Our readings covered positive, negative and neutral aspects of social media. Use these to make an argument about social media. Do you think, as a form of CMC, that it is beneficial, harmful or a little bit of both. If it is both, you must clearly explain what the positive and negative effects are. Craft your answer as an essay.

In the 21 century with development of technology computer mediated communication became part of our life. In average there are about 1.5 billion people use facebook actively each month. This paper states that CMC has many negative aspects, such as bulling, depression and privacy. Privacy is one of the most important issues associated with CMC according to Debatin at all. Moreover, according to the Macconnigal CMC can be correlated with depression and stress. Finally, I will discuss effect of the CMC on the public trust and distress.

Several articles were reviewed, first of them was “Facebook and online privacy: attitudes, behaviors, and unintended consequences” by Debatin et al. This article discuss modern issues associated with privacy in online world. Online resources such as Facebook become part of our life and vital ritual in every student life. The second article was “Internet, news, and political trust: the difference between social media and online media outlets”. This article compares the changes that online media, such as blogs and other independent internet resources, brought to public trust. Internet allowed freedom of speech and even more biased opinion for modern readers. The third source is the book “Willpower” by McGonigal. Book shows how media can effect the mood of people and their will power.

In the first article it was found that people usually relay heavily on the default setting of the any online source. It is possible to change security setting to the advance level, however people do not prefer to do. This phenomenon can be explained by third person effect. In addition, it was found that acquiring news from the official informational portal, such as TV news, associated with higher public trust. On the other hand, news that gathered from the social media correlates with lower trust. In the book McGonigal it also states that several research was do with popular media. News usually give information that interesting for the audience. For that reason, news usually about sex, tragedy and different disaster. It was found that all of this news lead to high stress level among audience. As a result, people who daily use CMC to acquire news more prone to the stress. When the same people did not use CMC for a while, they had better mood.

All three writing shows negative effect of the CMC on the mind of modern people. Alienation from the society can lead to the third person effect. It basically means that people do feel more secure that other people in the online sources. As a result hackers can easily access the private information. For that reason no one can guarantee security of private information in online word. In addition, biased opinion from social media can lead public distrust to the government. IT can be result of the bulling, lie and pseudo facts from the other social sources. Different people can you it for their own purposes. For example, many famous people sue with different online sources, because information that media use harms those people. Finally, people become more stressed, when acquire news from different sources. In conclusion, CMC has many negative aspects that daily connected to our lives.