Social Media has penetrated to each and everyone’s life. Social media was initially introduced as a platform where people can interact with their loved ones, the ones who are not easily accessible, to share some important facts and information, to express ideas and suggestions which has gradually become a platform for extroverts to socialise more and where asocial started finding virtual friends with whom they can interact freely, a corridor to their social needs which they cannot satisfy in their real life. The advantage of being anonymous on the platform has made users to use it as a space of sharing implicit thoughts, free expressions, pent up emotions or anger, humour and unfulfilled desire which they cannot express to their closed ones. Number of constant users have started living in this virtual life rather than in their real life. This status is gradually increasing. Once someone is approaching this stage, we can infer that he/she has entered into the cycle of social media addiction.
Social media addiction is the reality of today’s world. It is just not a virtual but an existing fact which is occurring at a very high pace regardless of gender, age and society. The most vulnerable people are the ones who feel that they are lonely and are least understood by the people around them, the ones who want to escape from present, the ones who are guided by the need for the recognition, the ones who lack opportunities and feel hesitant in expressing their true self.
However, based on the nature and time of usage, users are categorised into six types – Users, Butterflies, Abusers, Destructive users, Dependents and addicted. These stages are however goes into ascending order till he/she reaches addiction.
Users are the people who spend their free time in causal chats, conversation with friends and family. These are of those kind who are capable of involving in similar discussion or chit chat even when they meet in person or on a phone call. They are also the one who uses the media to convey useful and/or positive stuff to keep their contacts happy and informative.
Butterflies/Over users are the ones who spend nearly all the time they can spare, some trying to connect with more and more people and responding to all unknown requests. They show high interest in scrolling their time line and posts uploaded by nearly everyone without actual focus on any information.
Abusers are the ones who use social media to ventilate their anger, create rumours, poke into lives of others, create memes, spread socially unacceptable material and involved in trolling to disgrace people. They deliberately persuade or coerce others to indulge into mal practice and later use this as a tool for blackmailing. They neither feel guilty for any damage and destructive act.
Destructive users are the ones who find it difficult to avoid the social media platform even when they are aware that it has been destroying their productive time. They are the one who are willing to sacrifice activities which are pleasurable like sleep, just for the sake of using social media. In fact most of them find solace to stress as it divert their attention from real life problems. They have tendencies to isolate themselves from friends and family whenever face restrictions.
Dependency is the problematic stage. It is where the user has unavoidable craving to stay active on the social media to the extent that they are feel discomfort or distress at the thoughts of not being active or absent from the platform. They frequently check their account for new updates and feel uncomfortable whenever there are none. Dependents become restless at the time of uploading a post or picture and not getting enough likes or responses. They prefer communicating through messengers than in person.
Addiction is the stage when the user experiences withdrawal symptoms like emotional outburst, isolation and moderate depression. The initial symptoms is delusion that everything on the social media is real. They find it hard to differentiate between real life happening and social media posting and hence stay into confusion, high level of disturbance.
Social media dependence and addiction is an epidemic that is silently taking over the sanity of human beings. Active and effective steps has to be taken to create awareness and prevent further bubbling of addicted population.
