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Which app has the most screentime? What brands do you buy your clothes from? What brands do you buy makeup from? How many of your choices are influenced by social media?
I would say social media permeates almost all areas of life. I, myself, spend a large amount of time on social media. Social media not only influences people on their outfits and use of brands but also disproportionately affects their distribution of time. In this day and age, social media impacts all aspects of lives, particularly those of children.
This is a problem because nothing on social media is real. As social media platforms encourage people to post stories of their lives, the initial aim was to provide people with a platform to share and connect. Unfortunately, things like followers, likes, and comments have changed the purpose of social media. It started becoming a trend. People began to focus more on how to draw others' attention and likes instead of purely sharing their lives. In the process, commercial firms seized these opportunities, avidly collaborating with hot-trend video producers to advertise their products. These videos share their lives but are commercial advertisements that aim to gain profits. Multimedia companies are also arising. They specifically aim to cooperate with such commercial companies and video producers and promise to give them more viewer histories and like counts. Under such combined forces, those videos become extremely popular with hundreds of thousands of likes and comments. However, not all people can identify whether the information they receive is genuine or advertising content. For instance, most teenagers are not capable of making such judgments to measure the credibility of social media contents. They perceive such information as a fashion trend that they must follow and products for recommendation. This can be seen through my personal experiences as well. Almost all my friends around my age admit that they have experienced buying over-advertised products and later realised that this was an irreducible waste of money which was far less quality than how the products were advertised to be. Seeing the huge amount of like counts, teenagers even think the products and contents in the video are more credential. As long as they believe so, the power of social media has the chance to lead teenagers’ speeches and beliefs.
Moreover, information on social media underscores the differences among people and distributes people into different social categories. When these teenagers share the same media and begin to believe so, making the virtual content pose meanings in real life. This stimulates peer pressure to follow the trends. In real life, teenagers in school follow the same fashion trends, beauty standards, and current use of language and slang which are newly invented on social media. If one refuses to participate in following this, they are often isolated from their surrounding social sphere. Although no one purposely isolates them, it is the unfolded consequence because they lack the current ‘social lifestyle’. People follow social media to different extents and are in this way given different labels and categories. As it just suggests, people who rarely follow social media trends are likely isolated from the whole teen social sphere.Teenagers follow social media trends to varying degrees—some rarely follow them, some follow a few, and others follow them completely. Depending on how much they engage with these trends, the external society assigns different values to these teenagers. This kind of difference is unnecessary and makes teenagers feel insecure and inferior compared to others.
Under all of these conditions, how teenagers capture information about the world, and transfer perceptions to knowledge, is distressing. Teenagers are comparing themselves with these societal expectations showcased in social media, including beauty standards, fashion trends, and ways to behave themselves. They enhance their perspectives not by their observations, but voices of other people from social media.
The peer pressure of following social media trends forms harmful social categories as above. The teenagers thereby try to fit in their teen communities by conforming to the crowds. They are unaware of what is the meaning behind the fact of following social media trends, but simply doing it for the sake of being accepted. The functioning of community integration tears apart. Relationships and friendships are no longer purely as before but involve chasing for acceptance from the popular.
Viewing all these aspects, social media is impacting us in every way. Since the unstoppable, rapid development of technology, solutions are running low. Still, we can do our part to raise awareness by keeping an eye out for online discrepancies, forming our own judgements and refusing to blindly conform to the various pressures imposed upon us by social media.
By: Anonymous author
Yorumlar