After completing the Social Media Disorder Scale, I scored a 0 out of 9. I wasn’t stunned by the results I received as I use social media sparingly for a multitude of reasons. My number one reason is that I want to limit the exposure of my life onto the internet as much as possible.

When going through the items listed in the scale the first thing I noticed was that the scale was listed using yes or no answers. Only being able to answer the question with a yes or no doesn’t allow variability in the responses, which may not be able to show the extent to which one of the listed issues exists for an individual. I also think the number of criteria needed to be met to get a formal diagnosis seemed high, though I know I don’t have an understanding of the decisions that were made by the leaders in the study.

I would think that patterns across the world would be different as many nations have different things that they hold near to them and would consider important. With that in mind the way to social media can be used to display that would be quite different. Local family and friend relationships may allow for more in-person interactions that require less need to post about day-to-day activities, whereas others may live further apart increasing the need to post and seek a sudo connection through a digital outlet.