Question

This goes without saying; the media plays a monumental role in shaping morals, values, and behaviors in our society. In this particular day in age, social media has rendered itself a very powerful socializing agent, especially in our youth. Adolescents are particularly susceptible and sensitive to the messages that the media "sends", thus becomes internalized and imprinted in the teenage psyche. Look through some popular social media sites (i.e. Instagram, Snapchat, whatever other media outlet that's out there). Choose a celebrity or popular user page to scroll through. What values do their posts espouse? What do they "market" as beautiful, masculine, feminine, and ideal in our society? Please discuss in two paragraphs how these images shape self-esteem and overall social-emotional development in adolescents. Be sure to identify which social media page you used OR describe the image or attach the image (make sure to include the web course) to your discussion AND explain why you chose it.

Answer 1

The number of likes on a post has the power to entirely alter one's mood today, especially in comparisson to peers.

“When the teens saw their own photos with a large number of likes, we saw activity across a wide variety of regions in the brain,” said lead author Lauren Sherman, a researcher in the brain mapping center and the UCLA branch of the Children’s Digital Media Center, Los Angeles.

Let's look at the page of a "Social Media Influencer 'called Jess Conte, an Australian who married an American at the age of 19 and moved the the US. Due to her good looks and her husbands, their pages started growing massively with the right advertisement. They created their own brand of clothes and now have millions of followers on all social media platforms.

They have been marketing themselves as the ideal couple, who never fight, who are religious, and their lives are perfect and have accomplished it all at a very young age of just 22. These ideas strongly influence teens, especially between the ages of 13 and 15, who begin to imagine and desire a life that these Instagram stars are livig. Priorities shift, and mundane life and activities are no longer enjoyed, as everyone is craving to live a life with fame and fortune, that is apparently easy to achieve using social media.