Gabe Marshall
February 14, 2018
Rhetoric & Composition
Living In A Fantasy?
Why is posting about your life on social media so important to the younger millennial?
In this youtube video posted by Ted Talks, Samia Khan informs the audience about how social
media can affect us in a very bad ways. I will break down each reason why by demonstrating
how teens positiveness in social media makes them one sided when it comes to life. Including
how social media affects each individual in different ways, particularly college students. And
then inform on how millionaires that own the website deceive their users. As a result I will also
talk about how social media can cause conflicts which can negatively impact a person, and can
totally bend someones personality and mental health. I personally agree with everything Samia
has said about social media. People portray that their lives are perfect on social media, but what
really happens behind the screen?
In the video Samia Khan explains a fact stating “…social media usage has been increased
about 1000% in the past 8 years, 98% of college students use social media and on average we
spend about two hours day on these sites.” She brings this up because marketing professionals
spend millions of dollars luring us to these sites by giving us a chance to be “rewarded”.
Teenagers continue coming back to these site hoping that we get that reward which in social
media term is the notification icon. We’re conditioned to stop whatever we are doing to check
back and see if we have that notification. It’s like you’re trapped in never ending merry go round
constantly waiting and checking for that notification. But how does this bring conflict to
someone?
You and I are human we have emotions, and emotions lead to wanting attention to feel
safe or wanting to be cared for. Social media is a way to find this compassion that most of these
users seek. Samia explains that people share and talk about our highpoint, but forget about our
low points as well. This is particularly troubling because students dealing with problems like
that ca...
