Considering the feedback I got for my Topic Reflection, I decided to narrow my question down to “What are the social and psychological effects of excessive social media use on adolescents?”. After careful consideration of the research reflection, I found it important to research about the social and psychological effects of extreme use of social media by adolescents. As I stated in my topic reflection, younger generations are using social media drastically more in the last decade. Such situations have caused many emotional issues in adolescents and made them more insecure, anti-social, and addicted to the internet. This question interests me because I feel like younger people are living in a fake world and the internet is tricking them to believe everything they see. I personally see the impact social media has on me. When I watch a sad video, it impacts my mood and I think about that all day. When I see an ad for some food, I want to buy it. It is simply addictive. However, as I mentioned in my topic reflection, the documentary “The Social Dilemma” has influenced me to rethink the usage of social media. The documentary shows the visual description of how addictive and manipulated the internet can be, and how people of my age are being tricked and controlled by big tech companies. A large population of people urgently trying to get “likes” is young teenagers. The fact that young people are anxious about how many people “like” their Instagram post, is terrifying. 

Timeline: In the next two weeks, I will have completed my research for secondary sources, so I have this week and the other to research more about the impact of social media on adolescents. I also found some additional articles that I will include in my bibliography for further use. 

My intended audience is mostly young adolescents age 12-17 since they are mostly from the point of view and are newly introduced to the internet. I want to be a resource for them to reduce their amount of internet usage. I want to introduce new ideas and reflect new perspectives on the negative impact of social media on teenagers with my research. For this essay, I decided to use two modal essays that resonate with my research topic. 

My paper will be modeling the article/study report called ”The Psychological Effects of Social Media on Teens” published by Newport Academy. Such an essay is related to my topic since it explains the psychological effect of social media such as sleep deprivation, lack of physical activity, and cyberbullying. This article displays a study report of 13,000 teens over three years of social media usage. They also self-reported that there were mood swings, anxiety, depression, etc. It also points out how cyberbullying is a lead cause of anxiety, depression, loneliness, suicide, and depression of adolescents. 

Bibliography:

Minow, Nell. “The Social Dilemma: Review”. Roger Ebert Publications. September 8, 2020. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-social-dilemma-movie-review-2020

Burch, Kelly. “How social media affects the mental health of teenagers”. Insider. March 16, 2020.  https://www.insider.com/how-does-social-media-affect-teenagers

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.