Social Media Ethnography

When I was around the age of twelve, the popular social media app Instagram came out. It was the first time in my life that I had a social media profile and it had a huge affect on my life. It has affected us as a society and changed the way we interact and has also had a big affect on our mental state too.

I have always been a shy reserved person and I get nervous talking in front of a large group. Most people feel that social media has made us as a society lazy and anti-social. Me and my friends have always been able to communicate and keep in touch with each other anywhere we are. I think that it has helped me and a lot of other people in relationships that I have with people I know. I can send them things that are funny and it allows us

to have a better and closer friendship with the ease and convenience of social media. I also think that it does make people who use it more reserved and not as social as we were before. Now a days if a guy wants to talk to a girl he can just message her on twitter or Instagram and he doesn’t have the stress of having to go face to face and have a conversation. It allows people with low confidence or low self esteem to express their opinions and ideas without feeling insecure about themselves. It hurts our mindset in many ways and could affect us as we get more addicted to using it. In jobs if we have to confront someone or we get yelled at we wont have as much experience as our parents or their parents because of our use of social media. It also can build up peoples egos and make people

feel entitled. If someone has a lot of followers and gets a lot of likes they may feel like people care what they post and sometimes they might not even have that many friends or social skills in real life. Many people I follow act totally different on social media than they do in real life. They say and do things on social platforms that they usually don’t do because they feel more empowered by social media. People don’t handle confrontation as easily either. Now if you get in a fight you can just post about someone or talk about them through social media. It hurts relationships and allows people to take the easy way out. It also makes us dependent on news we hear or see. People believe anything they see and it can make us addicted to being on our phones all day. Social media also allows us to become more stressed than we normally are. We see what everyone else says and posts about and it makes us jealous of them or makes us want to be more like them and we start overthinking everything that we see on there. Being on social media can make you up to sixty percent more depressed than you would be without it. People who delete their accounts say they feel more relaxed and don’t feel as stressed as they do when they had their accounts.

Since social media has become mainstream people have had their lives completely changed. We have a less desire to interact with people and we would rather just communicate through technology. In the future it might even get worse as more generations of people grow up with social media from young ages. In my own life it has both helped me and allowed me to stay my reserved and shy self. Even though it has its benefits it has a huge downside as well.