Psychosocial and socio-economic gratifications and repercussions of online social media usage : a literature review

Abstract

Social media has become an integral part of today’s modern world with a reported number of over 3 billion users in 2018. However, research is unable to keep up with the ever growing platform and thus calls for a need to bridge the gap. The purpose of this paper is to present a literature preview of psychological and socio-economic gratifications and repercussions of social media usage. The paper begins with a review of 3 positive psychosocial impact of social media, namely: online socialization, self-promotion and marketing, and social media as an informative platform. Following that, we discussed about 3 psychosocial negative impact of social media, namely: cyberbullying and cyberostracism, malicious envy and negative comparison, and exposure to negative communities. Subsequently, in the following sections, positive and negative socio-economic impacts will be discussed. Positive socio-economic impacts include increased trustworthiness of companies/ brands and increased sales via social learning. While negative socio-economic impacts include cybercrime, social media attacks on psychological resilience and malicious envy in the workplace. Lastly, the review will conclude with directions for future research.