Narcissism: The Influence Of Social Media On Youth

As the usage of social media is increasing rapidly among youths today, it is important that we need to learn and study about the impact of Social Networking Sites (SNS) and social media toward mental health among them. There are several studies have found social media can influence people with decreased subjective wellbeing, and self-esteem and the increased of psychological distress. Besides, there are also numerous studies identify the use of social media will lead to many negative outcomes such as the increasing of anxiety, depression, loneliness, compulsive behavior and narcissism. Thus, it showed that the use of social media has linked to many negative outcomes. It will definitely pose a threat to the youth if found out that the population

The origin of the term of “narcissism” is in the Greek myth of Narcissus, which is a man refused to all lovers and was cursed by the gods to fall in love with his own reflection. Person who showing some elements of the criteria which is grandiose, superficial, and attention-seeking can be considered as experiencing narcissistic behavior without meeting all of the requirement for a personality disorder. A study found that there is 1.2% of females and 0.7% of males meet the criteria of narcissistic personality disorder and the percentage is consider high for a personality disorder. There are several studies shown that the teenagers and middle school students have higher self-esteem and inspiration in career than members of their age group in the past few years. These result called “expressive individualism” that it actually encourages persons to be more emphasize their own emotions and expression instead of a general social structure. Social media is a contributing factor that caused narcissism. Narcissistic behavior and social media use are strongly correlated as the narcissism was the highest predictor of social media activity out of all the factors that studied. Besides, another study showed that undergraduate participants have higher levels of narcissism was more active on social media. Social media is a platform for narcissists to “show” themselves and create their grandiose

Because of this tool, it makes our communication even easier. Youths thought social media is doing its job that allow them to communicate with each other easier at anywhere, anytime and social media make each other connect together and but actually the one who is more explores on social networking sites are lonelier than the one who explore lesser in social networking site. Loneliness is when people possess a need to belong and if the needs are missing, their emotion will get affected and makes them experience negative emotional feeling. Loneliness point of students is high when the social network usage is high. Furthermore, having a lot of friends in Facebook, the virtual world, does not decrease their loneliness in reality. The research showed that people who spend more time on Facebook are lonelier. Therefore, even though there are around 1.79 billion Facebook users in the world, but it also never decrease the loneliness feeling in