Can social media affect wellbeing or health? – Technology

Social media has revolutionized the way humans interact, providing them with unprecedented opportunities to meet their social needs.

An explosion of research has examined whether social media has an impact on wellbeing. First and second generation studies examining this topic have yielded inconsistent results.

An emerging series of third-generation experiments has begun to reveal small but significant negative effects of general social media use on wellbeing.
The results of these experiments mask the complexities that characterize the relationship between social media and well-being.

Whether well-being improves or decreases depends on how and why people use it, as well as who uses it.

People use social media for a variety of reasons (for example, to manage impressions, share emotions), which affect how it affects their own well-being and that of other people.

In a relatively short period of time, social media has transformed the way humans interact, leading many to wonder what implications, if any, this interactive revolution has had for people’s emotional lives. .

Over the past 15 years, an explosion of research has explored this topic, sparking countless studies and heated debates. Although early research yielded inconclusive results, several experiments revealed small negative effects of using social media on well-being.

However, these findings mask a number of deeper complexities. The accumulation of evidence indicates that social media can improve or decrease well-being depending on how people use them. Future research is needed to model these complexities using more robust methods to advance knowledge in this field.

The puzzle: does social media affect wellbeing?

Humanity had flirted with the idea of ​​building a machine that could rapidly spread ideas around the world for more than 2,000 years before all the pieces needed to do so were finally put together for Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-1400s, as he worked. . on the coasts. of the river Ill in Strasbourg. He relied heavily on Gutenberg’s invention of a technique for pressing movable type (think a beetle game made of metal) against paper and ink to create a printed page (https://www.britannica.com/biography/ Johannes – Gutenberg).

Before Gutenberg’s invention, it took up to 2 months to produce a single copy of a book. Now printers can produce 8,000 copies at one time.

The effect the press had on society for the next 100 years was transformative. Suddenly, people could read other people’s ideas, convey new concepts, and respond to what others thought. The press would help scientists and innovators disseminate their findings, acting as one of the main driving forces behind the Enlightenment.

However, the press also led to negative results. The democratization of ideas has made all ideas proliferate, including those that have fueled hatred and fear. For example, the Protestant Reformation, a particularly violent period in European history, was fueled by the ease with which Martin Luther was able to spread beliefs that were considered heretical at the time (https://www.history.com/news/printing – stampa Renaissance). Looking at it now from the point of view of the 21st century, the invention of the printing press provides an appropriate analogy for the world we live in.

In the early 2000s, social media proliferated and once again revolutionized the way the world communicates. About 4 billion people use Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, three of the most popular social media platforms, to share and consume information (https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks- ranked by number of users /).

Given the transformative impact this technology has had on society, it is not surprising that people around the world have taken an interest in understanding how these media affect their emotional lives.

Over the past 15 years, an explosion of research has addressed this problem. However, the results of this work are far from simple. While some studies indicate that social media undermines well-being, other studies suggest otherwise or that social media has no implications for this aspect of people’s lives. These seemingly contradictory series of findings sparked heated debate among scientists, leaving many confused.

With this broader context in mind, our goals in this review are to summarize what we have learned about the relationship between social media and wellness to highlight future research directions that are essential to furthering this work.

To anticipate our conclusion, our analysis suggests that, like print, there is nothing inherently “good” or “bad” about social media.

Whether they help or harm well-being depends on how and why people use them, along with who uses them (Figure 1).

Sharing of emotions

Decades of research indicate that when we experience strong positive and negative emotions, we are intensely motivated to share them. According to Rime’s Social Exchange Theory of Emotions, doing so helps us to pursue two goals: satisfying our socio-emotional needs, which involves obtaining the support of others to help us validate our feelings, normalize our experiences and savor states. positive. and our cognitive needs which involve receiving advice from others to help us make sense of our experiences.

Social media offers people unprecedented opportunities to pursue these goals by allowing us to instantly connect with people close (i.e., binding social capital) and more distant (i.e., bridging social capital). In fact, a wide range of studies indicate that social media provides feedback that satisfies socio-emotional needs (ie “emotional support”) and cognitive (ie “information support”) of people and improves their levels of perceived and received social support.

In some cases, the support benefits people get from social media outweigh what they get in the real world. For example, a couple of studies found that people with depression, who tend to receive less support than their non-depressed counterparts offline, received more support on social media.

As with social comparison research, there are caveats associated with these findings. For example, the more you interact with members of your network and the faster you get responses from them, the greater your perception of support. Furthermore, for reasons that are not yet clear, men, Euro-Americans and younger students tend to benefit less from social media support than women, Asians and older students.

However, existing research supports the idea that social media reinforces people’s real and perceived support, variables that are critically important to well-being.

But just as social media offers us new opportunities to reach out and provide support, it also allows us to share our feelings in ways that hurt others. In this sense, a vast literature shows that social networks provide people with platforms for cyberbullying and trolling, antisocial behaviors of moderate prevalence (range: 10-40% [85,86]) that negatively impact the well-being of others.

Although individual differences play a role in determining who engages in these acts [85,90], some features of social networks promote them. For example, social media removes cues that trigger empathic responses during face-to-face interactions, which limit aggressive behavior. They also make it easier for people to share their emotions when they peak and are more motivated to do so.

Social networks also play a role in spreading the moral indignation which contributes to the dehumanization of others and can reduce collective action and deepen social divisions.

Emerging evidence suggests that social media is particularly adept at spreading outrage.

For example, an experience sampling study found that people were more likely to engage and respond intensely to statements of moral outrage online (possibly including social media) than offline.

Together, these findings demonstrate that social media provides us with a new platform to satisfy our desire to share emotions with others. In some cases, these revelations are linked to positive wellness outcomes, offering new opportunities for people to gain social support. However, they can also promote negative outcomes by providing a platform for cyberbullying, trolling and the spread of hate.