Social Media article

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  • #428
    Sam
    Keymaster

    Post your thoughts on The Atlantic’s “The Dark Psychology of Social Networks“here.

    #431
    Helen
    Participant

    It’s interesting to see the effect of social media it has over people. It’s both positive and negative. Social media is a highly individual and flexible experience which amplifies the influence of others in your life. If you surround yourself with people who are level-headed, courteous, and who are generally good people, odds are social media will have a positive effect on your life. If you surround yourself with those who talk before they think or who choose to be brutal without cause, who push others to misery or who refuse to be consoled when they themselves are hurting, odds are social media will have a very negative impact on you. Despite this, it has become heavily involved into politics because of the information that social media allows to spread. Whether it’s the truth or a lie, the information continues to travel from screen to screen. Social media, whether we like it or not, will remain prominent and be a powerful factor in our lives.

    #432
    Anthony Liang
    Participant

    I found this article very insightful into bringing light to an issue on social media that was a blind eye to everyonr until the recent years when it blew up due to the 2016 election. Social media was a force of good initially but a few updates to make our lives easier turned it to a catalyst of arguement and debate. With updates such as the addition of a like and share/retweet button, it became a source of false news that many took advantage of to promote their own goals. Since social media is everywhere, news became less true to word and more about catching your attention. Their integrity didn’t matter as much as all they care about was the clicks. It became more about clickbait than truth and this clickbait is often taken as the truth which causes all sorts of chaos in society.

    Social media changed all of us and caused us to rely more on it to fuel our egotism with the like counter and causes us to act more differently than what we would have acted face to face due to the symbolism of the screen.

    #433
    Amy Ho
    Participant

    “The Dark Psychology of Social Networks” is a very interesting piece that uses repetition in the first few pages to establish the changes that society goes through over tim. There’s a section in the reading that talked about a person expressing their anger through social media. This reminded me of the megaphone reading where their similarity is the loudness. A post that contains a lot of anger is not literally loud but it catches the attention of audience and possibly overpower their thoughts, almost like a loud voice.

    This concept leads to something I learned in psychology, called groupthink. It is when someone say something which is agreed upon by others. They will then boost that ideology rather than questioning it. This form of agreement is dangerous because the idea could have a negative effect where no one decides to take a step back to assess it which create more problems.

    It is also a factor that causes “Fake news.” If a post on social media gets a lot of view, commented, share, and like people all over the world will see this information based on it popularity rather than reliability. I think the three suggested solutions at the end is useful and should be enacted in our society to inform people about what is true and continue the purpose of connecting people rather than using it to target each other.

    #434
    Sara Sanchez
    Participant

    My thoughts towards the article are complex. There is a specific part of the article I disagree with: In which the author claims people don’t consider the past to validate their public claims. I agree with that wholeheartedly, but understand that can be because of who I surround myself with in person as well as what I choose to associate with on my platforms. I understand social media itself is complicated & understand this article’s intention is to exemplify that. Social media has a huge effect on ones mental being, & though I cannot entirely/personally relate, I understand how it can make one’s health deteriorate based off likes & popularity online. When I read that as a “positive aspect” towards the end of the article, it made me think of how Instagram is considering removing likes being viewable to others.

    #435
    Syed Shataj Hosain
    Participant

    The article, “ The Dark Psychology of Social Network ” talks about how social media has both positive and negative effects on people. Social media has so many options that can affect peoples life. Like, comment, share, react to these features can affect on one’s mental health. People from all over the world can see things, anyone post on social media. Politics has become also a part of it. We can express our thoughts through that and that sometimes might lead to something negative by another. However, we should use these social sites to connect each other with something positive more than targeting people on something negative.

    #436
    Crystal Yang
    Participant

    The article talks about how social media was initially made for positive connection and communication, but in today’s world, it has definitely changed. I can definitely see how when arguments such as political arguments over the internet are made, it tends to be a public performance for everyone to watch and see. By hiding behind a screen, it’s easy for strangers to display their opinions, whether they’d be offensive or not just to try to win an argument. People often tend to ignore how they portray themself online because they know that it isn’t in person and the person they are arguing with will probably never meet them. It’s kind of sad that this is true in present-day social media and I, myself see arguments online between people who do not realize what kind of impression they are giving off.

    #437
    Mohammed Mia
    Participant

    “The Dark Psychology of Social Network” brings forth the optimism there is to social media and all of it’s aspects. It can either help build one side or destroy one side. Like how it was spoken about in the 2016 election. But even besides the election, social media is filled with millions of people all around the world, sharing their own opinion on any topic that is trending or important at the moment. For example: I’ve seen this post on saving the coral reef because it provides 1/3 of our oxygen and the teens that are going out there and putting in new reefs in the sea need our help to share the post on our stories and to other friends and spread the word because it is a major issue. However, social media also has it’s negatives. Just like resident Trump tweeting all day long, going back and forth on who has the bigger button. It’s a shame to see a man who is supposed to be our resident act like a 10 year old who’s laying online.

    #438

    My thoughts on the social media article is that social has become something else to what it  was meant to be. One example of this is that a research done by NYU showed that emotional words in a tweet on the Twitter platform increased its popularity by 20 percent.  Twitter was made for people to upload information to a timeline with a limit of 140 words and other users can view it to see what is it they are doing. Another research with twitter  was done and was found that posts made on twitter that were disagreeing with something received double the popularity. People could use this to their advantage to receive more followers and popularity. Facebook was a platform made to connect people from across the world and make it more open. Many saw this as an opportunity for the world to share their political views and that it was good for democracy. Facebook had a total different effect as political discussions were more aggressive and less civil than those we have in real life. Til this day we still have many arguments through social media that go viral and get super popular. According to the article, social media was meant to be used for something else but society turned it into something of their own.

    #439
    Xiaoqin Jiang
    Participant

    I think this article is very organized and realistic because it mentions that people use social media to convey their views today, which often influence others (general public) judgment because when the general public read their comments, the public cannot look at the issue in common psychology. This made me think of some entertainment news, some stars committed suicide because they could not stand cyber violence. Especially for them as public figures, they must accept the praise and criticism of netizens. If a star does something wrong and is exposed, anonymous netizens will use aggressive language on their social platforms to abuse them and even involve their families. This behavior will also cause other netizens to follow suit. So, as social media continued to evolve, it violated the original idea which is “to make the world more open and connected.” I pretty agree with the reduces the reach of unverified accounts according to this article.

    #440
    Nika Medilishi
    Participant

    <span style=”font-weight: 400;”>It was interesting to read this article. I believe social media can be very harmful to society. Even though many people agree that it can be harmful, they don’t necessarily realize why that is and this article explains that in full depth. Social media has started out as a positive influence and even today many people use it to do good, although, there are millions of people who hide behind their phones and spread negativity. It is extremely easy and accessible nowadays for people to create fake accounts and say whatever comes to their minds without any repercussions. Social media can be used in a positive way, where people connect and share their stories, however, I agree with the article that it should be more controlled and censored. There should not be this many fake accounts and this much hate should not be tolerated. </span>

    #441
    REAYANUL HAQUE
    Participant

    ” The Dark Psychology of Social Network ” is about how social media affects has on people. Social media was mostly made for something positive like connecting people from around the world for a change in society. But in today’s world, it happens to be different. People use social media more likely to spread positivity. Like in the election of 2016 and many other issues. People on social media don’t care before they say something to anyone because they think they will probably never see each other and that’s why they can easily leave a negative comment. However, we should use social media for spreading positivity and stop targeting people for their negativity.

    #442
    Ahmed Iftiak
    Participant

    The article is very clear about how social media changed the way we connect and react to other people’s thoughts, ideas, and emotions. We react to people’s posts without knowing them or without knowing the reason for their posts. Before the innovation of social media, we connected to people in real life and we did not share anything with the person we just meat. But now, if we disagree with one’s opinion we don’t waste time to get back at them and get into a virtual fight. As the article discussed social media was created to connect people from all over the world but as it improves were made to make things easy, it made it harmfull. like a retweet, like, comment, and share bottoms make things simple but end up creating obsessions in people’s minds of getting more and more like and share on their post, kind of virtual pleasure that we seek whenever we post something. We feel good when some comment good thought on our post and when someone shares our post thinking that it’s important to make us feel important too. the article also talks about the fake account that produces fake news troughing famous people under the bus. Which can be dangers if the news goes viral causing misunderstanding and unreal tensions among people. And it feels safe learning that social media trying to address those issues since they are receiving so much backlash that could be bad for their business.  As history taught us that whenever we discover something for good end ups causing problems when scientists discover that harnessing atomic power is possible we build nuclear boom. And ultimate it up to us how we chose treats these innovations that created for good.

    #443
    Arijit Saha
    Participant

    <span style=”font-weight: 400;”>”The dark psychology of social network” is a powerful article, it reaches out to many audiences. Social media networks started as a simple means of communication as technology got better social media expanded. Everything going on in today’s world are influenced by social media. Just as many other things social media has its ups and downs as well. Nowadays it’s more on the downside. Social media is the easiest way to influence and reach out to people. For example I saw a post recently on Twitter it was about planting trees, celebrities, CEOs, YouTuber, influencers everyone was called out to donate money and plant trees, it was very successful. It was mostly successful because of social media. However a negative impact of social media example is that there are many tragedies of teenagers committing suicide because of being bullied in social media platforms and not being happy with themselves watching others on social media. Now as we know the election was affected by the social media. Overall social media has positive and negative sides, but there should be ways of eliminating the negative sides. This article does a good job in bringing out the difference aspects of social media platforms. </span>

    #444
    Arturo Flores
    Participant

    The article touches upon the idea that our current society is heavily influenced by our social media advances. With every new innovation to things like Instagram or Twitter the actual negative effects grow. It is agreed that social media is bad and the article takes a deeper dive to convince someone that this idea is actually true. My favorite line is “We are easily lured into this new gladiatorial circus”. We as people have become programmed to believe all this stuff and have now a competition to take part in when we hop online. I believe that we always fear about starting a new war but we fail to realize that we are in one its just online. I think that if nothing changes we will become blinded and obsessed with this digital circus and we’ll let the world around us fall to ruin.

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