Social Complications: The Positive Consequences Of Social Media

We like it, we share it, we debate it, emoji it, ignore it, Tweet, retweet, follow it and Snopes it. Social media, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snap Chat, Twitter. We put it all out there for all to see, all to use, all to access, but is it good, is it bad or somewhere in between? IMHO, (in my humble opinion), social media has been one of the biggest social changes in recent years.
Social media from the functionalist perspective started out as a simple, straight forward idea. A method or methods for people to connect with others that are in your social circle, stay or get connected with family and friends and meet people with similar interests. These are intended positive consequences, the manifest functions, we can attribute to social

While there are many positive consequences, there are negative consequences. To my thinking, as social media sites were being developed, the most apparent of the manifest dysfunctions would have been the loss of privacy or invasion of privacy, your information is out there for all who want to see, at least until privacy controls came into being. The latent dysfunctions keep growing as social media grows. Unintended negative consequences can include the reduction of face to face interactions (Austin, 2013) and voice to voice interactions, using the phone to actually talk to another person. There is a false sense of connection, less meaningful relationships fostered in the real world versus the casual relationships formed through social media(Jung). Cyberbullying is a whole new phenomenon that I consider to be fully attributed to the rise of social media sites. Other dysfunctions include identity theft, oversharing personal information and an overload of false or fake news spread to the masses. Lastly, I ‘d like to mention the relationships that are broken or ruined by misunderstanding posts to media sites, during the last election, for example, the users of certain sites dissolved relationships over differences of opinion and the posting of political opinions and the defending of those opinions, some “conversations” were quite mean and hurtful in

We have symbols that are actual symbols, they are called emojis. Thumbs up, clapping hands, winks, pokes, smiley faces, frowny faces and face in between the two, the symbols are almost limitless. Sometimes something may not seem to be a symbol to one but is to another. A person posts a picture of themselves leaning on a really nice, expensive car, that then can become a symbol of success or hard work. It could also be a symbol of how another person is failing to meet that particular