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Lainey Marquiss

Professor

Leonard

5 September 2019

Research Proposal: How does the impact of social media influence the Society in a

negative way?

I first became interested in this topic when I was in a group discussion led by a

professional dancer and actress named Mollee Gray. She was teaching us about the industry of

dancers in films and what that lifestyle is all about when she said something that sparked my

attention. She stated that nowadays when you’re in an audition, the casting director when

considering people for the job, won’t just look at your resume as a preference, but they will also

look at all your social media. Which I found peculiar because then I thought what if the best

dancer in the room has the least amount of followers and has the least amount of likes. This sent

me down a curious path of what if social media will now and forever be the representation of me.

What if my accounts are what shows people who I am and what if they see that I don’t have a lot

of followers and assume that I'm nobody. Then it hit me… social media shouldn’t ever have such

control over my life that I have to question everything about my life. Then I had another

realization, the people that followed me, friended me, added me, etc., aren’t my closest friends

who want to see me succeed in life. I kept thinking about this until finally, I thought of my

generation and how bad we are at communicating with others, and I found a link. What if social

media is the reason we are bad at communicating, and what if we are becoming a lonely

generation in the result of this because I honestly haven’t heard about a more depressed and
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lonely era then mine. That’s why I need to dig deeper into this topic, it’s because I want to know

why my generation is so bad at communicating with others and why we are facing more social

problems than ever before.

How I feel about this topic is that I’m sad that this is even considered a good topic to

study and write about because I have such high hopes for us. Of course, I always will be

optimistic for my group of unique and inspiring people, but I worry about them, I worry about

me. It can’t be good having social media show us what being a “true girl” is and what being a

“true guy” is, we are getting a little better, but it’s still bad because for some reason we always

look at the negative more than the positive. What I think about this topic before doing any

research is that I do believe that social media is the reason that teenagers today are leading

negative lives. We are given such high expectations about our looks, our hair, our style, our

aesthetic, our everything. How did we even survive this long? When we open Instagram we see

models in these amazing expensive clothes looking, as we like to say, bomb. Then we open

Twitter and see these comedians writing these hilarious post and we open Snapchat to see

celebrities going on these amazing trips to places we’ve never heard of before. When you ask me

what I believe about my topic, I guess you can say that I believe that the impact of social media

is one-hundred percent the reason for all these negative feelings in teenagers because as I said

before we are given such high expectations about everything. What I already know about this

topic is that the more time you spend on social media the more you get obsessed with it. Whether

if it’s a social site or a game you are obsessed with it for a long time until you get bored with it

and move onto something else that’s addictive.

What I still need to know about my topic is ‘how’ social media could be one of the

reasons for the negative influence. I need to read more about it and to study it more deeply and
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consider everything about it. One of the questions that I’m going to research is, how does the

impact on social media in the United States today influence the loneliness in the teen population?

I’m hoping to learn more about why my generation is so depressed and lonely, I want to know

the reason why we have the same mental problems as insane asylum patients in the 1950’s.

Another question that I’m going to research is, why does the impact of social media make teens

in the United States feel worse about themselves as people? With this, I’m hoping to learn more

about how social media influences the feelings we have about ourselves as human beings. To

find the answers to these questions I’m going to research the internet, through newspaper

articles, and maybe even through some magazine articles. One thing I didn’t mention that I’m

excited to find out is if anyone is doing anything about the negative influence of social media. To

sum this up, I can’t wait to find out why my generation is facing so many social problems and

why social media has a huge negative impact on our lives.