Jordan Stubbs
Ms. Lehmann
English 2-1B
7 February 2020
Research Paper on Social Media
Dave Willis once said, “Don’t use social media to impress people, use it to impact people.” Today the world is more concerned with how social media is impacting people and their lives. These impacts are being focused on young adults who use social media. The adolescents using social media should be responsible users because it impacts teens’ well-being, social connectedness, and academic performance. In examining social media’s impact on well-being, it is clear the connection is complex.
How we use social media impacts our well-being. Social media has both good and bad impacts on teens’ emotional health. There are a range of challenges teens face in life, and social media allows them to seek out help they might not get otherwise. James et al write, “The ability to communicate anonymously can mitigate barriers, such as shame, that interfere with support-seeking offline.” (72) Being able to anonymously ask for help has a positive impact on teens’ lives because it allows people to ask for help without feeling judged so that they can get the help they need. Having considered the positive impact of social media, users must also be aware of the negative. Social media has been blamed for many negative impacts on people’s lives. James et al explain, “Several investigations document correlations between heavy media use and reduced well-being – related outcomes, such as diminished life satisfaction, internalizing negative experiences, and various dimensions of ill-being, such as depression, anxiety, attention problems, and stress” (72). When young adults use social media to compare themselves to others, negative outcomes will follow. When social media presents the good things in our lives as the only things, users can lose sight of the messiness of life, making them feel less satisfied with what they have. The impact that social media has on adolescents’ well-being depends upon how it is being used.
Social media has various impacts on the teens’ face-to-face interactions and connectedness today, but is there more positive or negative? Research has shown that “More teens say that social media has a positive effect on how they feel about themselves" (K.Y. 18). These teens are more likely to see the positive effects because they aren’t as vulnerable as others. The survey conducted by Common Sense Media from the article “Social Media and Teens,” showed that a young adult’s personality determines social media’s impact. “The 17 percent who scored in the low-SEWB group were the most impacted by social media interactions, suggesting that the child’s personality – not the platform – is the more important factor when determining the influence of social media” (K.Y. 18). Since everyone has different personalities, we can’t always know how social media affects everyone; it depends on the person. The more vulnerable teens will have more of a possibility of experiencing positive or negative effects from social media than other teens. It could be from pictures, creativeness in posts, or just random thoughts someone uses to update their medias. Social media gives many teens a way to express themselves. K.Y. states, “More than a quarter of teens social media is ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ important for expressing themselves creatively” (18). Because of social media, teenagers are becoming more creative in expressing themselves. However, we need to give the more vulnerable teens the skills to use it safely and responsibly. Overall, we can’t decide whether social media has more positive impacts or negative impacts because no human being is the same. They might have the same interests, but they will always have differences in their personalities.
Some argue that the dangers of social media have been overexaggerated. Despite the appeal of this argument, the negative effects of social media cannot be ignored entirely. Using social media too much has been connected to a lack of emotional and physical well-being as well as weaker social connectedness. Success in school has also been impacted by screen time. “Academic performance is directly related to sleep time and inversely related to overall sedentary SMU [Screen Media Use] among the students who participated in this study” (Peiró-Velert et al 5). The study found that the more time students spent on their screens, the less time they had to sleep, which resulted in lower academic achievement. It’s obvious that social media’s impact is complicated, and people should be mindful of how they use it.
By using social media responsibly, teens can minimize its impact on their health, connectedness with others, and success in school. Being aware of how they use social media can lower its negative impact on teens’ well-being. Teens need to restrict the amount of time on social media to help their connectedness with friends and help them to be less distracted. Social media is starting to cut into sleep time, which is causing adolescents to get less sleep, leading to lower academic performances. If teens use social media correctly, and not try to impress people, it can impact them in a positive way and minimize the amount of negativity teens may run into.
Research Paper Relfection
- Explain the process you went through to write this paper. Please be specific.
- The process I went through to write this paper was, gather information from research, write Cornell notes, use the Cornell notes to format my paper, and then write my paper and fix the revisions.
2. What qualifies this paper as an argumentative essay? What are the requirements for this genre and how did you meet them?
- An argumentative paper has to have a main claim supported by evidence, a rebuttal, and then a conclusion that restates the main claim. I met these requirements by giving my main claim saying that social media is complex, stating how social media is simple for my rebuttal, and then restated how social media is complex for my conclusion using my quote.
3. Explain one thing you learned about reading research or taking notes on research that you can apply to your next research paper.
- One thing I learned about reading research and taking notes is, you can’t rush through the research. You have to pay attention to small details. Writing notes, I had to slow myself down and actually think about how to introduce the quote, state my quote, and then explain it.