Author: Roy Sehgal / Source: The Next Web
We’re always online, always connected. We sleep with our phones under our pillows, check our email countless times a day, and keep tabs on our friends, families, celebrities, and social media “influencers.”
For many users, though, the experiences designed by social media companies do not bring a sense of connection or relationship, but rather one of FOMO and a diminishing sense of self.
Outside of the proliferation of fake news, the interference of foreign actors in politics, and the collection of our personal information for unseemly uses, perhaps one of the worst results of the social-first world we’ve built is that social media usage has been shown to have a negative effect on mental health.
But, the tides are beginning to shift, as designers are coming out against the products they have created. Many companies (Imgur included) are taking a long, hard look in the mirror at the tools we’ve built and how they’ve been employed — for better, or worse — to determine what solutions are out there.
In order to better understand society’s relationship with the internet (and to see how well we, as a company, were delivering on our mission “to lift the world’s spirits”), my team and I partnered with the research specialists at Ypulse to survey 2,100 internet users about which platforms they use, and how they feel after using them.
What we found was confirmation that social media is a breeding ground for negativity. What follows is an in-depth look at the results of the study.
I first wanted us to gauge how users felt about social media in general. The results showed that 61 percent of respondents believe that spending too much time on social media is bad for their mental health, and what’s more, 57 percent said that the negative side of social media isn’t talked about enough.
What I learned is that while many people believe that social media has a largely negative impact, the majority believe that these issues aren’t being addressed. Additionally, two-thirds of social media users said that they wish social media was a more positive place.
What this told me is that there’s clearly an appetite for social media good, and it’s on us, as the individuals and companies behind the platforms, to deliver.
The next aim was to determine if there was a correlation between the number and types of platforms that people use, and then to determine the varying impacts that they may have on the user.
What the study found was that the more social media platforms people use, the worse they feel. In fact, the data found that for every additional social media platform a person uses, their overall happiness level drops by 2 percent.
And that’s not all —…
The post Report: Anonymity could be the answer to feeling happier online appeared first on FeedBox.