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 the current generation of teenagers.  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 adolescents.  

As a college student that uses social media, I feel very strongly about this topic.  This topic is very relevant to this current generation because social media has become a prominent aspect in the everyday lives of teenagers. I will 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 am qualified to expand on this topic because I am someone who uses social media on a daily basis, and I am witnessing what it does to me and the others around me.  At times, I feel self conscious and negative about myself, and I want to educate other teens, as well as the general public 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 can be seen as biased 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.  One quote that stood out to me was from a junior in high school which states, "Even when I post a picture and don't get enough likes, I have the tendency to delete that picture because my confidence drops and I think that maybe I'm not pretty enough" (Harutyunyan).  If you're a girl and you stumble across this article, quotes like this one evokes pathos because these are real girls just like you telling how they feel every time they scroll through Instagram or twitter.  It makes the reader relate to them more.  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.  The major values that this source emphasizes is that high school girls are the problem with social media.  They are the worst critics because if someone looks just the least bit different, girls are the first ones to comment on it.  It is important to emphasize the fact that certain negative comments are really diminishing the self esteem of these teenage girls.   The source as a whole is not as credible as a news website would be, but this source is utilizing 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 contain less bias, even if the study proved to be more common for males.  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, however it also emphasizes the negative feelings that are associated with scrolling through Facebook.  The values that are brought up in the article lie around the central point that Facebook is adding to the negative feelings of self worth, so it introduces the point that you should use social media in small doses to diminish the amounts of negative feelings associated with the use of these sites.

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 all been asked to tell Cosmo how they feel about Instagram and what effects is has on their body image.  One of the girls interviewed said, "Looking at so many flawless, perfect pictures has lowered my self-esteem and promoted insecurity. Not only with appearance and body image, but financially, socially, and emotionally, everyone seems perfect" (Tullo).  Fourteen other college girls also explain how they feel self conscious when seeing other people on Instagram, which evokes the pathos in the reader.  Especially in this article, the value of self acceptance and self esteem is highlighted. By reading each girls' comments, it is easy to see how horribly social media affects the self esteem of these women.  Seeing as the reader will most likely be female, Cosmopolitan has strategically picked women's quotes 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. In order to provide a solution to this problem, it is important for the media and media users to start influencing positive aspects of body image instead of self decrementing thoughts.  We, teenagers, are the media, so in order for us to start feeling better, we need to change the way we use and interact with people on social media. I am excited to educate others about this topic because it is something that I feel is causing big conflicts in today's society.

