Does Social Media Affect Personal Identity?

As history has progressed, the world has become increasingly connected, resulting in the tradeoff of personal privacy for social relationships. This give and take process consists of people relinquishing some of their personal rights, such as privacy and independence, to gain some benefits of social living, such as government and a sense of belonging. However, not all of these transactions are beneficial. When people relinquish their privacy, they are also giving up some of their ability to autonomously determine their personal identity. Instead of identifying themselves with their natural social groups and/or characteristics, people feel shame if their natural self does not meet a social standard, and thus determine to suppress their natural …show more content…
Because social media works through internet-based interactions, the content shared can be edited in order to portray an ideal version of the self that is not based in reality. According to Vogel et al, psychologists who have researched the connection between social media and self-esteem, “users can selectively allow content onto their profiles, post pictures, and describe themselves in ways that best represent their ideal self-views" (Vogel et al. 207). These ideal self-views not only reveal how a person desires to be viewed by others, but also creates a standard which they expect others to meet. This then produces a set of social expectations that people feel obligated to achieve in order to be viewed by themselves and others as socially acceptable. In order to maintain an appearance of social acceptability and personal competence, people alter what they share to make it conform to the social standard created by social media. If some part of their life does not live up to what they believe others expect of them, people don’t share it and begin to despise it as something unacceptable, potentially sacrificing their natural identity in the process. This in turn upholds the false social standard by increasing the expectation that the standard must be met. Yet, the standard remains impossible to meet as it is based off of false …show more content…
Because social media can be filtered to portray whatever people desire, the image that social media portrays as acceptable is impossibly high for any person to reach naturally. However, people still feel pressured to reach this standard so that they can achieve a sense of societal belonging. Feeling compelled to live up to the social standard posed by the false broadcastings of social media, people destroy their natural identity in order to achieve something that is viewed as acceptable, in the process of doing so psychologically and physically harming themselves. Research has shown that social media is connected to feelings of inadequacy in teenagers of minority races, body dissatisfaction, and low self-esteem. This psychological damage to a great number of people is too great a price for the social connection brought about by social media. In order to preserve the mental health of modern society, social media needs to be valued less. If less value was placed on social media, people would feel less pressured to meet its impossible demands and would not be as negatively impacted when they do not achieve its standard. The overvaluing of social media in modern society is leading to the destruction of