Impact of Social Networking on Development of Human Personality
Ran Cai
INT SEM 2: VIS CULTURE
Professor Anna Alvarez
05/08/2017
Today, networking has become a social phenomenon that has a significant impact on billions of people. Although social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram help users to broaden their social connections, they also have a negative impact on the development of human personality. Definitely, the personality of older adults is more stable than the personality of teenagers, and therefore, development of personalities of teenagers can be significantly affected by external factors.
Social networking has become a factor that heavily impacts the development of adolescents’ personalities, and the main reason is that teenagers represent the group that uses social media the most. According to the data published by Common Sense Media, more than 75% of all American teenagers have profiles on Facebook and other social networking websites (Ramasubbu 2015).
Thus, there is no doubt that the young generation uses social media in the most excessive way, and such excessive use may heavily affect four personality factors. These four personality factors are unreal standards of behavior, increasing anxiety and depression, approval seeking behavior, and need for popularity to feel good about self (Alzahrani & Bach 2014)
Seeking Approval of Others
Firstly, it should be mentioned that the main goal of social networking is to extend one’s reach out to the society. However, the ability to easily reach out other people has changed the initial purpose of creating social networks, which was to help users extend themselves to the global community. Now, many people use social networks as the main means of communication, and it has led to the obsession with social networking. More than that, millions of people today use social networks to gain popularity and seek approval of other people (Ahn 2011). Many social media users try to become more popular by increasing the number of their friends, and by gaining more likes through constant sharing and posting. By doing this, users expect to get a certain feedback, and not receiving expected feedback may potentially lead to low self-esteem of teenagers.
Unreal Standards for Appearance
Rather often, to gain popularity, users have to act in a way that they do not usually behave. To impress friends in social networks, people in many cases do things that they usually would not do. One of the simplest ways to gain more popularity and get more likes from other users of social networks is to set an appealing profile picture (Labrague 2014). Additionally, teenagers become fake when trying to impress others, and they get increasingly materialistic. To get likes, adolescents become obsessed with sharing photos and comments that would help them stand out from the crowd. Thus, it can be stated that social networks have a significant influence on the development of teenagers’ personality, and obsession presents one of the greatest ways how social networking impacts development of personality.
For example, teenagers can get too obsessed with trying to impress others. If they fail to get likes and approval their friends and classmates, they may feel depressed. Depression in its turn may lead to other consequences, which impose a great risk on teenagers’ lives. For example, a 12-year-old adolescent tried to create an impressing profile picture and made more than 200 selfies. However, he did not like any of them, and as a result, he felt too depressed and attempted suicide (Molloy 2014).
Thus, it can be mentioned that adolescents try to become perfect to gain recognition and approval of their friends. Being obsessed, young boys take pictures of their abdominals, and young girls share suggestive pictures to gain popularity among classmates (Alzahrani & Bach 2014). In addition, millions of teenagers and grown-ups use different types of software that helps to enhance the look of pictures. To achieve the look of perfectionism, people forget about what makes them unique, and this also has a negative influence on the development of teenagers’ personalities.
More than that, when someone “popular” shares a picture that looks perfect, others may feel disappointed about the look of their own pictures, and they will take many actions to take better pictures satisfy their need for approval of others. To get likes and impress others, millions of teenagers set unreal standards of appearance, which help them get noticed and become popular. Changing standards of appearance and behavior may potentially have a very negative impact on the development of personalities of adolescents, and it should be considered by modern parents.
Anxiety and Depression
It has already been mentioned that excessive use of social networks leads to anxiety and depression in adolescents. Also, it may cause much stress in teenagers (Labrague 2014), which has been proved by numerous studies that showed a positive correlation between emotional distress of teenagers and their increasing use of social networks. Depression may be caused by a superficial friendship that exists on social networking websites. As many people have thousands of other users on the list of their Facebook friends who they have never met in real life, their friendship is also fake. Having no real friends may cause depression, and it can become even more severe when teenagers see shares of superficial friends on the news feed.
It may even happen that these fake friends post many great pictures, and teenagers feel very unsatisfied with their own lives. They start thinking that they do not have an interesting lifestyle, and they may feel that they are loners among thousands of Facebook friends. Definitely, it will lead to anxiety, depression, and feeling that they do not lead an active social life (Sassen 2002).
Culture of Popularity
Another factor that has a significant influence on the development of teenagers’ personalities is the culture of popularity. Facebook and other social networks have become major platforms for interpersonal communication, and social media has become the key channel of communication between people (Aleman 2008). Therefore, millions of people spend many hours per day communicating with others online, and it has become a social standard to have a great-looking social profile. People judge others by the look of their profiles, and their physical and social attractiveness can be defined by numerous factors. One of these factors is the list of friends; if a person has popular friends, there is a higher probability that he or she will gain popularity as well. Also, if many users like photos or other posts shared by a person, or there are many comments from different people on the wall of this person, other users will consider this person popular and will add him or her to the list of friends on Facebook or another social networking websites.
Therefore, it can be stated that thousands of teenagers and grown-ups strive to become popular on social networks, and they tend to change their behavior to gain more popularity. When people change their actions, and they become a regular part of their lifestyles, it may have a significant impact on their personalities as they will change under the influence of social networking and networking-related processes.
Impact of Social Media
It is believed that social media have had a significant impact on personalities of millions of people (Rowell 2015). The behavior of today’s generation of school and college students has been shaped by social media, and social media have made a great contribution to the lifestyles of millions of students. This paper also aims at discussing changes that take place as a result of excessive use of social networking.
Expressive
Trying to get the attention of other people, Facebook users share numerous posts, and many of them include a lot of personal information. Through such information, people get to know a lot about others, and it makes many of them more expressive than they were before. In addition, many words are substituted by emotions that are often expressed by various expressions.
For Millennials, being opened to thousands of other people has become a philosophy, and this is what differs this generation from previous ones (Moore 2010). In most cases, openness is expressed by constant connectivity, and many teenagers cannot imagine spending a day of their lives without being able to communicate to their friends through Facebook or other networks.
Therefore, messaging, posting, commenting and sharing on Facebook have had a significant impact on the development of human personality. The new generation has become more open and expressive. College students connect with their friends through social networks on a regular basis, and it helps them become more expressive as well as learn how to share emotions with others.
Connected
It has been just mentioned that students and older people become more connected to others, and it is possible to get in touch with anyone through social networks. However, it is not enough for teenagers to write something on the walls of other people – they need to get some feedback. School and college students expect great social interactions with other people, different groups of people, businesses, and organizations. If they visit a business page on Facebook and post some comments, they expect that this company will reply in a short time (Fowler and Christakis 2014).
Teenagers know that they can access any information and talk to anyone they want without a need to spend much time and efforts. Thus, the new generation of young people does not feel bound by geographical limitations, and teenagers are more connected to the global community that it has even been before.
Impatient
Social networking has made teenagers nervous and impatient (Moore 2010). As it has been mentioned in the previous paragraph, teenagers are always connected to the outer world, and they know that any information can be found within the shortest time possible. In addition, today’s generation of young people got used to the fact that most processes are automated, and they can expect automatic messages or responses. In case messages are not automatic, it does not take long for real people to reply to messages and posts, and waiting for the response can make young people nervous and impatient.
Impersonal
Although young people became more expressive, being more open to others does not include interpersonal face-to-face communication. The face-to-face exchange has been replaced with interacting through social networks behind the screens of smartphones. Therefore, the new generation of young people does not know how to have intimate interaction, and it can even be rather painful for them.
Another proof that communication becomes impersonal is that people can easily talk to strangers and people they have not met before through social networks, but they cannot talk to the same people when they meet in person. In most contact, there will be no eye contact, no topics to discuss, and both persons will feel rather awkward (Moore 2010). Therefore, excessive use of social networks has led to the communication becoming more impersonal than it has been before.
Knowledgeable
Teenagers do not disturb their parents with hundreds of questions per day anymore as they have an easier solution, which is to “Google” anything and anytime. Although it may seem that knowing everything does not have to do anything with the development of one’s personality, it is a fact that school and college students tend to think that they know almost everything. It has had a significant impact on their personalities because when people think that they know everything, it becomes hard to communicate with them. They become stubborn, and parents and other grown-ups may face difficulties in communicating with adolescents.
Sexting
According to Ramasubbu (2015), sexting is another important social phenomenon related to networking that has a significant impact on the development of one’s personality. Sexting, which is sending sexually explicit messages to others, has become a popular activity among teenagers who use social networks on a regular basis. Ramasubbu (2015) also stated that based on the statistics provided by the National Campaign to Support Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, more than 20% of all teenagers who use social networks participate in sexting. Sending and receiving sexually suggestive images may cause humiliation and personal trauma, which can have a great effect on the development of teenagers’ personalities.
Conclusion
This paper focused on providing numerous facts proving that social networks have a significant impact on the development of one’s personality. It was proved that constant and excessive use of social networks may result in the change of a typical behavior of adolescents, which in its turn may lead to the changes in one’s personality.
Bibliography
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