WAT topic for MBA: Social Media is a waste of time

Columnist & Author, MBAUniverse.com

Updated on January 8, 2014

This WAT/ essay on the Topic "Social Media is a waste of time" are in the series of GD PI WAT preparation for MBA Admission 2014. This article will provide inputs for your WAT round at Admission 2014

The time spent on social media could have been used for some creative work

Social Media has become a widely used source of communication and is more popular than any other means of communication. It is changing the ways to present the people’s views and responses as well as the means of interaction in the society.

The tools of social media i.e. Face book, Twitter, MySpace, SMS, Website etc. have become and may even grow more powerful in future with the lapse of time.

Time is wasted more than utilised

Means of Social Media, although allure people due to their convenience of being able to connect with others all over the world, remain unprotected and numbers of youngsters waste their time on sharing not so useful information on it.

The time spent on social media could have been used for some better and creative work and social welfare.

It is also making people physically weak as well as refraining them from going out and face the challenges.

Majority of youngsters use the social networking sites as a mode of pastime. It does not yield any positive or constructive results. There are around 65 billion users of Face book from India itself.

The addiction of the social networking sites takes a toll on their interests and hobbies such as literature, music, gardening, and scientific experiments. Sports become a secondary thing.

Loss of meaningful relationships

Social media sites are instrumental in making it more difficult to distinguish between the meaningful relationships we foster in the real world. By focusing so much of our time and psychic energy on these less meaningful relationships, our most important connections will weaken and the warmth of relations will gradually be lost.

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Not only waste but also dangerous

The problems created by these sites are much more prevalent than their advantages because they give malicious people the ability to create more danger among the millions of internet users. Information that is posted on the internet by people who believe it only to be viewable among their friends often ﬁnd that they have unintentionally shared personal facts with hundreds of people, some of whom plan to use the same against them.

The rape and exploitation of a seventeen year old, class XI girl by two young men, said to have come in contact and befriended with the girl in Delhi while using social networking site, is a glaring example of dark side of this phenomenon (TOI, Hindu dated 03.01.13). Since middle and upper-class families use the social media more than the poor ones who don’t have access to it, they tend to fall prey to it.

People are vulnerable to the practice of cyber-bullying in which the perpetrators, anonymously or even posing as people their victims trust, 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. The anonymity afforded online can bring out dark impulses that might otherwise be suppressed. According to a News report, cyber-bullying has spread widely among youth, with 42% reporting that they have been victims.

People are able to get through loopholes in the social media that allow them to stalk others, sell illegal substances, verbally, emotionally, and sexually abuse others, commit fraud, and do all the nasty things. It is something that desperately needs to be controlled so that the users are better protected.

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. Two studies have reported damage to productivity caused by social networking: Nucleus Research reported that Facebook results in 1.5% less office productivity while Morse claimed that British companies lost 2.2 billion a year to the social phenomenon.

Social networking sites encourage people to be more public about their personal lives because intimate details of our lives can be posted so easily. People 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 most sites allow their users to control who sees the things they've posted, such limitations are often forgotten or don't work.

Need is to use it judiciously

It is not easy to avoid the advancement of computer technology which has given tremendous rise to means of communication to many platforms. New templates of communications have been created between person to person, person to mass media, and vice versa. It may be called a good servant to use but bad master to command you.
These tools, if used with a vision and in a controlled manner, hundreds of great prospects would result from social media. Social networking sites keep the youth well informed and help them form an opinion on the current social, political or international issues.

Social media websites are not just a tool for networking but also an important tool of social activism. A Times of India report dated December 26, 2012, quotes a student as saying, "After the recent gang rape in Delhi, I don't just log on to Facebook for fun anymore. Instead, I'm using it as a tool to spread awareness among my friends."
In the environment of globalisation and narrowing world these sites keep you near your dear ones wherever they are in the world. The Professional networking websites like LinkedIn help the youth to connect with probable employers and vice versa.

Conclusion

It is a fact that the social networking sites need to have strong preventive measures from misusing them. At present only two main forms of prevention against harassment and illegal activities on social media sites are users making an agreement to abide by the terms of service upon making an account and being able to report a problem when they feel it is necessary. However, it is hardly enough to make people feel safe and secure when browsing through and utilizing social media sites. Social media sites need to take more responsibility over the protection of their users.

Social Media, when used in proper perspective enables you to connect with number of people you can learn from their experiences, learn about random topics, explore new ideas and find connections between seemingly disparate concepts. Social media facilitates this kind of hyper connectivity in our society. Although social media does have numerous benefits in our society, there are still challenges to utilise it judiciously to extract best out of it.

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