Negative effects of social media.
In my mind, time is always a good excuse to blame the invention of social media, especially gaming, at least in Chinese society. From I was in junior school, the crisis over social media never stop. Parents and teachers complaint that too much time and energy was spent on gaming and the teenagers become violent and can not focus on study. I remember one extremity example is that one teenager stays in net bar for 7 days without eating anything and only play Warcraft and the result is that he died suddenly because of heart attack. Many news nowadays are also related to the negative effects towards the development of social media. In my mind, many of these news are aimed at teenagers who usually can not allocate their time in a reasonable way. Seldom a new blames adults who play too many games.

However, why people, no matter teenagers or adults, are still willing to spend more and more time on Facebook or Warcraft? From my point of view, I think one of good explanations could be that they can release pressure from the real world. In Sims or Warcraft, the player could be someone else and easier to gain the feeling of achievement in the virtual worlds. Besides, a good game can be treated as an enjoyable movie. They are good at story telling and enable to provide the players veritable sound and the real feeling of the scenes. Nevertheless, I think it’s hard to justify whether these social media provides enough value according to the time spent. Because it’s an individual evaluation behavior and the standard to define value could be various.

Another negative effect of social media is that it decreases physically active lives. I absolute agree with this argument. The virtual communication changes the way we usually chat or talk and reduces the frequency we contact friends in the real world. When we sit in front of computer for hours, like what I’m doing now, most of my body parts are staying in quiescence, only the brain and fingers are active.

To sum up, many of the negative effects I talked about above are due to the lack of self-mastery . In other word, these effects may be vanish if people can manage their time and energy in a more suitable way. But other negative effects, like the problems on language development and unpatience attitude because of the gaming culture, are difficult to alter and need long time to adjustment.