Sociology 101
Looking at the effect of social media on interaction through symbolic interactionism.
On February 4th, 2004, one of the largest social media network website was launched. Now in 2015 Facebook is one the most widely used and known social media website in the world, according to The Guardian Facebook has over 1.2 billion active users. Ever since Facebook has been launched many other social media websites have launched and raised in popularity, such as Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr, people all over the world and ages ranging from young to old use all of these social media websites to communicate with others. Social media has contributed to many trends, and became very popular in the last 10 years. Ever since social …show more content…
With the theory called the looking- glass- self created by Charles H. Cooley, states that people’s attitude, personality and behavior is formed through other’s perspective of them. In today’s society an average teenager spends about 7.5 hours on the internet, talking to friends, creating posts, and uploading pictures, when spending this much time on the internet and sharing personal thoughts and feelings to others around the world, people start to form a new behavior. When online most people are more confident rather than shy offline, to explain this the change of identity through social media serves on a psychological level, people live life as if they are on a stage, and they tend to seek approval of through interaction, but when online people still seek approval but through the internet, manipulating their presentation, such as profile pictures, and changing small details on the profile. By manipulating their profile on social media, they are urging for approval of others, the more “likes” a person gets on a photo, their self esteem goes up high and tend to post similar pictures. Not only do likes rise the self esteem levels but the amount of friends and “followers” the more followers and friends the higher the popularity, through certain social media websites people actually pay to have more followers on their social media profiles to become more acceptable in society, because it shows that people who are popular are looked up to and liked in society. Through social media people hunger for attention, they seek popularity and to be accepted in society. With this effect on social media, it has greatly affected teenagers. Social media has created a big impact on a teen’s life and forming their identity because during the years of puberty, teenagers are at the age of where they are discovering themselves and through the internet it