Internet does not only have a positive impact on society and individuals, internet and social media has also given us more negative effects.
I think many of these negative effects depend on how easy it is to sit in front of a computer in comparison to many of the other media channels. The reason it is easier to sit long at a computer is that it is very easy to vary the content, just for example, change the page in your browser or switch from looking at YouTube videos to play computer games. It is also social in a completely different way than the traditional media, and in certain contexts even peer pressure effects may be created through these social channels.
An example of peer pressure on the internet is something I heard from my friend who plays a lot of World of Warcraft. She told me that some evenings she had to play World of Warcraft because she otherwise could be excluded from the group she joined in the game. And it was not for a short time she had to play but it was basically the whole evening and sometimes the night. It harmed parts of her social life outside the computer world and that part was replaced by a social life in the game where she had many virtual friends.
Another problem, which I believe is because the internet is mainly to entertain, is that it is sometimes difficult to focus on the task when you're doing something boring or hard. I myself have often noticed that when I sit down to write an essay in a topic which I am not really interested, it is very easy to slide into home pages that do not have to with the work that has to be done, such as Facebook or YouTube or start talking with friends through MSN Messenger. It makes the work take much longer time and often becomes slightly worse because I am less focused at the work.
I have also replaced some of my thinking with internet because of its simplicity to search for information online. When I get a question I cannot answer directly I do not even try to come up with the answer myself, I write directly as a search word in Google or Wikipedia and trying to find the answer this way. Sometimes this method takes more time than if I sat and pondered and found the answer myself. In some cases I don’t even try to come up with the answer myself after a search without a hits because I think “If it doesn’t exist on Google it doesn’t exist at all”.
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2 comments:
I do agree with your opinion that is the peer pressure from the virtual digital game world. Actually speaking, I also wrote my college mate’s experience regarding the World of Warcraft. When I asked him why he would like to spend all days and nights on the game, he just answered that he joined a team and was the leader of that team. So he had to keep the highest level so that he could help other team members to finish the team task. What is more, if he quited the game on the half way, the task of the whole team could not be finished. And he would be also excluded from the team with the bad reputation.
Let’s consider about this problem to a further degree. I believe the main function of the computer game should be the entertainment aspect. In other words, it should fulfill people’s demands of leisure. As we know, people’s initial purposes are to get relaxed and release from the daily work pressure through computer game playing. That’s also the reason why we would like to spent time on it. The core value should be the relaxing and amusement. However, if the person feels even more pressured on playing online games, if the amusement and entertainment function is transferred into the peer pressure, then it is the time for us to think about whether the time we invest on such activities is worth spending. Finally, I would like to mention that if the person gets closer and closer to the friends in the virtual world, probably he or she would like to be a bit far away from the friends in the reality since he or she has no time to associate with the friends in the reality.
I agree with you Rasmus that social media can pose real negative effects if people feel they have a huge commitment to other people online. This is something that I find really disturbing as I believe that human contact with real life friends is so much more important. Getting too committed to being online and ex. playing games at night is a threat to social behavior when this is “eating up” more and more of our awaking hours.
I also agree that our creative thinking is negatively affected by using wikis ad search engine in a too large extent. Of course this gives our huge opportunities but I find myself not being able to explain some things that I am most certain that I know what it is. I believe that this is because I am getting more and more used to looking up things online instead of thoroughly thinking through what my own explanation and definition of the subject would be in concrete words.
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