The extensive impact of social media in and on individual and social lives in the world today cannot be captured through the eye of the use of social media by the various strata of people in the world. By this we mean that the fact of the usage of social media by almost all categories of people and their utter reliance on it for all kinds of interaction and relationship do not tell all about the depth of impact that social media has in the current world. The extensive usage of social media is measured in Nigeria, for instance, by the logic of having the usage registered at about 75 percent of all Nigerian internet users. And the number of users and the extent of usage is also reflected in the position of psychologists that social media is deliberately constructed and designed to be addictive, such that users tend to be engrossed in its usage, without any thought as to leaving the platforms or reducing engagements there. Rather, users do not worry about reports of dangers of the usage of social media to mental health and the need to be concerned with the negative effect of the extensive and persistent usage on mental health even as every user is compulsively devoted to featuring and engaging on the platforms.
Incidentally, while the psychological and emotional and mental health negative effect of the use of social media is fairly known and has been addressed at many fora across the world, I am more concerned in this piece with the social cost of the use of social media, or what we could call the extent of social injury as a result of the use of social media which has not received as much attention and corresponding analysis. Social injury is conceived as intended or unintended harm inflicted on individuals, groups, families, organisations and such others in the course of the usage of social media whether such harm is criminalised or not criminalised. Indeed, there is a new area of study called Zemiology relating to the analysis and deep study and engagement with social injury, which study has not become popular or extensive in Nigeria. Yet, the negative impact of the use of social media has also become such of concern in Nigeria that the Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, was once on record as having opined that a Nigerian could be responsible for the start of the Third World War if the extent of disinformation and fake news on the Nigerian social media were not curbed or brought under control. This means that the issue of social injury through the use of social media is not just a world problem, but also a Nigerian problem.
Our position is that calling attention to the negative impact of social media usage has to start with the issue of the thought process preceding or powering most of the exchanges on the social media. The truth is that nothing gets done without a corresponding thought process preceding or leading to it, such that if only social media users were to invest some time on their thought process in reflecting on the likely impact of whatever they wanted to do on social media, perhaps we would have considerable reduction in the extent of negative postings on the social media with the possibility of inflicting social injury. The implication is that we have to be concerned more with the thought process preceding and powering social media if we are to make headway with limiting the extent of social injury inflicted on others on the social media.
The point also has to be made that not many people realise the extent of social injury they permit the use of social media to inflict on them with the way they allow the addiction to social media to make them compulsive users of the social media platforms. And through compulsive usage, they open themselves to depression and anxiety not just by the unusual number of hours they devote to social media usage every day, but also by the unorthodox and harmful postings from others they get exposed to because of their uncontrolled and unending usage of the social media. Many do not realise that the drib and drab of social media postings, especially the negative ones, could have deleterious effect on their health with far reaching consequences. This way, they end up allowing their phones to be a source of negativity for them since they are not in a position to determine what others post on the social media, which postings get reflected on their phones. They are at home or on their beds and get inflicted with social injury through their phones because of their permissive use of the social media.
In some specific instances, some users are exposed to bullies and their bullying postings on the social media with nowhere to run to as they have already permitted a no-holds-barred approach to their use of social media. And this tells us that whereas social in social injury indicates that we are concerned more with collective injury and harm on the social media, the first viable reaction and antidote to social injury on the social media has to be an individualised approach to the use of social media in which we want to have some level of control over what we are exposed to on the social media at individual levels. In this regard, our first defensive act would be to control the number of hours we spend on the social media as this would help us in counteracting the approach of addiction while also helping to reduce the rate of our exposure to toxic postings on the social media. In the end, our first line of defence and salvation from social injury on the social media is really our individual selves even as we wait for collective and government intervention to reduce the toxic flow on the social media. We must, therefore, be ready to put our individual shield of protection up by insisting on regulating the number of hours we spend on the social media as a way of limiting our exposure to the social injury that has come to increasingly define the use of the social media in the world today.
- Professor Adetola is Head, Department of Sociology at the Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago-Iwoye, Nigeria.