Social media, whether we like it or not, has become a big part of our daily lives. Facebook, twitter, and instagram are just a few to name that are used every day, by teens and adults. Many people have different views on social media and the impact it has on our lives. Social media has changed the way we see the world and communicate with the people around us. Studies show that people between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four spend more than three and a half hours on social media, thirty-five to forty-nine spend about three hours, fifty to sixty-four year olds spend about two and a half hours on there. Females spend about forty more percent on social media than men do every day. Over forty million pictures are uploaded to instagram every day and instagram users spend over two hundred and fifty plus hours on there every month.

 Different people have different views on social media and the effect it has on our lives. Some negative effects that it has on us, is cyber-bullying. Cyber bullying is perpetrators, anonymously or even posing as people their victims trust, who terrorize individuals in front of their peers. The devastation of these online attacks can leave deep mental scars. In several well-publicized cases, victims have even been driven to suicide. There is decreased productivity, which is while many businesses use social networking sites to find and communicate with clients, the sites can also prove a great distraction to employees who may show more interest in what their friends are posting than in their work tasks. Wired.com posted two studies which demonstrated damage to productivity caused by social networking: Nucleus Research reported that Facebook shaves 1.5% off office productivity while Morse claimed that British companies lost 2.2 billion a year to the social phenomenon. New technology products have become available that allow social networks to be blocked, but their effectiveness remains spotty. Another thing that social media does is reduces privacy, social networking sites encourage people to be more public about their personal lives. Because intimate details of our lives can be posted so easily, users are prone to bypass the filters they might normally employ when talking about their private lives. What’s more, the things they post remain available indefinitely. While at one moment a photo of friends doing shots at a party may seem harmless, the image may appear less attractive in the context of an employer doing a background check. While most sites allow their users to control who sees the things they’ve posted, such limitations are often forgotten, can be difficult to control or don’t work as well as advertised.