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Social media and the impact on teenagers
How social media affects teenage lives
How social media affects teenage lives
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Introduction
Self-portraits serve as a remembrance of an important moment of someone’s life that can be shared with others. Along the way, people began to use self-portraits not only just to capture moments of their lives, but also to refocus the way they viewed themselves. Nowadays, these self-portraits are called selfie. The term selfie was first used on Flickr in 2004, but it took almost a decade to reach the masses. According to Oxford Dictionary (2013), selfie is defined as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a Smartphone or webcam and uploaded to any social media website”. People now live in a time when sharing photos online is not only common but also an accepted pillar of someone’s digital identity. Every individual is easily captured by what is new with its surrounding. People are governed by things around him such as the social media. And technology is adapting this social trend of self-portraits to rule the world. In this growing generation, preteens and adolescents are now ruling the world. And the rise of selfie is a concrete proof.
Selfies are easy to do, yet they can also horribly ruin one’s life. In this study, the researchers want to know how taking selfies can change a person’s personality especially for the youngsters. To be specific, the researchers want to identify the potential harmful effects that may arise from sharing “selfie” in the social media. This study will provide brief description of the different significance of selfie as a way of expressing oneself or as a form of addiction which leads to narcissism. This study will help the students of the institute to be aware about the psychological facts of “selfie” and how it can affect them.
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...ies with different online “friends” relates the positive and negative effects to the individual’s psychological behaviour and its relationships to other people. We also found out that photographs shared to particular others showed both a positive and negative effect in comparison to a general online ‘friends’. For example, partners sharing more photographs of family is may positively correspond to support, whereas partners sharing more photographs of friends is corresponds negatively to intimacy.
However, In order to fully understand the processes underlying the connection between photograph sharing and real life relationship quality, further research is required that may be consider the device used to view the photograph. For example, viewing a photograph from a smartphone in any environment could be more intrusional the viewing photograh from a desktop computer.
Although Rachel Simmons in “ Selfies Are Good for Girls” and Erin Ryan in “ Selfies Aren’t Empowering. They’re a Cry for Help”, both agree selfies can show accomplishments. However, Simmons believes selfies are a way for young women to boost their pride whereas Ryan defines them as a way to gain social approval confirmation. Simmons believes selfies are empowering, and increase self-confidence levels of young women. According to Simmons “selfie is a tiny pulse of girl pride - a shout-out to the self (P4)”. In other word, she believes self-portrait gives teenage girls an outlet to express pride within themselves. She explains how selfie not only express pride, it is also a way for young women to share their accomplishments, as shown in the
For centuries, humans have used their interaction with one another to help shape outsiders' perceptions of them. Often communication experts refer to this as constructing one’s “social identity.” For many years, this projection of self-came through interpersonal communication; face-to-face communication or other forms of personal interaction. In the progress of technology, this development of one’s personal attributes has come to include photographs, letters, published and unpublished writings, and physical attributes. Many aspects of a person’s “identity” as others see it are difficult and almost impossible to define. In the modern age, such vague characteristics are both helped and hindered by using social media and the internet to “construct”
This paper will examine the effects that social media and magazines tend to have on individuals. To help determine the effects of these kinds of media on the self, this paper will discuss what the “self” is. It will also look at the different types of social media and magazines while examining the positive and negative aspects these kinds of media contribute to the self. The constant ongoing debate happens to be what is deemed to be the actual definition of the word self.
The essay How You See Yourself by Nicholas Mirzoeff discusses the evolution of art. The author discusses the use of art to represent changing identities over the years including cultural practices and societal expectations. The selfie, according to Nicholas Mirzoeff’s essay, is the equivalent of a self-portrait in the previous centuries preceding the technological development required for the present day selfie. The essay explores the different periods and the significance of art, particularly self-portraits, the selfies of the time, and their development over time. The author focuses on different themes including heroism, gender definition, and the focus of an image. Mirzoeff effectively provides examples illustrating and reinforcing the themes he highlights in his essay.
Technology has advanced a lot and has been greatly impacting our lives since the Industrial Revolution. The appearance of the mobile phone, the computer, and the tablets have all changed our ability to communicate with people around the world. Although technologies have greatly improved our lifestyle, they have brought many negative effects on our relationships and happiness as well, for instance distorting people's views on one another and bringing more loneliness to people's lives. Many people believe that benefited by social media platforms such as Facebook, it is now not necessary to talk to someone in person in order to effectively communicate with one and know one’s life. Others, however, believe that technology alone cannot replace
In our culture, technology serves as an instrumental aspect of our lives. Regardless of where you turn, you are constantly surrounded by technology. Whether it is our cellphones that spend their entire lives within an arm’s reach of us, our computers, or the newest wave of technology that is moving us towards tablets, much of our life is lived in front of screens. With these advancements comes the notion that there is an application that can solve every life problem we may have. Thanks to technological advancements like text messaging or social media networks, there are plenty of ways a relationship can be sustained for a significant period without personal contact. Unfortunately, most people have a misconstrued belief that these resources are a great substitute for personal time in relationships that have periods of long distance separation. Scientists and relationship experts debate the usefulness of technology in relationships and many do not share the above mentioned belief. They debate if technology helps sustain relationship or helps ruin relationships. Just as social media can be a great way of keeping up with others while they are away, it can also be used to spy on others and assume an intimate connection between anyone who posts on your significant other’s wall often.
Selfie-Loathing: Here’s Why Instagram Is Even More Depressing than Facebook. Slate Magazine. Retrieved from http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/07/instagram_and_self_esteem_why_the_photo_sharing_network_is_even_more_depressing.html
There are many positive sides to forming relationships via the internet. Online communities may offer a safe environment for the user to feel welcome and among peers due to commonalities between themselves. Using the internet to form relationships may benefit the user by providing mental stimulation, an increase in self esteem due to receiving praise from others, and by comparing oneself to others (Zywica & Danowski, 2008, p.8).
Ever since selfies started trending, this generation started caring only about how their pictures turned out. People nowadays stop everything they may be doing to capture the perfect selfie. Selfie sticks were also recently created to add more to this silly picture. After this trend, many apps came out to edit and perfect ones selfie. Eventually, these apps may lead to over editing and maybe even towards younger people. Teens stop focusing on school work and more on how to keep their online audience entertained. In fact, it has become sort of a competition to see who has the lost Instagram followers or likes on our selfies.
The online photograph sharing, storytelling app has challenged the way people identify themselves. It has help raise the question of which identity is more important in today’s digital age? Self-identity is the “verbal conceptions we hold about ourselves and our emotional identification with these conceptions.” Social identity is the “expectations and opinions that others have of us.” (Kitzmann, Lecture 12) Instagram allows its users to post photographs of anything they choose, however at times these photos give people to challenge the idea of appearance versus reality. The use of photo editing apps is just an example of a way that users are able to fix the imperfections they see in order to make the picture “instagram worthy.” The appearance of the photograph is flawless when in reality it took several minutes (or hours) to take over fifty selfies and to edit the perfect one before it was considered for posting. This is how the app challenges hegemonic practices of beauty. In the fall of 2015, a model by the name of Essena O’Neil decided to quit instagram. For most people, they would assume that she deleted the app or deactivated her account; however she kept her account running only to re-caption her old pictures. O’Neil went back to her old posts and changed their captions, exposing all of
What we post, share and do online depends mainly on two things. Firstly, the "friends" and our relationships with them on a social platform (Rowe, 2010). For each different relationship we have with people we choose to share certain information about ourselves, for example you won't share the same information with your friends than what you share with your mother or even your partner. As mentioned by (Rowe, 2010) th...
Photography has created an outlet for the masses to story tell. It has a way of speaking without words like most art forms and is a manner of expression in itself. To eradicate photography from humans would be equivalent to taking away a limb from humankind. Our society has grown an immense amount of dependency on it. Photography has become almost a daily menial task such as brushing your teeth; where we must take pictures of the things we deem important or equally unimportant, even more so with the invention of social media outlets such as Instagram and Snapchat, where photography is the main source of communication between people who use them. Susan Sontag offers the basis of what taking pictures can undertake in both our daily lives and moments that are not part of our daily lives, such as travel. Traveling to places where one is not accustomed can flare pent up anxiety. A way to subdue that anxiety could be through taking pictures, since it’s the only factor that we have total control over in a space where we don’t have much, or, any control of our surrounding environment. On the other hand, taking photos can also be a tool of power in the same sense as it allows for it to be a defense against anxiety. With the camera in our hands, we have the power to decide who, what, where, when, and why we take a picture. This in turn also gives the person who took the picture power over those who later analyze the photos, letting them decide the meaning of the photo individually, despite the intended or true meaning.
which people communicate. How people form and maintain relationships are evolving in light of Internet-based technologies, most recently with the rise of social networking websites. Furthermore, these sites alter previously held beliefs related to identity formation and maintenance, as users may choose to share as much or as little personal information – whether true or fabricated – as they like with other users. These changes impact relationships in the offline world both positively and negatively. Although today people carry out their day-to-day relationships online, social media have weakened the meaning of friendship and emotional connections. In discussion of whether or not social media affects relationships positively or negatively, a differing viewpoint has been offered by William Deresiewicz in his essay “Faux Friendship” and Clive Thompson in his essay “I’m so digitally close to you”. On one hand Deresiewicz ridicules the use of online social networking in today’s society. On the other hand, Thompson contends and talks about how Facebook has positively changed the world.
Several decades ago, communications philosopher Marshall McLuhan spoke about the development of the Global Village and how the evolution of new technologies would help connect people on opposite sides of the world, creating online communities that would break boundaries and borders. While this change has been recognized, so too has the idea explored by his successors in which while individuals were expected to look at others in the world through a telescope, they have alternatively developed the tendency to look at themselves through a microscope. As the era of worldwide connectivity began, so did the era of ‘me, me, me’. Both the hardware and the software of the new millennium, inclusive of the iPhone’s forward-facing camera, and apps that allow one to fix blemishes and whiten teeth, have adapted to allow this change to an inward focus. While this has certainly caught on, it has also begun to cause a lot of problems. The act of posting about the self began to be seen as a negatively self-centered one when Facebook NewsFeeds were filled with egotistic stories and ‘Selfies,’ photos of the self. Shortly after, the application Instagram was created, where the occurrence of the Selfie was magnified to a greater degree. This intensive focus inward, and the way these pieces of media are shared, have made some individuals reliant on the positive expressions of others for self-confidence and social approval. When self-esteem is intertwined with how many ‘likes’ a photo gets on a mobile application, we start to see a shift in how self-awareness is formed, what people will do for this approval, and how some will react to a lack of attention.
These pictures give users a certain “self-control” that they are able to use to their advantage when posting them on social media. “Alicke (1985) found that the pictures brought out the self-favorable characteristics optimizing ones likeness to the better features of their self” (Re & Rule, 2016). By using selfies it gives the users confidence in how they look and how others will perceive them. In comparison to the models and the seventeen year old teenager described earlier in my paper, selfies typically help to hide the features that one might feel they lack giving them a better perception of how they feel. Selfies include “selfie filters,” or digital photo enhancement tools” to help improve the picture in making what they feel will look better to others and themselves” (Re & Rule).These filters typically “blind” others in seeing things as if they really are not. Meaning the pictures used with these “phot enhancements” are not the real person. The pictures are modified to help fit what would be considered to be a more physically attractive look. Those who participate in taking selfies and using these filters can also be possibly subject to harsh criticism in the end though. “If selfies are to help shape ones biases to be more likeable, than selfie-takers may exaggerate how positively their selfies are recognized. This creates possibly a blind spot where others view those filtered selfies as less likeable”(Re & Rule,2016). Basically, those who use these filters and enhancements are more likely to have others perceive their photos as less attractive, because of the amount of what could be described as cover ups they have used toward their photos. This idea may be the case of some because with all these filters those on the outside looking in may feel one is trying to cover up who they really are physically. These filters though are mostly used for