Lauren Sullivan Final Paper

        Social Media: The 21st Century Plague    

              “We are what we share” (Leadbeater) is a powerful quote from Charles Leadbeater’s book, We Think: The Power of Mass Creativity. In this day and age, what you share on social media is a true definition to our character. Before you are accepted for a job, the company will go through your Facebook because what you post on social media exemplifies an unaltered version of you. Our generation and the ones to follow are the ages of technology. Everything is digitalized, our lives are documented and information spread faster because of it. Social media has provided us with the opportunities to keep in touch with people all over the World, find out information at a quicker speed, and have something to do at all times. However, it has many lasting negative effects on us personally and culturally. At some point, we should slow down and look at the irreversible damage that it has caused to our generations. Damage such as we cannot go a day without our phones in our hands because of fear of missing out, we cannot have face-to-face conversations, we post things for likes to boost our own self-esteem; we forgot how to enjoy the real world. In the twenty first century the increased dependency on social media in the younger generations of the United States has unforgivingly changed the way we interact with one another face to face and on the Internet.

            Facebook, though commonly believed to be, is not the beginning of social media. Social media was first initiated in 1978 when the first, public, computer-generated program, Bulletin Board System or BBS, was developed. The uses of BBS were simple, “to inform friends of meetings, make announcements and share information through postings” (Curtis). Later, in 1985 American Online (AOL) emerged and after this social media starts to become more popular. 1997, blogging becomes a fad and AOL chatting arises bringing instant messaging and away messages, connecting us to each other faster than ever before. 1998, Google becomes a search engine and will later become one of the richest companies in the modern world. 2001, the largest online encyclopedia, Wikipedia is open to the public and this same year Apple starts to sell IPods. This when I was in the third grade. For our generation, it is hard to remember life before Wikipedia, Google, IPods, etc. In 2003, social media as we know it develops. MySpace was introduced to the social networking addicts in 2003 and in 2004 the one and only Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook. Though, Facebook stayed between college students for two years until it was opened to the public in 2006, the same year Twitter was launched. It is mindboggling how quickly social media changed and evolved and what is almost more unbelievable to grasp is that privacy concerns did not surface until 2011 (Curtis). In 2011, almost 50% of Americans used social media sites regularly ("Are Social Networking Sites Good for Our Society?"). In just two years, that statistic has jumped from about 50% to “Some 73% of online adults now use a social networking site of some kind” (Duggan, and Smith). That is a staggering number to grasp; almost 3/4s of the online population use some sort of social media.

           In particular, the dependency of social media on the youth of society has caused irreversible damage socially. One being we are more distracted in social situations. You see people glued to their phones during social gatherings. A study at the USC Annenberg School showed that 47% of 18-32 year olds text or use social media during meals (“Are Social Networking Sites Good for Our Society?”). Face-to-face interactions are becoming less common among the youth of America. Another issue emerging from dependency on social media is the inability for face-to-face confrontation. Texting fights are more common than meeting up to talk in person. Texting is less effective because through a text message you cannot express emotion. You are more likely to say something over text message than when talking to someone in person. This is a growing problem among young adults; fear of confrontation. Confronting face-to-face is braver, more creditable, and more amicable than confronting someone behind the keyboard. Conversely, we still choose to fight over text messaging or by subtweeting someone because social media has changed the way we approach communicating and psychologically changing the minds of generations in the process. 

“Psychologically, in some weird, twisted way, we associate “likes,” comments and shares with self-worth” (Kong). According to the dictionary, self-esteem means a realistic respect for or favorable impression of oneself; self-respect. However, today we associate self-esteem with how other people perceive us. We boost our self-esteem by getting other peoples admirations. Instragram has filters because we are not confident in ourselves that the picture we are posting is worthy of our followers’ approvals, so we add a filter, altering. For what? The answer is because we want our friends to like our pictures to increase our self worth. That is a messed up way of thinking but it is subconsciously the way the youths of the United States think. We are obsessed with getting approbation of our fellow social networkers. If not to get their appreciation of your post, it is to try to one up them. This is a nauseating spiral of lowering generations’ self-esteem since 1978.

FoMO, otherwise known as fear of missing out is the phenomenon that we all experience from one degree to another. If you are saying to yourself no I do not think this applies to you then why are you using technology? Why do you have a smartphone, a laptop, a television, a Facebook, or a Twitter? The truth is technology and the various forms of the media has brainwashed us and changed our culture completely. We need to know where our friends are, what they are doing and you feel the need to tell other people what your doing and thinking. WHY? The answer is we have a “…Fear of Missing Out – popularly referred to as FoMO. Defined as a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent, FoMO is characterized by the desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing” (Przybylski, Kou, DeHaan, and Gladwell). We feel the need to constantly be connected on social media sites. As of 2013, “Almost a third of young adults 18-24 use social media in the bathroom” (Curtis). A funny statistic, but it shows our strange culture is. We have waterproof phones cases, so now we are enabled to stay connected while swimming in a pool or taking a shower. We are all guilty of it at some point, whether it be texting, emailing, Facebook-ing, tweeting, blogging, etc. Young adults struggle with this fear of missing out of something and it destroys us psychologically and emotionally.

However, it works both ways. Young adults post things to show other that they are doing something fun, in a way of showing off. Why do we feel the need to post pictures at parties, traveling, having a good time? We take pictures to have personal memory, why do we then feel the overwhelming need to show it to all of your Facebook friends? To show off, to let other people know what you are doing, to let them know you are doing something potentially better than whatever they are doing? Just the other day, my grandmother sent me a package containing pictures of memorable experiences from my senior year; prom, senior banquet, graduation and traveling. She attached a sticky-note to the pictures saying "Don't throw these away, these are memories". It struck me, these pictures; hard, printed out, concrete, real pictures are memories. Not virtual, pictures stored on a computer drive. Its a nostalgic feeling and also a feeling of sadness. Future generations may not experience these, as printing pictures appear to be a dying fad. Younger people  now take a picture to show off on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook. Future generations will have to check Facebook, Twitter and other social media to see how we lived in our teen years, not look through a shoe box of old pictures with the date of the picture neatly written on the back. Pictures are memories, not something to show off. Miranda Lambert has a song out called, Automatic. She sings off how different life was before everything became 'automatic'. It really in captures how different past generations lived and how we culturally have completely changed over to a digital world and left the manual world behind us.
Posting things on social media It is becoming a larger problem when it comes to posting profanity such as drinking underage, partying, smoking and other less than satisfactory actions can have repercussions that can follow you for life. Posting those things can cause you to miss out on more than a few likes on Facebook. Students are getting expelled, suspended, removed from school activities and so on because of posts on social media. Athletes from the high school level to the professional level are put under a microscope when it comes to what they post. This past October, Bob Cook published an article about high school athletes and social media. He argues that it is "not just posting something stupid -- it's that even an innocent athlete in the wrong place can end up in a photo or video that gets forwarded to the athletic director's office" (Cook). The guilty by association rule being implemented in high school  is getting athlete and other students in trouble just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Furthermore, well-educated and deserving prospective job searchers are not receiving jobs because job recruiters look at your Facebook before your resume. Social media were not created with the intent to cause such problems but problems nonetheless. These problems that are casting a negative shadow on the youth of the United States and is causing permanent damage to our reputations . 

            Our social media sites are a look into a more personal view of who we truly are. Very relevant to the generation of college students (and will be even more for the future generations) is the impact of social media on job and college acceptances. Resumes are one sided and in effect, bias representations of who we are. You put on a resume what you want your potential future boss or admissions office to know about you, your good qualities, accomplishments, skills, etc. What you post social media is your true, unbiased, genuine character. Your social sites show your personality, it shows your social habits; are you outgoing? An introvert? A partyer? Religious? Racist? Family oriented? These qualities can be deal breakers for acceptances into colleges and jobs. For example, imagine that you are applying to be a third grade teacher at a local elementary school and a parent chooses Facebook ‘stalk’ you. All you have on your profile are pictures of you and friends at bars and parties with a cup in your hand in every picture. They are going to think you are unprofessional and unfit to be teaching their young child. However, on paper, your resume, you are a college graduate with a high GPA, many qualifying qualities, extracurricular activities, community service, and the perfect candidate for the job. However, your social media representation of you says otherwise. This is a harsh reality, but it is our reality and we must adapt to it. In a recent study, “Job recruiters reported negative reactions to finding profanity (61%), poor spelling or grammar (54%), illegal drugs (78%), sexual content (66%), pictures of or with alcohol (47%), and religious content (26%) on potential employees’ social media pages” ("Are Social Networking Sites Good for Our Society?"). In the words of Charles Leadbeater, “We are what we Post” (Leadbeater).    

            Social media for all attentive purposes are a way to connect to one another and give us a break from our daily lives. However, some of the problems has changed social networkers psychologically and emotionally, which causes wide spread change in social norms for our and future generations to come. We cannot have face-to-face conversations, we are on our phones during social get-togethers, we are not getting jobs or college acceptances due to our social media. The addiction to social media has caused a legitimate fear of missing out. People are constantly glued to their phones and this sad reality is brilliantly demonstrated in the YouTube video, I Forgot My IPhone. It follows a woman who goes about an average day but without her phone. She notices how often people use their phones instead of interacting with one another. We would notice this as well but we instead are the ones guilty of hiding from social interaction, choosing to live through a virtual, false reality. If you do not think this is true, the next time you go out to lunch look at how often someone picks up his or her phone, neglecting the conversation with a human being to check their phone. A synonym for digital is 'thinking machine', we forget how to think for ourselves, we are overly reliant on our phones for too much of our day to day life. It may seem crazy but that is how our society has culturally changed, loving the digitalized world more than the concrete world. The culture of the United States is evolving into a technological dependent, connected, digitalized nation.  

Work Cited 

"Are Social Networking Sites Good for Our Society?." Social Networking. ProCon.org, 12 Mar 2014. Web. 25 Mar 2014. <http://socialnetworking.procon.org>.

        Cook, Bob. "High School Athlete Makes Federal Case Out Of Twitter-Related Suspension."FORBES. Forbes , 23 Oct. 2013. Web. . <http://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcook/2013/10/23/high-school-athlete-makes-federal-case-out-of-twitter-related-suspension/>.

Curtis, Anthony. "Brief History Of Social Media." . University of North Carolina, n.d. Web. 23 Mar 2014. <http://www2.uncp.edu/home/acurtis/NewMedia/SocialMedia/SocialMediaHistory.html>.

Duggan, Maeve , and Aaron Smith. "Social Media Update 2013." Pew Research Internet Project. Pew Research Center, 30 Dec 2013. Web. 25 Mar 2014. <http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/12/30/social-media-update-2013/>.

Kong, Melissa Joy. "You are Wasting More Time on Social Media Than You Think." Technori . ColorJar, n. d. Web. 25 Mar. 2014. <http://technori.com/2013/06/4262-the-real-reasons-were-all-addicted-to-social-media/>.

Leadbeater, Charles. We Think: The Power of Mass Creativity. 1. London: Profile Books, 2009. Print.

Przybylski, Andrew, Kou Murayama, Corey DeHaan, and Valerie Gladwell. "Motivational, emotional, and behavioral correlates of fear of missing out." Computers in Human Behavior. (2013): 1841-1848. Web. 24 Mar. 2014. <http://eds.a.ebscohost.com/eds/detail?vid=4&sid=381f2767-e310-4b12-b549-1fca97df2646@sessionmgr4005&hid=4110&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmUmc2NvcGU9c2l0ZQ==

Young , Miles , and Sampaio Manfrinatti, eds. "The Effects of Social Media on How We Speak and Write." SocialMedia Today. N.p., 17 Sept 2013. Web. 24 Mar 2014. <http://socialmediatoday.com/karenn1617/1745751/effects-social-media-how-we-speak-and-write>.