How Social Media has Affected Your Life, Before and After. 

How has it affected your life? A survey about how it has affected teachers and teenagers in a school environment tells us the answers to these questions. I sent out a survey to random students and teachers of the school and got results on how their use of social media has affected the face-to-face, fitness, intelligence and relationships part of their lives since they have been using social media.

Firstly how old were they when they got social media. I do not have social media and was curious about what age each person got it. Here are the results. 1.7% were 30+, 5% were 11-13, 23.3% were 13, 16.7% were 11, 15% were 12, 10% were 14, 5% were 15+, 11.5% were 10, and 11.7% don’t have social media.

The first results I got in were how it had affected their fitness. I gave them the options of it has worsened, improved or done nothing to their fitness. 7.5% of people said that it has improved their fitness. Some saying ‘I want to do more fitness so I can post about how cool my life is’. 18.9% said that it has worsened their fitness saying ‘ social media will draw me to my device more so I stay there for longer’. While the other 73.6% said that it has had no effect on their physical state/fitness. I wasn’t surprised with these results as social media shouldn’t have a larger effect on your physical state.

Secondly I asked them how their use of social media has affected their intelligence. As a person who doesn’t use social media I was quite surprised at the results. 36.36% of those that took part in the survey said that it has improved their intelligence saying ‘I have gained different perspectives and viewpoints on topics around school’. Another 12.73% say ‘social media has made it harder for me to focus in class’. The rest (50.9%) stated that it has not affected their intelligence at all. I thought that if anything it may have reduced their intelligence but has instead done the opposite...enhance. Wow. That was a surprising result.

The next question was how it has affected the user’s face-to-face conversation skills. Not such an unexpected outcome. 5.56% say it has improved their face-to-face skills telling ‘improved because I can bring up conversation topics that we’ve had in the past’. The next 27.78% said ‘it has worsened my face-to-face skills because as we are on phones we are not properly connecting’. And the last 66.67% said it had no effect on their face-to-face conversation skills. This I was expecting as they would spend more time on their phones than talking to actual people.

Lastly how relationships with other people. I think that it would have no affect because you can communicate online and in reality but of course there are some anomalies. Those who said it had improved their relationship were 30.91% saying ‘Much better: MEMES’ To be honest I agree, memes are good. Although there were some others who said it had worsened (14.55%) stated ‘Created fights with friends due to misunderstanding of texts and messages sent’. The last 61.82% said that it had no effect on their relationships, as I had predicted.

Other websites also back up the information that was received such as debate.org, http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/275361.php, and http://www.wdish.com/health/10-good-and-bad-ways-social-media-affects-your-mental-heal th. So if you more information please go online and check them out.

Overall I am quite happy knowing these results because it has given me a better view on how social media has affected the ncg and wider community. Although there were some anomalies in the research almost all of the responses were legit (with the odd person saying that they are a potato on the ‘other’ option) So I guess the message here is that you can still try to have control over your life even with social media.

- Sam Scott