The Idea of an Essay, Volume 2

100 both promising benefits and devastating consequences. Social media carries the potential to effectively educate, unite, and enrich the medical community (White Paper 1). For example, websites such as Facebook offer nurses the ability to deepen connections with coworkers and process stress experienced at work, activities which can reduce emotional burnout. However, these benefits can also lead to harmful consequences when abused. Social media can improve the emotional health of nurses by fostering relationships among coworkers and encouraging meditative journaling; however, it largely erodes the security of the medical field because it incites nurses to violate patient confidentiality. Social media significantly impacts the lives of millions, and before exploring this subject it is necessary to understand its definition and scope. Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary defines social media as “forms of electronic communication… through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content.” Variations of social media include blogs, podcasts, and sites such as YouTube, Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook (NSNA 1). Under the umbrella of social media, Facebook is one of the most popular websites, boasting of approximately 800 million users (McAndrew 2359). On any given day, approximately half of these individuals log in to their account to update information, peruse friends’ pages and photographs, and chat with other users (2359). Social media saturates the lives of the world today; millions turn to it when communicating with friends, working, expressing emotions, keeping informed about current events, exercising, and traveling. As a result, lines are often blurred separating work, play, and time with friends. Like an oil spill, the use of social media is extremely challenging to control. Because it is convenient to use, versatile, and massively popular, it presents a formidable challenge for those attempting to regulate it. Consequently, members of the healthcare profession face great difficulty in addressing this problem, and the answers to this dilemma are far from black-and-white. When used properly, social media provides desirable benefits to the medical community. Specifically, it can potentially promote emotional and mental health among nurses, a group of individuals who dealt with an enormous amount of stress on a daily basis. According to the National Institute for Occupational Safety