作者：（雅思写作-李佩）

Nowadays, many people use social media every day to keep in touch with others and news events. Do you think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages?

The internet has transformed the way people work and communicate, and unmistakably, it is fast changing our entertaining fashions. Despite the benefits social media has brought to our lives, as many might claim, I hold the view that the negatives of this modern lifestyle outweigh the positives.

It is true that the proliferation of social media has drastically improved long distance communication. Today, smartphones have put virtual bars in people’s pockets, where people from different places or even races can mingle free from the constraints of physical geography. However, friends made from the Internet cannot be compared to our actual friends and family. And body contacts like a hug or caress better ease away people’s negative emotions than conversations through a screen or text messages on an app.

In fact, our over-reliance upon social media, more often than not, triggers severe passive feelings. Research indicates that Internet and social media engagement exacerbates feelings of loneliness, depression and anxiety. Many netizens cannot help spending hours a day swiping seemingly endless short videos posted on apps like TikTok. Instead of socializing with friends in real life, people now prone to be addicted to the Internet, comparing themselves to others, placing all their attention to other people’s highlight reels. We cannot bear the boring moments without a phone in hand anymore since the dopamine rush from instant gratification is the only thing that makes us feel anything anymore.

Apart from that, social media users now are omnivorous readers of fragments. It is neither profound nor systematic. It seems that we are dabblers of almost any domain, yet we also sense the shallowness and superficiality of what we learnt from the Internet. As a result, it might often be the case that the more we are on social media, the more we tend to feel a sense of emptiness or meaninglessness.

For the above reasons, the conclusion is safely drawn that, in alarmingly many cases, the over-use of social media results in more drawbacks to modern people, especially at the psychological level, than it’s widely acknowledged merits.