Solutions for Social Media Harms: An Media ecological perspective

Abstract

The present study aims to work out solutions for reducing Social Media(SM) harms based on the media ecological perspective. According to media ecology perspective, SM should be addressed at micro-, meso-, exo-, macro-, and chrono-levels. Drawing on meta-synthesis method, Magiran, SID, Noormags, ScienceDirect, Wiley, Springer, Ebscohost, and Sage databases were searched for the data using related keywords. Accordingly, a number of 129 articles were retrieved from the databases. Further analyses on the article titles, abstracts and full texts led to the exclusion of 47, 26, and 14 articles from the set, respectively. Eventually, 42 articles were selected and analyzed as the research sample. The eligibility criteria included peer-reviewed journal articles or full conference papers on social media harms or abuse, published between 2002 -2020, available in English and Persian. As other sources (e.g. dissertations) are not peer-reviewed, and we aimed to identify rigorous best practice literature, we excluded these. The results showed that solutions could be worked out by studying the why and how to use and to participate along with the harms simultaneously. The why and how to use as well as the harms may be determined at micro-, meso-, exo-, macro-, and chrono-levels so that solutions could be proposed at five levels including nurturing time management skills; promoting critical thinking; encouraging family, peer, and colleagues’ participation in creating recreational, sports and leisure contexts; teaching media literacy; passing binding and persuasive laws, then review the historical trend of technology adoption.

Keywords

• virtual social networks, ecology, meta-synthesis, cyberspace