¶ … Social Media on Human Perception
The human interactivity has its rots in the inception of faster communication systems like the telephone, telegraph and later on the email system. As the IT continued to develop and the globalization intensified, the frequent interaction between people on extreme ends of the world became a more regular phenomenon and hence more valued over the years. The continued interaction has been seen in the gaming industry where competitors from different parts of the world connect to each other in real time over the internet and compete in the same game for hours. This has over the years engaged people from different parts of the globe though it has been limited to the gaming aspect only. The other predominant mode of interaction in the contemporary society is the social media which has mushroomed over the last decade, seeing companies like facebook, twitter, SnapChat, Instagram, Flickr among many other having millions of users all interacting actively at the same time. The social media thirst has been fueled by the global trends of urgency in communication and since social media delivers messages instantly and replies offered sooner than conventional email system, it became perfect tool to fill the gap of communication.
Due to the prominent position taken by the social media in the current society, it is considered to be one tool that influences most the perceptions of people, especially the younger generation and how they see both their environment and themselves (Worsman S.,...
This influence has triggered small to multinational businesses to turn to the social media for marketing purposes and for potential clients. The social media is known to shape the social identity formation of the young people with people across borders influencing the way others look at themselves and how they handle issue and react to happenings around them. The trending issues have helped form common approaches and unified ways of doing things. The person that a youth becomes is significantly influenced by both the internal and external factors and the current extrinsic factor is the social media. The identities forged by the social media are hence extensively and continually being shaped in a global manner. It is estimated that an average American adolescent spends 9 hours on social media (Wallace K., 2015). This time is not just spent on entertainment but also implicitly or knowingly used in research and social comparison of self with other cultures across the globe. Since the youth are at a stage of deciding whom they want to become, the flow of information from across the globe initiates social comparison. The enormous amount of information from social media on whom they want to become often means enforcement of ideas, corruption of perceptions and even at times falsification of sense of who they would like to be or of what the actual world is out there. In as much as the information they get from the social media is rarely reliable source of whom they would like to become, nevertheless it forms an important basis…
