of your friends?
If the answer to the above questions is often, then my dear friends, you are caught in social media’s never-ending loophole.
Social media was developed to bring together like-minded individuals – those united by personal and professional interests, create job opportunities, marketing the resources, sharing and learning
information, ideas, and knowledge in various ways across the globe. In this article, you will find that Social Media is Bridge or a Barrier to Education and how it helps in education, its addiction to students

Ill-effects of social media addiction

• The adverse effects of this are both physical and mental. Spending long hours on social networking sites could be adversely affecting your mood. Regular users are more likely to report poor mental health, including symptoms of anxiety and depression. This has only made it easier to peek into only the selected best fancy parts of everyone else’s lives, which is a sure path to stress. 
• Cyberbullying or online attacks comes handy with social media. These cyber bullies can use the anonymity that social networks provide to gain people’s trust and then terrorize other innocents. These attacks leave deep mental scars and even drive people to suicide in some extreme cases.
• The Fear of Missing Out is real and one of the most widespread adverse effects of this. FOMO is a form of anxiety or fear that occurs when a person is scared of missing out on a good experience that someone else is having.
• Apps like beauty plus, Handycam, Snapchat make us believe in the external beauty of an individual. This has made us feel better the filter, better the lifestyle, or happier the person is. However, the reality is far from this.
• The increasing intolerance of people in society is also a big concern.
• The increasing anxiety and depression incidents arise due to spending too much time on this, leading to poor sleep. Quite a few studies have shown that increased use of this harms your sleep quality.

How social media addiction hampers with education

• Students begin to procrastinate their studies, and social media has made them less productive.
• Prioritizing social media overstudies causes a downfall in grades.
• When children are subjected open to social media at a tender age, they may be exposed to the dark web also.
• The decline in ethics of students. 
• Children may consider anonymous people trustworthy over their close family members, which can be dangerous for them.
• Students rely on the accessibility of information on this and the internet to provide answers, which implies a reduced focus on learning and retaining information.
• Students attempting to multi-task, by checking social media sites while studying, show reduced academic performance. These distractions significantly reduce their ability to concentrate on the task.
• Less socializing in person with others.

Benefits of social media

• People follow brands on social media than they follow celebrities, thus Increasing brand awareness. This offers the opportunity to establish your brand as a thought leader—the go-to source for information on topics related to your niche.
• For creating and promoting organic content on social channels.
• Reaching and connecting with large audiences directly.
• On this, students can find informational and relevant websites they want to follow. Depending on their interests, students can find answers to all their questions. 
• Increased Student Collaboration and Participation
• The massive number of e-learning sites available 
• Excellent Video Conferencing abilities

Way out to reduce social media addiction

It is rightly said that excess of anything is wrong. This holds equally true for social media addiction as well. So it might be time to set some boundaries to reduce your social media use. It doesn’t have to be anything too unrealistic to achieve. One should be more mindful of the precious time and be more productive and have more time to relax and spend with their loved
ones.

• Disable (even if only temporarily) your Social Media Apps making it harder to log into your social media apps.
• Set a time limit for checking your social feeds and use only this allocated scrolling time to surf this.
• Pick up a Hobby or try setting some time to do other productive things.
• When you feel the urge to stop using your social media, immediately put the phone down and indulge yourself in other things like helping your mother in the kitchen, playing with your pet, going to the gym, etc.
• One of the most vital strategies to reduce social media addiction is to unfollow Unwanted accounts that don’t add value to you and can ‘suck up’ your news feed, so you don’t see the posts you want to.
• Resist the urge to share everything on your social media because that puts your privacy at risk.
• Take a day off from this every week to give time to yourself and your loved ones around you.