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The Two Faces of Social Media That Bring Joy or Despair

Dr. Patricia Farrell
4 min readMar 14, 2024

Social media serves various purposes, but not everything related to it should be applauded, and some things bring psychological pain.

Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash

The dawn of the Internet promised incredible access for researchers worldwide and for the average citizen who wished to participate in important or nonsensical conversations. It was to be the technology that would free the lonely, inspire the creative, and enable the fraudulent in their efforts to overcome restraints. We've seen every single aspect of it, and not all benefit us.

More and more people are joining social media, and the global user base is 4 ½ billion strong. The number of people using social media has jumped by 400 million in a year or almost 13 new users per second.

We can only speculate about the enormous potential audiences on these sites, but there are many worries about some media sites like Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter (aka “X”). These social media users will likely use their mobile phones rather than desktop computers at home or the workplace.

Two-thirds of the global population, or about 100,000,000 people, now have access to mobile phones. If you don't have a mobile phone, you are disconnected from one of the largest potential audiences in the world. How must that feel? There is the potential to make anyone without a…

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Dr. Patricia Farrell
Dr. Patricia Farrell

Written by Dr. Patricia Farrell

Dr. Farrell is a psychologist, consultant, author, and member of SAG/AFTRA, interested in flash fiction writing (http://bitly.ws/S94e) and health.

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