Assignment #3 by Carson Dumais

The 2 main Social Networking Sights (SNS) that I use on a daily basis include Instagram and Snapchat. I started keeping track of how much I use each app on a daily basis from October 25th-28th and it turned out I use these apps much more then what I had imagined. In total I spent around 1 hour on each of these apps a day, and although I didn’t create or alter anything in this time span I did a lot of consuming and sharing. The picture I have above is a post I re-posted on my instagram story of my favorite basketball team winning a game. 

With these 2 SNS’s there are lots of positives that come with them. The most obvious one is communication. By using these apps you are able to text your friends, call your friends and share posts with your friends all with a tap on your phone. This can be very useful when trying to plan things to do during your day and also keeping up to date with your friends and what they have going on in their life. We now no longer have to send off letters in the mail to check up on family, instead we can just slide chat them on snapchat and talk or send them a text message in instagram DM’s to see how they are doing and get a response almost instantly. 

But of course, with everything in life there are always negatives to using these apps. One of the main ones would have to be cyber bullying. We are now witnessing it more than ever as it is so easy for people to message others with very negative messages, and although some people have learnt to tune out the negative people; There are others who have a very hard time dealing with that negativity. Another negative is addiction, lots of people have openly stated that they are addicted to social media such as instagram and snapchat as they love communicating with others and posting pictures of themselves on these apps at all times. Some teenagers even seem to go by the motto of “if I didn’t post it, it didn’t happen” meaning they are constantly posting about things they do on a daily basis to show everyone. Another thing with SNS’s like these is eye strain. When looking at a screen for hours on end watching highlights of basketball or whatever it may be on instagram your eyes start to become very sore and strained. This can lead to eye sight problems in the future and having to get glasses. 

My behaviour and expectations have changed drastically over this past year because I have relied on SNS’ for basically everything I did during this span. One expectation in which I  never had before but I never can get away from now is business on instagram. Evangelos Moustakas stated “Social media has been used heavily for business purposes while communicating with customers and promoting new products or services. Because there is a direct connection between communications and promotion, social media was easily integrated in the marketing field.” Before COVID I saw an ad maybe once every 20 times I went on it but now everytime I open up Instagram the first thing I expect to see is ads as this app has had such a high usage rate as of recently. SNS’s have also completely changed our behaviour and the way us students think and study as “It directly causes the gradual drop of grades of students. It directly affects a student’s academic performance if the student invests his time in social networking sites instead in his studies. Paul, J.A., Baker, H. M. & Cochran, J.D. (2012).” This basically means students have been so distracted and drawn to their phone that they now are spending less time studying and more time socializing, which is leading to a negative impact on their grades.

Works Cited

Kumari Kalra, R. Et al. published: August 2013 Effect of Social Networking Sites on Academic Achievement Among Introverts and Extroverts. Retrieved October 28, 2021, from http://www.ajssh.leena-luna.co.jp/AJSSHPDFs/Vol.2(3)/AJSSH2013(2.3-43).pdf

Moustakas, E. (n.d.). The impact of social networking on consumer behaviour. The Impact of Social Networking on Consumer Behaviour . Retrieved October 28, 2021, from https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Evangelos-Moustakas/publication/291691535_The_impact_of_Social_Networking_on_consumer_behaviour/links/56a4cca708ae1b651132638e/The-impact-of-Social-Networking-on-consumer-behaviour.pdf.