The phenomenon of social media is a topic that peaks my interest. Being born in the late 1990s, I never really knew about social media until middle school. I remember asking for my parent's permission just to get a Facebook in the eighth grade and an Instagram account as a sophomore in high school. The explosion of social media concerns me. Children I babysit now have an extraordinarily high knowledge of social media. Children as young as age 5 can be seen with Instagram accounts. I teach gymnastics to children ages 5-8 and many of my students will often find and request to follow me on Instagram. This not only creates a sense of awkwardness for me, as I am 10 years older, but it also scares me. The lack of privacy these children are committing themselves to at such a young age is alarming. I believe there is very little parental monitoring of these accounts allowing children to post whatever they desire. I reckon I have a large amount of knowledge on this topic by just growing up during the boom of social media and having knowledge to so many real life examples. These concerns inspire me to bring to light the negative effects of social media on people and our society as a whole today. 

To help answer my research question, I have consulted three sources. My first source is an article by Trevor Bell titled, "How Social Media Can Impact the Sports World." This article discusses how social media can add a negative impact onto a professional sports player's life. The article brings Johnny Manziel and his incident with several negative tweets and drunk pictures into light. Athletes behavior on social media can lead to concern for coaches as well as the player's reputation. The major value here is the negative impact that social media can bring into an athlete's life. The article provides examples of a spike on player's profile when they are in the middle of a "scandal." While many people may believe social media is good for promoting certain athletes, this article calls into action the other side of the situation. This author is very credible as he writes for the College of Media & Communication at Texas Tech University. He is the Social Media Lab Manager, allowing him to have a significant amount of background knowledge on the situation as well as he is an alumni of the University.  

My second source is from a scholarly newspaper calling to light the negative points of social media. In the article, "The Negative Effect of Social Media on Social Media and Individuals" by Brian Jung asks readers to identify with him on four major negatives to social media. These four negatives: false sense of connection, cyber-bullying, decreased productivity, and privacy all have a strong backing. Social media has made it very difficult for people to know who they are actually connecting to which can lead to cyber-bullying and even suicide. Social media also leads workers to distraction and gives up the privacy of individuals. The major values of this article are the four negative points to social media. The article brings up these specific examples instead of just stating "social media has a negative effect on our society." Jung hopes that with these specific examples the reader can connect and relate to these concepts. This article comes from a very credible author as he has been writing since 1991 and he currently runs two blogs. Brian Jung graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and received a Doctor of Philosophy in English. He has a significant amount of experience in the writing field. 

My final source brings up an interesting negative to social media. In the article, "OMG: Social Media May Wreck Your Kids Writing" by Ruth Campbell she brings up the point that more and more children are doing the majority of their writing on social media. Children are becoming used to forgetting capitalization, punctuation, and using abbreviations. This social media "writing style" leads to difficulty with formal writing in school and eventually the work environment.  The major point of this article is that social media such as Facebook and Twitter has wiped out all formal use of punctuation, capitalization, and apostrophes in young children's writing. The article also brings up the decreasing quality of handwriting as kids are doing more typing and less writing. Kids are coming to kindergarten with an increased amount of knowledge on technology and typing and may even have a large knowledge of spell check. The source comes from a scholarly database on Thomas Cooper Library's website and the author comes from a knowledgeable background; she covers higher education and grades K-12 for the Southeastern Missourian newspaper. The newspaper uses several credible sources such as first hand examples from professors at Southeast Missouri State University and former English teachers from several high schools. 

This question is very arguable because there is so much talk in society about how social media has benefited our society. I think this question helps people see the other side to the social media rise. There have been agreements in the fact that social media can lead to a lack of privacy and brings up every part of a person's life. Some disagreements in the articles have been over how social media can be used for marketing tool. These different perspectives help support my idea that social media has created a somewhat scary future for our world. I think all the articles bring up points that I didn't necessarily think about when first deciding my research question. I think my research question is fairly strong, but could use a more detailed explanation on what part of society I want to focus on e.g. athletics, politics, personal lives, etc. 

