Media Perceptions Individual Paper

Media Perceptions Individual Paper

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Media Perceptions Individual Paper

Media perceptions has evolved from the time social networks were only for a chosen few to the present time whereby literally everyone has access to social media. Social media for example Instagram and Facebook are so common and some people actually depend on them for a living as they do their business and other activities that earn them money through the social media. These people are likely to be positive about social media (Neier, & Zayer, 2015). Other people view social media as a destruction to their normal life. This is because for some people social media has influenced their lives negatively and maybe they have been addicted to social media, in the process of getting out of the addiction they had to develop different methods through which they could prevent social media from destroying their lives and one of the major methods is through having a negative attitude. Therefore, different people have different media perceptions for their different reasons. This paper discusses these perceptions in relation to the different lifestyles people live and how social media affects them.

American students are one of the groups which is known to consume media at a very high rate. This is because students are majorly adolescents and young adults. This is the age which is associated with social media because of its desire to be liked and to connect with people who are like minded. This is basically the cultural context of the presentation we did and it gives a clarity about the role of social media in our lives (Graham, & Avery, 2013). Media and media perception is a topic which is very important for any member of the society to engage in because it covers a great deal of area in our lives and it gives us a way forward as society so as to utilize the resources around us and specifically social media effectively and in the right way for our advantage. The use of social media in the United States has improved over the years and from the first time when social media was introduced in the early 2000s very few people were concerned. The major way of communicating way through phone calls and even earlier than that there were phone booths. Social media at first was seen as a way of basically communicating from one person to another (Diga, & Kelleher, 2009). With time it began to incorporate a lot of other features aside from communicating. For example, some social media sites like Instagram and basically all social media platforms are being used for advertisement by different people.

Therefore, with this historical context it is easy to understand the place of social media right now as it has developed from being sites for basic communication to sites whereby people can even meet their dating partners or make friends whom they will never meet physically. the issue is important to the current society because even though social media has been good all through and a lot of people have got a lot of benefits from social media, it has some adverse effects and some people have already suffered from that (Freberg et al, 2011; Moreno et al, 2015). Therefore, it is an important topic for any society because the society needs to know how to use social media in the right manner and prevent any misuse of the social media and social networks. China for example has advanced this by restricting the usage of Chinas form of TikTok for underage individuals. They stated that children were spending excessive amount of time on TikTok and that was not heathy.

Personally social media is a great place to have fun, make new friends, see trending activities and issues and at the same time receive news about different things in different parts of the world. Therefore, social media has been good and helpful to me for a long period of time and I am positive about it. Social justice in relation to issues of social justice has a lot of work to do towards improvement. A lot of people have been posting their achievements on social media and they never post their mistakes or their negativities (Zhao et al, 2016). This means that social media feels like a place of happy people full of achievements and some people actually get carried away by this. Social justice issues come into this because even though social media portrays itself this way, it is actually not true and a lot of other people who do not have anything positive to post about themselves are left out or even start blaming themselves when compare themselves with the others I social media. However, this is not always true and it is a great problem in the current society as societal justice is not served by inclusion of everyone but rather only a small number of people. This is the case with Instagram mainly because it is mainly used for photos and selfie sharing.

In Instagram some people do not get the chance to be included since they feel that they are not good enough and no matter what they do they will never be good enough. Therefore, this is a social justice issue whereby whatever is posted is seen as a destruction and lack of inclusion. Women express themselves more on social media and men tend to shy away from this expression. Straight people also express themselves more than the LGBTQ community members and even when one of them expresses themselves there is always a high chance that they will be ridiculed and negative comments made about them (Lau, 2017). Because of this, social justice is not served as some people are excluded and no matter how much they try to fit in and fight for their inclusion, most members of the society do not see this and they never accept to accommodate people who are different to them. However this can be seen as an issue of not just social media inclusion but actually as an issue within our physical communities as it is what we believe in that we express. It is just made worse in social media because people cannot be noticed and therefore, they are true in what they express.

Participation in this class has contributed a lot towards understanding some social constructions and issues which affect people. Specifically in the project we did, I managed to understand the social issues which present themselves through social media and how they can be deal with. Our group focused on how these challenges that are faced within social media can be dealt with. However, a person cannot deal with something they do not know or understand (Valkenburg, 2017). Therefore, the suggestions of the group towards understanding the issue of social media perceptions and helping people is through carrying out a survey. The challenges that present themselves are to be addressed through the survey and the online platform for people to express themselves.

The online platform would enable a person to express themselves and try to explain the different issues which impact them in their social media interactive life. The online platform would be open to everyone and anonymous accounts can be used to send in messages about their experiences in social media (Wang et al, 2011). Through listening to the people express themselves not only will perceptions about social media be obtained but actually the problems which face people in social media are analyzed and understood and therefore the challenges can be dealt with through different ways for example involving the right institutions in dealing with the problems and watching online hate and malice to prevent it and therefore provide a safe place for everyone to co-exist (Wood, 2011). The theory used for this paper was self-persuasion theory which states that individuals should be encouraged and motivated to change their beliefs and behaviors and attitudes. This is majorly in relation to the issues which present themselves in social media and especially when people are unable to relate effectively with the issues occurring and how negatively they affect them. The chosen theoretical perspective is important since the people who have issues like low self-esteem among other issues are being encouraged to get away from their issues and become better.

Our action is setting up and online platform that can be used by anyone anonymously to express themselves and through their expression way forward can be decided (Chan-Olmsted et al, 2013). However the basic method of dealing with the expected results from the online platform is through the theoretical perspective which states that the people who have challenges and issues will be encouraged to get away from them and become better people. Through this social justice can be achieved in that people will be highly involved in better relations within the social platforms.

References

Chan-Olmsted, S. M., Cho, M., & Lee, S. (2013). User perceptions of social media: A comparative study of perceived characteristics and user profiles by social media. Online journal of communication and media technologies, 3(4), 149-178.

Moreno, Á., Navarro, C., Tench, R., & Zerfass, A. (2015). Does social media usage matter? An analysis of online practices and digital media perceptions of communication practitioners in Europe. Public relations review, 41(2), 242-253.

Freberg, K., Graham, K., McGaughey, K., & Freberg, L. A. (2011). Who are the social media influencers? A study of public perceptions of personality. Public relations review, 37(1), 90-92.

Zhao, X., Lampe, C., & Ellison, N. B. (2016, May). The social media ecology: User perceptions, strategies and challenges. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 89-100).

Graham, M., & Avery, E. J. (2013). Government public relations and social media: An analysis of the perceptions and trends of social media use at the local government level. Public Relations Journal, 7(4), 1-21.

Diga, M., & Kelleher, T. (2009). Social media use, perceptions of decision-making power, and public relations roles. Public Relations Review, 35(4), 440-442.

Neier, S., & Zayer, L. T. (2015). Students’ perceptions and experiences of social media in higher education. Journal of Marketing Education, 37(3), 133-143.

Wang, Q., Chen, W., & Liang, Y. (2011). The effects of social media on college students. MBA Student Scholarship, 5(13), 1548-1379.

Lau, W. W. (2017). Effects of social media usage and social media multitasking on the academic performance of university students. Computers in human behavior, 68, 286-291.

Wood , J. (2011). Gendered Media – University of Delaware. Gendered Media: The influence of Media on Views of Gender . Retrieved December 4, 2021, from https://www1.udel.edu/comm245/readings/GenderedMedia.pdf.

Valkenburg. (2017). Understanding Self-Effects in Social Media. Human Communication Research, 43(4), 477–490. https://doi.org/10.1111/hcre.12113