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Belana Sanchez

Professor Rodrick

English 115

1 December 2018

Social Media

Social media has become a part of peoples everyday lives. Before social media was

created, people would interact with each other more in person while hanging out together.

Nowadays that is not the case. As technology advanced, the amount of time people spent on their

electronic device increased because it was made easier for them to use it. For example, when the

first iPhone came out people were intrigued because it was touch and it was something new. Then

not long after, websites and apps where a person is able to connect and communicate with others

was created. Most kids nowadays are on any form of social media first thing in the morning and it

is the last thing they check at night. Constantly being on these sites such as Instagram or

Facebook can have negative effects on a person especially if that person is at an adolescent age

because their brain is still developing. Technology has negatively shaped a person’s identity by

introducing social media which is harmful to adolescents because it damages their self-esteem,

increases their social sensitivity, and creates psychological health issues.

Adolescent childrens' self-esteem is negatively affected by social media because they start

depending on the number of likes they receive to determine how they should feel about

themselves. If a person gets multiple likes on a picture they shared, it will make them feel better

about themselves. In contrast, if someone does not get enough likes they will feel worse about

themselves. In the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Anthony L. Burrow and Nicolette
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Rainone studied how likes on the social media site Facebook can affect a person's thought about

themselves by examining and studying a specific person’s likes. They concluded, “Because

receiving positive feedback can signal acceptance within one’s social environment, we predicted

that self-esteem would increase as a function of the number of likes one received on their personal

photographs” (Burrow 3). This means that as likes increase, a person's self-esteem increases as

well and they start to feel more accepted in our social society with the more likes they receive.

People worry not only about what they post but about how many likes their post will receive. This

can have extremely negative effects on someone if they did not receive the likes they wanted as it

can damage the way they view themselves. This is harmful because kids should not grow up

relying on likes to determine their own self-conceit and self-worth.

Social media makes people vulnerable to others, and potentially strangers since people are

posting about their own personal lives for another person to see and in a sense, judge. In

Personality and Individual Differences, multiple students ran an experiment to determine the

correlation between social sensitivity and social media by making participates take either a selfie

or a picture of a cup and giving them the option to post it either online or not share it at all. Their

studies found that “people present themselves on various social media platforms to strengthen

their own self-concept, and they also become more sensitive to others’ posts and comments”

(Shin 25). In other words, the main reason people post pictures on social media is to see how

others perceive them which can make a person more sensitive to online comments. Because social

media allows others to freely respond to a person’s post, people have started to care a lot more

about what others say. They start to become more vulnerable to valuing other people’s opinions

before their own. The more exposed and defenseless a person becomes, the more vulnerable
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they become as well and social media creates a platform in which a person becomes more public.

Social media is also linked to serious health issues such as anxiety and depression. In the

Journal of Adolescence, Heather Cleland Woods and Holly Scott studied 467 adolescents to

determine how often they use social media and how it affected them psychologically. They

concluded, “we therefore expect that emotional investment in social media - which includes

feeling upset and disconnected from others when unable to access social media sites - will be

associated with higher anxiety and depression levels” (Woods 8). Teens and kids use social media

a lot more now. It has became a part of their daily routine to check it. They use it so much that

they become emotionally invested in it. When they are not able to access it, they can become

depressed because their minds got used to using it so much that it can cause the feeling of

something being absent. When they are not on social media, it creates anxiety because they fear

they are missing out on something online. Depression and anxiety are serious psychological

issues that are forged by the addiction to social media.

At this point in time, technology has become a part of a normal person's everyday life.

People rely on it to stay connected to others through the use of social media. People end up

depending on social media to determine how they should think about themselves. In addition to

this, research has proven that it affects our health by creating psychological issues that were not

their before. Adolescents are the ones who become the most affected by social media since they

are still developing and they are the ones who use social media the most. The negative extent

technology has shaped identities online has affected people in real life by making their lives more

adverse mentally. The picture is an example of how technology has shaped identities in real life.

It shows every single kid being on their phone and the only interaction they are having with each
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other is by looking at something on their device together. It shows technology disconnects us

from reality.
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Works Cited

Burrow, Anthony L. and Nicolette Rainone. “How many likes did I get?: Purpose moderates links

between positive social media feedback and self-esteem.” ​Journal of Experimental Social

Psychology, ​vol. 69, March 2017, pgs 232-236.​ ScienceDirect,

doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2016.09.005​. Sept 23 2018.

Shin, Youngsoo. “Selfie and Self: The effect of selfies on self-esteem and social sensitivity.”

Personality and Individual Differences, v​ ol. 11, June 2017, pgs 139-145. ​ScienceDirect,

doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2017.02.004​. Sept 23 2018.

Woods, Heather Cleland and Holly Scott. “#Sleepyteens: Social media use in adolescence is

associated with poor sleep quality, anxiety, depression and low self-esteem.” ​Journal of

Adolescence, ​vol. 51, August 2016, pgs 41-49. ​ScienceDirect,

doi.org/10.1016/j.adolescence.2016.05.008​. Sept 23 2018.