THE INDIRECT EFFECTS OF SOCIAL MEDIA ON THE INDIAN ECONOMY

Author: Gnanavell, III year of B.Com.,LL.B.(Hons.) from School of excellence in Law, The Tamil Nadu Dr. Ambedkar Law University , Chennai, Tamilnadu.

Abstract

This blog is an analysis of the Indirect Effects of Social Media on the Indian Economy. We can see as an overview that the social media has nowadays has a greater influence on the life of the every human being. It helped the people to connect easily and share things innovatively. Though it is good on one side, it is on other side making the people to get addictive and unproductive. Thus resulting in the indirect effect of our India’s GDP.

KEY WORDS: Social media, GDP, Algorithms, Internet, Economic growth.

Introduction

Our Indian economy is a developing country for the past 10 to 20 years. Day by day the technology and advancement of techniques are increasing at a rapid growth rate. With the growth of population the consumption of Social media is also increasing slowly and consistently. The influence of social media is vast and wide nowadays. From the 5 year kid to 70 year old man everyone are fond of using social media and creating profiles on it to engage with people. The social media helps to share things with friends and others, which was a very tough and complex in olden times. In a small screen we can able to see whatever things that happened in any corner of the world .Thus the social media usage has nowadays become like a habit that evolved in our day to day life. In this article we will be seeing how the Social media indirectly affects the Indian economy.

The Growth of Social Media Applications in India: An Era

With the widespread availability of internet access, the number of social media users in India has been steadily increasing day by day. The Indian government through the Digital India initiative has also played a significant role in this expansion of Internet usage.

After the Introduction of JIO telecom services in India at 2016, where it offered free unlimited Internet service for every JIO sim users. This offer attracted majority people in India and made the users to buy the Sim at less rate and use the internet at an unlimited rate. From this point the average keypad mobile user started to switch to the smartphone user with abundant availability of internet.

The Indian people started to install the Social media Applications like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok etc.[i]These social media apps made the people to sit at one place and consume the content for many Hours. It made the people addictive to the apps and affecting the productivity and their work. As the technology increases on one side the Cybercrime rates also started to increase on other side. Thus this how the Social media apps of other countries started to enter into our Indian market with the advent of Internet.

How Social media affects India’s GDP

According to research data people in wealthy countries spend lesser time on social media. But in our India we are obsessed over these lip sync and dance videos. Also the countries like china promote these crappy videos in the social media feed throughout the world through algorithms but when you use the same apps in china they have more intelligent content videos in the feed and that’s something to think about. We can see that the European countries where social media is used less their GDP is way more than Asian countries where social media is used a lot and people are obsessed with it.

So how do such videosaffect our GDP by watching and getting addicted such content we are not getting smarter, in turn it affects our productivity and it affects our GDP as we are sitting like an idol and watching the videos in Tiktok , YouTube etc. On an average Indians spend 2.3 hours to 3 hours on social media everyday by watching short reels and videos in Social media applications.

The Major Social media apps in India are foreign based applications. They design the apps according to the human mentality to get addictive more and more they use. In such way through the advertisements in the middle of videos they generate a lot of income. Thus an individual’s productive time is converted as money by these social media applications.

Increased Social Media Influence during Covid-19

In the year 2020, when India was gripped by the Covid-19 pandemic, many people turned to social media to gather information or express themselves by making videos, singing songs. This pandemic period made everyone to have mobile phones and laptops in their hands compulsory in the name of online classes, Meetings, Work from home and many more. Many people gained fame as well as defame through social media.As the number of people using social media increased, the internet community were also growing very wider and larger.

This has made the children as well as youngsters to get addicted to games, social media apps and porn. To say the bitter truth according to data the more than 40% of youngsters in our India are addicted to pornographic contents. This has increased as many are at home and lonely. Thus the social media has spoiled many young minds by making them addictive to these unwanted videos.

Social Media Active users in India

The number of active social media users in India stood at 330 million in 2019 and is expected to rise to 448 million by 2023. And Also 290 million active social media user access social media networks via mobile devices. Whereas the total number of Internet users in India has risen to 658 million, accounting for roughly 47% of the total population in India.

​PLATFORM	​ACTIVE USERS (IN MILLIONS)
​Facebook	​491.53
​Instagram	​503.37
​MX TakaTak	153.97
​Moj	151.34
​Twitter	​ 295.44

Income generation from Social media

Many of us would have a doubt that how social media apps are making money out of it. The Social media applications like Youtube, Instagram generates advertisements to the users and they collect the money for those ads from the companies. The Different Users may have different ads according to the algorithms. They show ads to the users accordingly what the user likes in nature by use of cookies. Cookies is a like a storage which shows the search and web data of the user. For example if you searched for a watch in chrome, the ads may show the watch advertisements whichever website you open in future time period. Cookies save your preference and your data.

The Social Media users also nowadays generating money from it. They create some Content videos and they earn money from it. For example an average youtuber uploads a video and earns money through the views of audience and the subscription amount. Nowadays earning from social media have become a trend. The general concept is more the views, likes the more the money. [iii]

Conclusion

The Social Media’s power is so unjudgeable in nature. The Social media is more advantageous in nature. But still there are also some disadvantages in it like addictiveness, over usage, being unproductive and many more. Also the social media cuts the physical interactivity between the people and turns into introvert in future time period. The more serious issue is that many people used the power of social media to bully others. So everything is fine until the limit is crossed. Thus the social media apps will be useful if we use it in a wise way.

Endnotes [i]https://islandtimesoloexploration.weebly.com/conclusion.html#:~:text=Social%20media%20changed%20our%20life,a%20good%20change%20for%20us.

[ii]https://www.theglobalstatistics.com/india-social-media-statistics/ [iii]https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/socialmedia#:~:text=Social%20media%20is%20a%20collective,friends%2C%20family%20and%20various%20communities