Burns 1 Daniel Burns Mr.

Padgett ENGL 1102 February 4, 2014 Social Media in Society Context Social media has been a part of my life since early childhood. Ever since my first experience through AIM Instant Messaging in the third grade, it has been a part of my regular day to day life. Social media has evolved a lot since AIM Instant Messaging, everything from Myspace, to the new forms of social media such as Instagram and Vine today. Through the rise and demise of my many online accounts, I have had my ups and downs with social media as a whole. Throughout my life social media has played different roles, some being more significant than others, but as I have grown up it has turned out to be a smaller part of my everyday life. In the most recent years I only access social media a couple times a day through my computer or mobile device. When I was introduced to social media, it was so appealing to me because it was my only way to be in contact with my friends outside of school, but nowadays its just the opposite. Now it is almost impossible to escape the lives we students live at school. We are in constant communication whether it is through texting, Facebook, or another form of social media. This constant communication students live in can lead to unhealthy lifestyles filled with no alone time, insensitivity to human interaction, and low self-esteem. Although I do not find much use for social media, large portions of my generation are avid Facebookers and Tweeterers which causes some major problems to society. I believe social media causes
Comment [AP3]: How do you know all this? Comment [AP2]: What does this mean? Try to avoid overly ambiguous language. Comment [AP1]: Wow, this young.

Burns 2 problems to society such as subliminal social exclusion, obsession with the status of peoples online accounts, and procrastination. Inquiry Can social media cause subliminal social exclusion? It is a well-known and widely accepted fact that social media houses one of the most prominent places for cyber bullying to occur. Cyber bullying is a very serious problem that can lead to social exclusion. But there is another form of social exclusion through social media that often gets swept under the rug due to the magnitude of the problems cyber bullying causes. I like to call it subliminal social exclusion. Subliminal social exclusion is when a group of people always takes copious amounts of pictures to let the social media world know how much fun they are having. Everyone knows a group of people that every time they get together have to post every single thing they do on some sort of social media site. So what harm can the posting all of these pictures of social plans online cause? I believe that when people post everything they do on social sites, that it can subliminally make others feel socially excluded. When someone is looking through social media and looking through all of the fun social events that other people are experiencing and posting, they are likely to feel depressed and socially excluded. Although the culprits of the picture postings may not be trying to intentionally harm someone, their posting pictures to achieve some social status harms the emotions of others. In todays society technology is nearly unescapable inescapable especially as a student; almost every class requires some form of Web work or computer usage. When doing these assignments keeping on task is very difficult, after all you basically have the universe at your fingertips. Is it possible for social media to be a major cause of students procrastination? Because social media is such an important part of a lot of peoples lives, using it as a form of
Comment [AP8]: I think the answer to this question is that it probably contributes to procrastination. But if not for social media, there would be other things people would do instead of their actual work. Namely video games. At least that was my source of procrastination when I was a student. Comment [AP7]: Okay. To me this seems to speak to the insecurities of those who feel excluded. Comment [AP4]: Okay, so are you saying that there are more negative consequences from sm than positive? How do you know these things? Are you just conjecturing? Be careful about making overly broad statements. You should be inquiring into these things, not assuming expertise on the subjects already. Comment [AP5]: See, now youre asking questions you seemed to have the answers to in the previous paragraph. Comment [AP6]: Does cyber bullying exist outside of social media?

Burns 3 procrastination and distraction is very common and very easy. If you sit in the back of a classroom that permits laptop usage, you will see a significant amount of the screens scrolling through various social media sites. This not only directly distracts the user of the laptop, but a lot of the surrounding students who look at what the user is doing on the laptop. While distracting students inside the classroom is a widespread problem, social media also distracts students outside of the classroom. When students have to do assignments outside of the classroom on computers or a tablet device, distractions are very tempting. One of the most common distractions is social media, which leads a student to procrastinate on an assignment due to scrolling through Facebook or Twitter. Im sure someone in this class used social media to procrastinate this assignment. When a student finds their way to a social media site when theyre supposed to be working on an assignment, they can spend hours procrastinating and putting them farther behind in a class. Although it is ultimately up to the student to decide whether to work on an assignment or go to social media, the dependence on social media feeds the ability to prioritize it over school. Social media has created great opportunities for a lot of people and businesses, some people have found their big breaks through social media. This sense of success some people have achieved through social media has spawned an obsession over becoming famous through sites like Twitter, Instagram, Vine, and much more. Is social media causing people to obsess over their social media status? Some people invest mass amounts of time and resources into trying to be known in a desperate attempt to reach fame. This causes a problem to society because people become so involved in achieving a certain status for themselves online. Examples like team follow back and websites where you can pay for people to follow your accounts show that people are too concerned with the status of their online accounts.
Comment [AP10]: Okay, this is a good question. But I think this also speaks to distraction. Comment [AP9]: True. So I

Burns 4 Next Steps I expect my research to take me to scholarly articles that are written about the negative impact social media has on society. Specific articles will probably include details such as how social media affects the self-esteem of youth, how it affects the grades of youth, and why becoming social network famous is so appealing. I believe my evidence will support my thesis because there will likely to be strong evidence to support the fact that social media negatively affects its users in the specific ways I think it does. When forming my thesis I have to remember to stay specific, because Im not going to be talking about every aspect that negatively affects users of social media, so I have to be sure to include the specific cases of negativity that I am going to be focusing on. Daniel, I think you have some really great and really interesting ideas here. I think you seem most interested in investigating how much of a distraction that social media is. Although, you might find more research if you investigate technology in general. I do want you to be careful about too much conjecture when you compose your research paper. This is why inquiry is so important so we can ask questions and find answers to those questions as opposed to theorizing out of thin air and making unsubstantiated claims. Youre off to a great start, I look forward to seeing how these ideas develop.