Other Issues in Media and Society

In my final post, I would like to kindly recommend you some of the Media blogs that I have read. Also, it should be mentioned that all of the blogs have quite different issues and it is very interesting to read them.

The first blog is made by Eliska Popova. She is writing about the topic that I have too, so it was amusing for me to read it and look at the issue of downsides of using social networking. If you want to find out more about the "Blue Whale" game of how much teenagers exactly spend on the Internet, welcome to this blog.

The second one is run by Adil Merzlov and dedicated to playing video games and how this hobby can influence people. I recommend you to read it in order to get an understanding of the game world and especially if you consider video games only from the negative side.

In the third blog of Patricie Grablova the topic that I have never thought before is discussed and it is about how athletes and sportsmen can use social sites in the best way and get benefits from it. A pleasant bonus for it will be the fact that all the information is provided from the professional point of view because Patricie used to be a dressage rider for many years.

Adina Zhantykeyeva will tell you all the truth about post-truth politics in the fourth blog. To my mind, it is significant to know how we can be manipulated by politicians and it much more useful to know how we can stop it.

The last blog I want to tell you about is written by Miriam Kluincova and here the topic of journalism ethics is raised. This issue is unusual and the society does not often speak about it, nevertheless, it is important to recognize it more profoundly, because we are influenced by the media with unethical journalists and photographs almost every day.

In addition, thank you for reading my blog and sharing your thoughts about my topic! Hope you have enjoyed it.

My View

It is obvious that nowadays we cannot imagine even a day without using smartphones and gadgets, we cannot imagine our morning without reading the news through news app, day without chatting with friends in messengers and evening without checking Instagram and Facebook.

In the one hand, it can be told that this way of life is quite normal, because we do not live in the Stone Age, we live in the 21^st century, when the technologies are well developed and it would be strange not to use all of these tools, including social media and opportunities that it gives to us.

On the other hand, the social media has gone too far. It is replacing the reality, it is changing our life, slowly turning it into the life of people, who do not care about each other. If you want to be convinced in these words, you just need to go in the street and look at strangers. The majority of them, especially youngsters, will be walking on the street with their eyes in the phone. Not at each other, talking and laughing, not in a newspaper or in a book, not at an ambient place or nature, but in the phone.  A gadget with a range of social sites in it replaces the whole world around us. 

However, this issue has a positive side. During the last one or two years, the society has started to notice that something is going wrong with the social sites and the way people are using it. They understood that it is better to focus on yourself and your own world with emotions and feelings. The social media can be a great addition to this enjoyment of life, but not the main component of it.

Right now groups of activists are creating different kinds of flash mobs and challenges in order to inspire to people not to use their phones all the time and start to pay attention to our wonderful world. It is good that people got the point that social media sites are just webpages with data in it and it will not exist forever. People are trying to teach themselves how to spend without scrolling social media feed and how not to be bored at the same time. Hopefully, everyone will get such an ability and understanding of the current situation.

Such an approach to the social media seems to be perfect for me. I cannot controvert my usage of social sites, but the thing is that I try to control the time that I spend there and my attitude to it. The telephone can capture all the beautiful moments that you are experiencing via making photographs, videos and notes; and the social sites can help you to share these moments with other people and receive some feedback from them. But the telephone with Instagram is not able to replace the emotions and memorial.

The social media is a good tool to use for communicating and sharing your personal experience with the others, but the one should not forget to create this experience without technological devices. 

For Futher Research

In this post, I would like to share with you some links where you can find out more information about the negative impact of the social sites on us. Ironically, all the information is shared through different social networks.

The first website will show you a lot of interesting statistics about the most popular social sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube. For instance, you can find here the exact number of likes that users put on Facebook per for 24 hours or how many seconds an average Internet user spends on Youtube every day. All the numbers are not straightly connected with the negative impact, but these numbers give a better understanding of how much time and energy we spend on the social media. I strongly recommend you to read it and to grasp it.

The second one is focused on seven negative effects of social media. These effects are the main and the most striking one. I am sure that this page is essential for being more aware of this issue. Moreover, it is perfect to start your research with this website, because all the information is given in a very simple and understandable way.

The last website is a short story about all of us, students, and how social media influence on our educational skills and results. The negative outcomes overweigh the positive ones. This article explains it in details and gives some real life examples. It is important to know these facts in order to get rid of the bad impact in future. 

What the Experts Say 2

Another web page that I have found cunning is about how using social media affects our brain. The issue is rarely discussed, nevertheless, it is quite useful to know this information.

One of the most astonishing fact that I have read in this article is that social sites can change our mood and habits. The reason for this is that we are becoming addictive from likes, shares, other forms of countenance; and when we do not receive enough positive reaction to our post on the social sites, our mood can be bad, and we can be angry and even depressed. Researchers are claiming that the internet gives us more of a dopamine kick than having some tasty food, than hugging your parents, kissing your love, than achieving high results.

"Even contact between two people, the most intimate thing in the world, gets superseded, because people get more of a fix from friends or even strangers 'liking' them, than the person sitting next to them in the bed with a similar device. Even a cuddle now, is not the same as, 'Oh, 50 people just liked my photo'."(Katina Michael, Associate Professor at the University of Wollongong's School Of Information Systems and Technology in Australia)

To tell the truth, sometimes social sites have such an impact on me. I can be very cheerful when I receive a good amount of likes and positive comments on Instagram, so this article is very touching.

I recommend you to read it and think about how the social media affects personally you and your thoughts. You can find a few more examples of how it affects our brain.
Moreover, I recommend you to watch the video attached below. 

Here is the link. 

What the Experts Say 1

You can find a plenty of websites related to the topic of the negative impact of social media on the society.

I have found one interesting blog that attracted my attention by this quotation "Privacy is dead and social media hold the smoking gun" by Pete Cashmore. It is focused on the following three impacts on the society: privacy breaches, electronic relationships, and effects on communication.

To my mind, these three issues are ones of the most important.

Firstly, because communication is the key thing in our lives. However, the Internet and especially different social sites have broken the way it used to work. I completely agree with the author of this blog, that people are slowly beginning to stop communicating face-to-face with each other, they prefer to send messages and pictures. No doubt, that it is much easier just to act something online and call it a “communication” rather than to leave your house and actually talk to another people. It is crazy.

Secondly, nowadays it is absolutely normal to show everyone your life in each aspect. People have stopped caring about their privacy and borders. But what they often forget is that this private information can be used in an inappropriate way, for instance, for cyber bullying or blackmailing. Our modern world is the place where special workshops and discussions about protecting your data in the Internet are held. People tell another people that they should not post every piece of their life because it can lead to some bad results.

Isn’t it crazy?

Here is the link to this blog.

Current Events 2

This event related to the topic of the negative influence of social sites on our society is quite disturbing and thought provoking. Have you ever heard about selfie deaths?

“Selfie death” term appeared a couple of years ago when the popularity of selfies and posting it in social media raised to the unbelievable level. A team of US researchers has found 15 selfie-takers died in 2014, 39 in 2015 and 73 died in the first eight months of 2016.

The latest selfie death what I want to tell you about took place in Calcutta, 13 April. Three men died and a fourth was seriously damaged while trying to save a 22-year-old friend Taraknath Makal who fell off a train while trying to take a selfie minutes after it had chugged out of the station.

There may be two possible reasons why this man wanted to take a selfie during the train was already on his way.

The first one is if you post an extraordinary picture in the social sites, for example, on Instagram, you will be more likely to get a huge amount of likes, comments and shares rather if you post just a casual selfie in the mirror. It is kind of race: who has the most original photo and who will get more likes for it. Therefore, Taraknath Makal was consciously getting out of the train with his phone in the hands to take a selfie. I am sure, that he was realizing the dangerousness of the situation, but the priorities were set wrongly.

The second reason why this man was risking his life is just to get an approval from his friend via the social sites. The social media has become the main place where people judge and range other people. Now it is enough for us just to look at the person's Facebook page and Instagram profile to make a total judgment about him, to tell what kind of person he is like, who he dates, where he spends his time.  Taraknath Makal simply wanted to appear like a brave man who has no fear of anything. Of course, he proved it to all of us, but the cost of it is huge.

Nevertheless, it is glad to see that the society is showing its reaction to these kinds of tragedies and try to give a warning to another people not to repeat such a mistake. For instance, “more campaigns in various media platforms urging people not to use a phone or listen to music while crossing the railway tracks and not to click photographs while traveling” have launched by Eastern Railways, the railways, where this accident appeared. So, there is still hope.

The moral of the story can differ from one person from another. The lesson that personally I got from this tragedy, is that social media is not the place for us to show our abilities and try to approve something.

You can read more about this story here.

In addition, below there is a video showing seven the most astonishing deaths while taking selfies. 

Reference List:

http://www.hindustantimes.com/. (2017). ‘Photography strictly prohibited’: Fatal selfie that resulted in 4 deaths prompts railway advisory. [online] Available at: http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/photography-strictly-prohibited-fatal-selfie-that-resulted-in-4-deaths-prompts-railway-advisory/story-rra60l3DGoPd0iJU0KUi7O.html .

Bbc.co.uk. (2017). The rise in selfie deaths and how to stop them. [online] Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/38012990/the-rise-in-selfie-deaths-and-how-to-stop-them 

Current Events Ⅰ

Online Suicide Game

Thinking about the negative influence of the social sites on our society, this unbelievable case has come first to my mind. It has gained a huge publicity during the last several months.

It began in autumn in Russia. Parents started to notice that their teenage children were behaving in the unusual and strange way, spending almost all of their time on the social site “Vkontakte” and chatting with some strangers. Unfortunately, not enough attention was paid to it. Later these teenagers were found dead. They all committed suicides. They all were playing an online game that is called “Blue Whale”. It is named from a common belief that blue whales voluntarily beach themselves in order to end their own lives. 

The public was shocked. No one could imagine that a simple chat in the social sites can lead youngsters to suicide. Let us consider this case more deeply.

The Blue Whale ‘suicide game’ is an online social media group, which is encouraging people to kill themselves. There is a group administrator who gives daily tasks to members that they agree to complete in 50 days. These tasks can vary, but all of them include self-harming like cutting veins in a shape of the whale, watching horror movies, waking up at night.  The first challenge usually comes at 4:20 am. Every time you accomplish a task, you must provide a photo or video proof to the curator. Nothing extremely bad, you can say, but tasks are gradually getting more and more extreme. On the 50^th day of this game, the curator instructs the teenager to jump off the roof or to throw yourself under a train. When the aim is achieved, the game is over.

Now here are some numbers. According to the police database, there were at least 130 suicides across Russia, which are linked to this online game. Investigative newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported:  “Almost all these children were members of the same internet groups and lived in good, happy families. Parents were not expecting it”.

To my mind, such a horrible event must have happened now or later.

On the one hand, the social sites have started to play such a huge role in our lives, and especially in teenagers' lives. Teenagers that are approximately 12 to 16 years old spend most of their free time online. The main threat is the fact that they are very vulnerable and sensitive, they do not have the sense of reality and they are not able to understand all the depth and seriousness of this game. It has become a trend and as every trend, this game attracts teenagers' attention. Youngsters hear about the “Blue Whale” from their friends and classmates, they want to be in that trend and they participate in it. On the other hand, parents should also be blamed in this situation, because often they do not pay enough attention at how their children spend time on the Internet.

The social media has become a powerful source that has a strong influence on our society. We live in a century when some random people from the Internet can tell us what to do and we will do that. Isn't an issue to think about?

You can find more information here.

Reference List:

BBC News. (2017). Blue Whale: Should you be worried about online pressure groups? - BBC News. [online] Available at: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-39729819 

The Indian Express. (2017). The truth of ‘Blue Whale’ challenge: A game said to ‘brainwash’ teens into committing suicides. [online] Available at: http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/web-edits/blue-whale-suicide-challenge-fact-or-fiction-and-a-wake-up-call-4641835/