Wk 4. Personal Blog Entry

Personal Blog Entry

Collier Duffin

BSCOM/330

08/03/2020

Dana Kaufman 

Personal Blog Entry

“The internet is a convenient source for obtaining educational materials and information. Social media refers to web-based applications that allow people to create and exchange information such as blogs and microblogs (for example, Twitter), content communities (like YouTube), and social networking (for example, Facebook and LinkedIn)” (Sumayyia, Al-Madaney, & Almousawi, 2019, p. 1294). Like Sumayyia, Al-Madaney, and Almousawi say, the reaches of social media are vast and hard to define specifically. It is the foundation of our growing information age of humanity.

Social media mostly started out in a simple manner; connecting people that would normally be more difficult in a traditional sense (face-to-face). It has since then become a staple a norm of society to connect with one another. There is often speak of worry about humanity losing its ability to actually connect face-to-face anymore, due to the extreme dependency and growth of social media use in this way. “Although studies demonstrating an association between greater social media use and poor health outcomes (eg, depression, loneliness, poor body image) are plentiful and make for popular headlines, the literature on social media use and well-being is quite mixed” (Pagoto, Waring, & Xu, para. 4, 2019). It seems the infancy of our social media movement is too young to make any solid findings.

Outside of personal use however, social media use looks far more promising in the professional sense. In a study correlating medicine and social media, Sumayyia, Al-Madaney, and Almousawi (2019) stated, “Our findings suggest that the majority of the participants used social media platforms to find information related to their health conditions, while approximately one third received direct medical consultations online” (p. 1294). Pagoto, Waring, and Xu (2019) also note that, similarly to the personal use of social media, most studies thus far are more focused on the negative attributes of social media, as they are more reactively seen and studied. The only factor that remains clear, is that we must wait to see until it is too late that our movements in social media prove to be our calamity or our enlightenment.

References

Pagoto, S., Waring, M. E., & Xu, R. (2019). A Call for a Public Health Agenda for Social Media Research. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 21(12), e16661. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.2196/16661

Sumayyia, M. D., Al-Madaney, M. M., & Almousawi, F. H. (2019). Health information on social media. Perceptions, attitudes, and practices of patients and their companions. Saudi Medical Journal, 40(12), 1294–1298. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.15537/smj.2019.12.24682