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1. Jacey Parsons
11/18/2015
Mr. Harold Blanco
FYS
Research Paper
In the article “Social Media Explosion” written by Marcia Clemmitt, there were many
different opinions on whether social media is helping or hurting this generation. Larry Rosen, a
professor of psychology from California State University, states, “Many kids say they prefer not
to talk face-to-face.” I honestly do not doubt it because I know I am the same way. I am even
that way about talking on the phone even. If I can type it out to someone, you best believe that
I am going to be sending a text and not making a phone call. When we think of social media, we
think of “liking” other people’s statuses or pictures or maybe sending a message to a friend or
even a stranger. What is social media exactly? “It is forms of electronic communications
through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages
and other content” is what Webster’s Dictionary says. Social media gives us an easy way to stay
in touch with people and stay up to date on social events, but it also takes away our privacy and
kills the digital generations’ chance of ever being able to be very sociable.
Some of the key concepts that this article is trying to put across is that society fears that
people of the digital age will fail to have those communication skills and face-to-face interaction
to live life. A few other key concepts are privacy, the fact that social media is slowly but surely
becoming a distraction, and also the pros and cons of the relationships over the World Wide
Web. There are just about as many benefits as there are concerns listed about social media.

2. Some benefits include the fact that it helps people meet, talk, get their work done, and also
play games with other people from around the world. It just blows my mind that you can be
playing Call of Duty in your dorm here in Huntington, West Virginia with someone from over in
Saudi Arabia. The article also informs us that this generation is also more empathic over social
media. For example, we are more prone to comment on someone’s selfie and tell them that
they look pretty rather than say it to their face. Another benefit is that fact that social media
allows you to express your opinions and ideas to an audience and those viewers have the
freedom to give feedback or not. There are many, many concerns when it comes to social
media, security and privacy being a major one. When a picture is posted online, it is said to be
that it is on there forever. How scary is that to think about? This is why privacy is such a big deal
to most people. It is intimidating to think of strangers seeing your photos in the first place, but
them being able to see extra information like where you live, where you work, where you went
to high school, how old you are, etc., is kind of freaky. Another concern is the new term
“catfishing”. Catfishing is not what you would expect it to be. It is when someone is pretending
to be someone they are not over the internet. The article tells a story of Manti Te’o, linebacker
of the University of Notre Dame, had a two-year relationship over the Internet with a non-
existent woman. When he found out that she was not real, he said that she had died of cancer
because of the embarrassment that he had caused himself.
While researching the disadvantages of social media, I stumbled across “#bully: Use of
Hashtags in Posts about Bullying on Twitter” by Angela Calvin, Amy Bellmore, Jun-Ming Xu, and
Xiaojin Zhu. This article gets into great detail about the effects of bullying on social media.
Bullying on a website is a lot easier than doing it face to face because kids of this generation are

3. already so accustom to hiding behind a computer screen. When using the #bully on Twitter, it
shows that you are aware of bullying and showing your support to those that fall victimto it.
Another article that I chose to help strengthen my stance was “Cyberbullying via Social Media”
by Elizabeth Whittaker and Robin Kowalski. The title of the article kind of gives away what the
topic of it is. Cyberbullying is a huge problem on the internet and this article examines three
separate studies done by college age students about different aspects of cyberbullying. This
article helps to strengthen my stance on the issue by discussing all of the trouble that comes
from social media in the sense that cyberbullying is definitely alive and in its prime. My last
article that I chose was not a peer reviewed article, but I felt that I had to use it because it
definitely boosts my side of the argument. “Teens, Kindness and Cruelty on Social Network
Sites: How American Teens Navigate the New World of "Digital Citizenship"” is a solid article
about how our generation is the one that has the most control over social media. It also
discusses more on cyberbullying and the true cruelty that can be shown over social media and
how ridiculously out of hand that it can get.
When looking at these articles and after choosing that social media was helping before, I
am starting to reconsider my choice. Social media definitely has some benefits, but it definitely
has lots of negatives to go along with it as well. I am glad that I got to research the opposing
factor to which I chose because it opened my eyes to a lot of things that I did not realize before,
like how severe cyberbullying actually is. When reading these articles in depth, I read many
stories of children who had been bullied over the internet and ended up killing his or herself.
Although this paper was hard to agree to do at first, I am glad I did.

4. Works Cited
Clemmitt, M. (2013, January 25). Social media explosion. CQ Researcher, 23, 81-104. Retrieved
from http://library.cqpress.com/
Calvin, A. J., Bellmore, A., Xu, J., & Zhu, X. (2015). #bully: Uses of Hashtags in Posts about
Bullying on Twitter. Journal Of School Violence, 14(1), 133-153.
Whittaker, E., & Kowalski, R. M. (2015). Cyberbullying via Social Media. Journal Of School
Violence, 14(1), 11-29.
Lenhart, A., Madden, M., Smith, A., Purcell, K., Zickuhr, K., Rainie, L., & Pew Internet &
American Life, P. (2011). Teens, Kindness and Cruelty on Social Network Sites: How
American Teens Navigate the New World of "Digital Citizenship". Pew Internet &
American Life Project.