Negative Impact of Social Networking on Students' Psychology

Social networking has become a new way of interpersonal communication for students. While benefits the students, it also brings some negative effects on their psychological development.

With the development of the Internet, social network gradually enter into people's lives, especially into the world of universities' students. The Internet    changes the social life of contemporary college students with its own unique charm. Then online dating has become a very popular way of communication for college students.

Normal network communication has positive effects on the healthy growth of the college students. A lot of scholars have expressed their opinions that, while social networking brings happiness, benefits, enjoyment and hope to people, it also brings emotional crisis, moral decline and humanity alienation. There are mainly four areas of the negative impact of social networking.

1 Cognitive bias.
First, excessive network communication is easy to make the cognitive style of college students to become unitary. By reality interpersonal communication, people achieve cognize through  vision, hearing, touch and other sensory modalities, then all experience of people comes from a direct exchange of experience by the reality interpersonal communication. But by the network communication directly experience become text symbols, in fact, people's awareness of others become single. Secondly, the distortion of the reality induce distrust of the students by the network communication. Social networking makes them easy to open hearts and enjoy the feeling that it is difficult to talk with others in reality.The feeling makes college students mistakenly believe that: the network directly on the soul, rather than the reality life which is so hypocritical and heavy, then come to the wrong conclusion: "Network is more real than reality".

2 Emotional indifference.
Man-machine dialogue for a long period causes emotional indifference. Studies have shown that: spending too much time online dating will lead to social isolation in real life. So that the negative emotions such as depression and anxiety will increase, then involvement of the real social life reduces. Especially when college students have encountered emotional traps in network communication, they would feel the emotions among people hypocritical and terrible, they will no longer believe real emotions among people, resulting in emotional indifference and even social phobia.

3 Willpower weakened.
The frequency and time that college students indulge in network communication are often high and long than planned. It is known that some of them also feel extreme anxiety and depression for a certainly period, but at last  simply indulge themselves. Obviously, indulging in the network communication for a long time will reduce the ability of self-monitoring.

4 Role confusion.
Network is a virtual space, most of the Internet users hide the real situation to arm themselves with a mask. Some of them even can not identify true self and network virtual image. The role confusion instead of self-identity, affects the social development of them in real life.

Although social networking has a large amount of flaws above, it is still a historical invention which benefits people. In my opinion, what we should do is to enhance our ability of self-control, and to keep a reasonable distribution of time we spend on social networking and real life.