A lot of people believe that social media doesn’t have a large impact on their lives, including older generations. Whether it be ego or not, we are all certainly incorrect. Despite not wanting to admit it, social media consumes my life. The three platforms I use the most are Snapchat, Instagram, and Tiktok. In the past three days I have received 55 snapchats, 0 Tiktok messages, 4 Instagram messages, and 49 text messages. I rarely respond to text messages unless it is my family, so I wouldn’t say I use it, I don’t even read them a lot of the time. Media and SMS have had a large impact on everyone, but mostly in teenagers from ages 13-18. Depression and suicide rates have increasingly gone up due to social media. Personally, Instagram and Tiktok have been quite damaging to my sense of self, self-worth, and has caused great insecurities within me. There are “fake” lifestyles portrayed on them, and unrealistic beauty standards that I always wish to achieve, regardless of knowing they’re fake. Snapchat, in my opinion, is censored to those aspects considering it is just a form of communication and to send photos to friends that disappear after, but I believe this feature has allowed for bullying, sexual assault, and harassment because individuals know that their photos and messages will go away after viewing. But why don’t we choose to delete them?
Instagram and Tiktok are insanely good for spreading awareness and educating users on topics that the higher medias like the news choose not to discuss, such as the issues in Afghanistan and Palestine. Certainly, there can be false information spread through it, but that can occur within everything. Snapchat has a positive side to it which is we can easily stay in touch with our friends and can share photos of what we are doing. As time goes on, SMS apps have started to become more and more alike. Instagram used to be just for sharing photos, but now it has “Instagram reels” and stories. Instagram reels are basically just Tiktoks, and the stories correlate to Snapchat stories. And now, even snapchat has videos that are like Tiktok. We all sit here day in and day out switching between these apps despite them all being almost the same thing. It is rather depressing, and now according to my scholarly articles, users of media are starting to question their own beliefs, traditions, culture, and their overall self. There is now a theory called “Self-Persuasion Theory” which discusses how much we question ourselves due to media. As media progresses and we share more of our lives, hackers become more prevalent. As one of the articles says, hacking is insanely easy because of how much we put on social media and how advanced technology is.
https://academic.oup.com/hcr/article/43/4/477/4670707?login=true
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2167702617723376