Self-Esteem And Social Media Analysis

Social media is a perpetual aspect of twenty first century life by influencing and affecting every part of it. 82% of adults in Britain use social media daily/almost daily (Statistics, 2016), highlighting the mass usage that has been increasing. These networking platforms which encourage social interactions and the ability of its numerous users to create and share content (Kleitmann, 2011) could potentially be damaging people in ways that were not previously anticipated. Arguably, the relentless nature of social media could be a cause of multiple negative impacts on psychological wellbeing and functioning. Psychological wellbeing is an intangible construct which is hard to measure objectively and often relates to people’s self-esteem and …show more content…
Gonzales and Hancock (2011), found that the self-esteem of a person increased when looking at their own Facebook profile. This turns a corner from previous assumptions that social media sites were mainly negative as the self-evaluating nature of the task made people feel more comfortable and happier with themselves. This was because they recognised aspects of their online lives they were proud of, which benefitted their self-esteem and a link could be made to the impact on psychological wellbeing. The very nature of Facebook could be beneficial to individuals’ self-acceptance and could potentially provide a very simple method of dealing with minor self-esteem and psychological issues. However, due to the artificial nature of a lab experiment, it is unclear whether self-viewing a Facebook profile would prove beneficial as there are many other situational variables present when a person may look at their own profile in private. It is therefore unclear whether these results are simply a product of the laboratory …show more content…
The presence of depression indicates damaged psychological wellbeing. Since regression analyses were performed with factors measured, it is possible to infer that it was the use of the Internet that lead to a decline in psychological wellbeing rather than the reverse, therefore increasing support for negative effects on psychological wellbeing.
Overall, these results support the idea that real relationships could be replaced by online ones which could decrease psychological wellbeing. However, Kraut (1998) found that few people form genuine relationships online, which attempts to disprove the idea that online relationships could take over and decrease wellbeing. However, even if people are not forming relationships online, they are still spending time online which has also been shown to decrease wellbeing because normal social ties are suffering