3. What have we lost because of the freedom social media gives us?

Social media—especially social media on our smart phones, gives us the freedom to access all sorts of information, knowledge, and people at any time. While there are some major advantages to this technological advancement, I think there are also things we are missing out on.

1. Does social media make us less creative? There have been several studies done about whether or not social media limits our creativity, and as an advertising  major this really caught my attention. How could social media—that is filled with so much creativity be limiting my creativity?

So, our phones are brutally efficient at addressing an ancient desire {boredom}. But is that always a good thing?

At Oxford, England's Social Issues Research Centre, researchers fear it is not. In their view, by filling almost every second of down time by peering at our phones we are missing out on the creative and potentially rewarding ways we've dealt with boredom in days past.

"Informational overload from all quarters means that there can often be very little time for personal thought, reflection, or even just 'zoning out,' " researchers there wrote. "With a mobile (phone) that is constantly switched on and a plethora of entertainments available to distract the naked eye, it is understandable that some people find it difficult to actually get bored in that particular fidgety, introspective kind of way."

What an interesting thought that by constantly filling our downtime with social media, we are depriving ourselves of personal thoughts that lead to creativity. This is a frightening loss from social media.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/25/tech/mobile/oms-smartphones-boredom/

2. Is social media making us lonely?

While social media can connect us to friends and family all over the world—making us feel a strong sense of connection—can it also make us lonely?

In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are. We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information.

The question has intensified in the Facebook era. A recent study out of Australia (where close to half the population is active on Facebook), titled “Who Uses Facebook?,” found a complex and sometimes confounding relationship between loneliness and social networking. Facebook users had slightly lower levels of “social loneliness”—the sense of not feeling bonded with friends—but “significantly higher levels of family loneliness”—the sense of not feeling bonded with family. It may be that Facebook encourages more contact with people outside of our household, at the expense of our family relationships—or it may be that people who have unhappy family relationships in the first place seek companionship through other means, including Facebook. The researchers also found that lonely people are inclined to spend more time on Facebook: “One of the most noteworthy findings,” they wrote, “was the tendency for neurotic and lonely individuals to spend greater amounts of time on Facebook per day than non-lonely individuals.” And they found that neurotics are more likely to prefer to use the wall, while extroverts tend to use chat features in addition to the wall.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-facebook-making-us-lonely/308930/

Social media has give us so much since its creation, but not without costs. Those two costs I listed above, limiting creativity and loneliness, are high costs to pay for social media usage.