In my mind, time is always a good excuse to blame the invention of social media, especially gaming, at least in Chinese society. From I was in junior school, the crisis over social media never stop. Parents and teachers complaint that too much time and energy was spent on gaming and the teenagers become violent and can not focus on study. I remember one extremity example is that one teenager stays in net bar for 7 days without eating anything and only play Warcraft and the result is that he died suddenly because of heart attack. Many news nowadays are also related to the negative effects towards the development of social media. In my mind, many of these news are aimed at teenagers who usually can not allocate their time in a reasonable way. Seldom a new blames adults who play too many games.
However, why people, no matter teenagers or adults, are still willing to spend more and more time on Facebook or Warcraft? From my point of view, I think one of good explanations could be that they can release pressure from the real world. In Sims or Warcraft, the player could be someone else and easier to gain the feeling of achievement in the virtual worlds. Besides, a good game can be treated as an enjoyable movie. They are good at story telling and enable to provide the players veritable sound and the real feeling of the scenes. Nevertheless, I think it’s hard to justify whether these social media provides enough value according to the time spent. Because it’s an individual evaluation behavior and the standard to define value could be various.
Another negative effect of social media is that it decreases physically active lives. I absolute agree with this argument. The virtual communication changes the way we usually chat or talk and reduces the frequency we contact friends in the real world. When we sit in front of computer for hours, like what I’m doing now, most of my body parts are staying in quiescence, only the brain and fingers are active.
To sum up, many of the negative effects I talked about above are due to the lack of self-mastery . In other word, these effects may be vanish if people can manage their time and energy in a more suitable way. But other negative effects, like the problems on language development and unpatience attitude because of the gaming culture, are difficult to alter and need long time to adjustment.
2 comments:
I agree with you Zhang, gaming can definitely be an escape from reality. During the teenage-years many people have difficulties in finding them selves and they try to search for a place in life. When that place is difficult to find and you can have another try in another world you will take that chance. I really think that there is a problem when some people tend to live in a virtual world and other live in the real world. We are all living in one world physically, but if we are living in two different mental worlds these two groups will see the world from two very different perspectives. This in turn, will lead to communication problems and difficulties in understanding each other. If humans do not understand each other the ability to feel sympathy will be lost. To deal with two different groups with no sympathy for each other can be quite difficult. This is of course an extreme situation, but still I think that when some people flee to a virtual world their conceptions of the world will differ compared to other people living in the real world. And I do not think that there will be less communication problems between the two groups.
As Zhang Xiaofan said, in China parents always blame online games because their children spend too much time and money on it. As we discussed in the seminar, the game developers and publishers should think about the children. The children do not know what the right thing to do is, and they do not have enough self-mastery to stop their addiction to online games. The development and popularity of online games is definitely related to social media and based on it. Of course, the social media technology itself is just a new technology created by human beings, and it is not simply right or wrong, good or bad. But after people use it to develop other things, the social media technology affects people’s everyday life and has positive and negative effects. The negative effects of social media are caused by people’s wrong usage. Because children do not know how to use social media and play online games rightly, the developer and publisher of online games should design proper games for children, and balance the profits and social moral. According to Zhang Xiaofan’s opinion, lots of negative effects are due to the lack of self-mastery, I agree with this argument. So when the children cannot use self-mastery to control their behaviors of social media, the whole society should create a good condition and healthy environment for them till they have enough self-mastery. There are a lot of things to do about the proper use of social media technologies.
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