Media Representation In Social Media

Social media is a phrase that we throw around a lot these days, often to describe what we post on sites and apps like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and others. The "social" part refers to interacting with other people by sharing information with them and receiving information from them, while the "media" part refers to an instrument of communication, like the internet. So, from these two separate terms, we can pull together a basic definition: Social media are web-based communication tools that enable people to interact with each other by both sharing and consuming information. Nowadays, social media has assumed a significant role in the tech-savvy nations of the world.It becomes a crucial element in peoples’ lives, no matter genders,

Besides, there is also an impressive mini research done by a journalist, that he separately post similar content on twitter disguising as celebrities of a male and a female. Even though the content is nearly identical, he found that the spoof twitter account received more negative and abusive comments when the poster was portrayed as a female. Therefore, the ubiquity of women using social media does not mirror the representation of women in it, and the response they get plays a significant role towards relative female silence in social media. To emphasize the gender inequality issue on social media,‘flaming’ (being criticized by highly abusive language eg slut-shaming) is only one of the myriads of harassment females usually face in the cyberspace. Other examples include culturally justified violence, which there are jokes promoting rape, and intimate partner violence, which they are threatened to have their naked photos’ videos unveiled to the public, like Jennifer Lawrence and Gillian Chung, a former Hongkong singer. We can see how genders hierarchy still exists and oppresses females in modern days.Though the world is becoming more civilized and people are being more open-minded, we can see that there are still some traditional values embedded in today’s society, like genders are still heavily