Social media and shaping identities

Nowadays, social media becomes a huge part of our lives, especially young, according to an article in New York magazine, teen agers spend about 7 hours a day using social media, as it becomes that widely and extensively used, it has negative effects on the individual first and on the society and the culture. People becoming more dependent, their personality becomes wavier and not stable because of the social media impact on shaping their personality and how judging becomes more versatile because of the changing context of social media 

I will organize my arguments by answering these questions, what is social media and how it becomes that important in our lives? How using social media shape and transform our lives and in what way? How do the

standards keep changing because of social media so our subjectivity change? How social media have this power to construct a collaborative identity? How this change our personalities and opinions and how we are living in the real world?  How the use of social media contributes to violence

First of all, social media is a web-based service that enables an exchange of information between users and creates a a social network, there are different categories of social media, for example social network sites like Facebook where people can communicate informally and share similar interests or build new relations with other people, another an example is multimedia social media like YouTube where people can share videos, photos or posts    

This phenomenon becomes serious lately, about 75 percent of teens use more than one social network site according to a report released in 2015 by the Pew Research Center study, and approximately the same number of teen users use smartphones. It is getting more dangerous because of the construction of collective identity, to socialize and to get new friends cool friends the user should change his preferences tastes ideas activities and sometimes his beliefs to be known to more popular and worthy of attention, and it is measured and quantified by how many likes, followers, friends… which has a detrimental impact on individual self-esteem, this is defined in the concept of networked individualism that Barry Wellman researched within the communities that are constructed through these social media platforms, 

The second part of shaping identity is related to privacy, privacy is transformed into online platforms, the users share their personal  information with their friends through posts, walls, photos 3 billion photos uploaded monthly on facebook and depends on your profile you get either accepted or denied, which limits the knowledge of a a person on some posts or photos, this is itself a common standard that a high number  of users follow while chatting or communicating on these platforms this is a strong example of how social media shapes our identity in a way that makes us all have the same standards. Users think that they control this shared information which is completely wrong, for the instance when facebook celebrated its 14th birthday, the platform shared memories about users and these memories were collected through algorithms, users had no choice about which memory to share. The most dangerous the part is that the context of social media is changing that changes also the judgments and opinions of users  depending on the new standards shared on these platforms, the evidence for that is how facebook users changed from students of universities in order to communicate 

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