Our society today is in, what scientists call, "The Information Age".  Americans are becoming more and more adapted to use and rely on technology in their everyday lives.  The teenagers in today's society are especially being reliant on technology, as seen in the use of iPhones, iPads, laptops, and many other technologies available to them.  With the use of iPhones and laptops, comes the use of various social media apps/ websites such as Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, and Facebook.  The popularity of these social media sites among teenagers in today's society has been causing a lot of issues to the mental states of today's generation teenagers.  So, the exigence of the research topic that I chose is whether or not social media sites like Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook are causing low self-esteem in today's society.  

As a college student that uses social media, I feel very strongly about this topic.  I feel as if this topic is very relevant in today's society because social media has become a prominent aspect in the everyday lives of teenagers. I'll be sitting in class waiting for the teacher to start and the person next to me is on twitter, and the person in front of me will be constantly checking Instagram, so really there is no escape from the realm of social media.  I would say that I'm qualified to expand on this topic because I am someone who uses social media on a daily basis and I can see what it does to me and the others around me.  I feel self conscious and negative about myself, and I want to educate people on how social media, although it may be fun to use, can be destructive to our minds.

The first article I found is from a high school news website, which immediately shows bias towards high school students and how they are negatively affected by social media.  The central claim of this article is that social media is creating low self- esteem in teenage, high school girls, and the author supports her claim by stating statistics from national sources, as well as quotes straight from high school girls among her and her peers.  The article is also very much biased towards females and how they're affected, which seeing as the author is a girl however, adds to her credibility.  If you're a girl and you stumble across this article, it evokes pathos because these are real girls just like you telling how they feel every time they scroll through Instagram or twitter, and it makes the reader relate to them more.  Obviously the source as a whole is not as credible as a news website would be, but this source is taking real life people that are going through the issue of having low self- esteem and asking them to comment on their experience, which makes it more credible.

The second source I found was from Forbes, talking about how a new study had linked Facebook to depression.  The website and article itself gear their argument towards a gender neutral audience, meaning it does not gear its argument towards neither males nor females, making the article less bias than the others that I have found.  This article sites the study published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, giving the article credibility to back up its argument.  The study itself that was done discovered that "people feel depressed after spending a great deal of time on Facebook because they feel badly when comparing themselves to others" (Walton).  This article is mainly concerned with the logos side of their argument, providing fact after fact in order to back up its point and makes it clear to the reader what it is the author is trying to get across.

The next article I found on this topic was from Cosmopolitan, which right off the bat proves that this article is biased towards teenage females.  This article's main argument is to prove that Instagram likes are causing self esteem issues in college females.  The article cites 15 different college women, whom have been asked to tell Cosmo how they feel about what Instagram does to their body image.  Each girl talks about how they feel self conscious when seeing other people on Instagram, which evokes the pathos in the reader.  Seeing as the reader will most likely be female, Cosmo has picked stories of women that they think their readers will sympathize with, in order to argue the negative effects of Instagram and other social media sites.

This is a very controversial topic to argue, especially in today's society.  When researching this topic, I've found that every argument is mainly made about females, but I've also noticed a lot of articles stating the positive affects of social media, so both sides to this argument definitely exist.  In the sources I've found, it's hard to pick out what information will be usable in the paper, without having an obvious bias towards one particular gender.  I think I will have to improve my exigence by opening up the argument to the negative effects in both females and males, because then I will not be favoring one gender over the other and creating a bias in my paper.  I am excited to educate others about this topic because it is something that I feel is causing big conflicts in today's society.

