Essay Sample on Social Media: Globalization's Engine - Impact of 4th Industrial Revolution

Introduction

Social media is one of the biggest highlights of the fourth industrial revolution. The social media platform has had a significant impact on the modern world, especially in regards to the flow of information. It has served as one of the main engines of globalization as people from different continents interact with each other daily. Information sharing has become easy, and social interaction has been improved. People from different cultures and backgrounds interact with each other in a way that would not have been otherwise possible before. Social media also has educative properties that enable people to learn through various courses offered through the platform. It provides "drastically superior opportunities than previous communication opportunities (Gunduz 86). But like everything else in life, social media has a downside. One of the most common concerns when it comes to the use of social media is its influence on identity. A person's identity is the concept of oneself that develops over a while. A person's identity included things that a person can't control, such as place of birth, work history, relationship life, and habits. However, social media is increasingly playing a significant role in identity by influencing social interactions and behavioral patterns. Facebook, WhatsApp, and the Chinese Tencent QQ are the three most popular social media platforms in the world, with over 3 billion user accounts between them. Each of these accounts is a representation of identity. Whether accurate or not, they represent what their owners want the rest of the world to see. However, few people consider how social media is influencing their identity.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

Social media allows people to share their personal views and experiences with the rest of the world. Platforms such as Facebook has a feature that updates others on a person's movements. One's Facebook friends could be informed a person travels to a different location or visits a particular restaurant or social place. Twitter has recently added features such as "flossing" or "eating pizza in bed." These are activities that were once considered personal or private. However, social media creates the urge to share these because somehow, they influence how people will perceive a person. Orenstein from the New York Times refers to this as "performance culture" (Orenstein). A performance culture is where people feel the need to live their life as they would want others to see them. Social media has turned people's lives into a reality show. A person has to behave in a certain way because he or she is in front of the camera. The person does things that he or she would not have otherwise been doing for purposes of influencing social media opinion.

At some point, the line between reality and social media becomes blurry. As someone attempts to influence their social media feed, they eventually become influenced by social media itself. They do things that wouldn't have otherwise done to try and impress or annoy other online users. For example, one decides to take a vacation that he or she wouldn't have gone in normal circumstances to generate social media attention. At that point, the person is influencing the kind of content that he or she provides to his or her social media networks, but the individual also gets affected by the same group. Actions are no longer based on inner self but instead on outward self. A person would do things based on how they want others to react to it and in most cases, that happens through social media.

Social media sites such as Facebook have been involved in scandals involving how it handles its users' privacy. When one signs up, they provide a host of different information that includes contact details, residence, preferences, and even relationship status. These are items that were previously considered private. One would only share them with those close or official purposes such as tax. However, social media has changed all that by laying it bare for all to see. It's no longer about how a person's lives but the way the rest of the world thinks the person lives. Most of the sites ask for additional information to enhance their user's experience. They even get access to a person's phone contacts. Tech Republic's writer Alan Norton lists privacy concerns as his number one reason for not avoiding social media (Norton). It is impossible to separate identity from privacy. Anything that affects a person's privacy will consequently change their personality. A significant number of things that define a person's privacy are those that are private. But these social media has redefined the line between private and public. People are willing to share the things that they initially considered private.

On the other hand, social media's effect on personal identity is not just dependent on what the person does or creates. It's also influenced by what they see on social media. That concept could be explained using cultivation theory. The theory "hypothesizes that social reality of heavy viewers of TV and movies is shaped by what they watch" ("How the Internet Affects Identity"). Just like the television, the content that people consume in social media affects their identity by defining their reality. Social media has created a way for people to judge or analyze their lives by comparing it to other social media users. For most people, their happiness level is affected by how their life compares to that of other social media users. A person's definition of happiness becomes determined by their social interactions in social media.

It is true that the content that one exposes themselves to or gets exposed to affects their mode of thinking. In the modern world, most of the content produced and consumed is through social media. These include interpretations of beautiful, sexy, rich, poor, and as mentioned earlier, happy. The young generation is perhaps the most affected by social media because they have spent a significant part of their lives around social media. As a result, their behaviors and mode of thinking tend to be significantly different from that of their predecessors. For most young people, their interactions in social media and involvement have caused their definition of self to be based on the impression they would want others to have about them.

One has also to consider how social media may affect identity by influencing their upbringing. The young generation is the most affected by social media because they got introduced to the platform at an early age. The age of early adulthood, which begins when people are at their teens to their late twenties, is a time when people try to discover themselves and establish who they are. Unfortunately, this is also the time that people spend the most time in social media, and they end up forming their perception of themselves based on social media.

Conclusion

As a result, social media ends up affecting people's identity by changing their behavior, their perception of themselves, and influencing the privacy of its users. The number of users is bound to rise, especially with increased internet penetration in emerging markets in Asia and Africa. As people become increasingly interconnected, they will have to give more privacy to embrace new social networks. Personal identity will continue to be a casualty of social media use.

Works Cited

Gunduz, Ugur. "The Effect of Social Media on Identity Construction." Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, vol. 8, no. 5, 2017, pp. 85-92., doi:10.1515/mjss-2017-0026.

"How the Internet Effects Personal Identity." Applied Social Psychology (ASP), Penn State, 16 Mar. 2018, sites.psu.edu/aspsy/2018/03/16/how-the-internet-effects-personal-identity/.

Norton, Alan, and Social Enterprise. "10 Reasons Why I Avoid Social Networking Services." TechRepublic, CBS Interactive, 8 July 2012, www.techrepublic.com/blog/10-things/10-reasons-why-i-avoid-social-networking-services/.

Orenstein, Peggy. "I Tweet, Therefore I Am." The New York Times, 30 July 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/magazine/01wwln-lede-t.html.