Essay 4 --- negtive effects of social media

Recently, a new argumentation which is about internet addiction clinic diagnose standard really drew people’s eyes in China. This standard stated that internet addiction belongs to psychopathic; and if the average time reaches 6 hours or beyond it for a person to surfer on the internet every day, and this situation lasts or exceeds 3 months, then it is deemed to internet addiction. This argumentation raised drastic debate, and aroused Netizen’s antipathy.

Many people are online more than 10 hours every day because of their occupation, without internet they could not work, as many people claimed. I am always online if I am home, I cannot count out how many hours I am online everyday; maybe because of the special situation I have which is I am abroad, alone, without TV in my room, no pet, no roommate, and so on. The only entertainment at home is surfer on the internet, where I can read news, chat with friends, call my parents by VOIP, watch movies and TV shows by some Chinese software, etc.

But sometimes, I do hate the life I have like this. I really become lazier, for instance, 6 years ago, I could not stay inside my room for the whole day without going out; otherwise I will feel headache. But now, I can stay at home for 3, or 4, or 5 days if there is no reason to go outside. I do not want to visit my friends; even their rooms are quite near from my room. I prefer chat with them online. And there is also a negative impact on my language skills in terms of writing skills. Since the day when I started using computer instead of pen to write down things, communicate with people, my writing skill became worse and worse. As you know, Chinese is hieroglyphic, not as the most languages which consist of letters, which means what you type from the keyboard is what you write on the paper; to type a Chinese character from a Chinese version keyboard which is same as the American one, you only can type its pronunciation which is called Pinyin and then shows several characters which have the same pronunciation for you to choose the right character you need; of course there are many ways to type Chinese characters, but no matter which method you use, you have to type letters in order to get the Chinese characters. So by doing this, I do not need to practice writing and remembering the characters anymore, and as a result, I forgot how to write many characters; also my handwriting is uglier than ever before.

I can illustrate more about the negative impacts which internet brought to me; I am both happy and sad with the internet. But I guess it is not the internet’s fault, what I can do is to control myself and change the lifestyle I have now.


By Qiong Jia