Analysis: Teenagers Use Of Social Media

The two readings I picked are ‘Taking risky opportunities in youthful content creation: teenagers use of social networking sites for intimacy, privacy and self-expression’ by Sonia Livingstone and ‘Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States’ by Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa. Author Sonia Livingstone talks about use of social media by teenagers, where author Bonilla and Rosa talks about how and why social media platforms have become powerful sites for documenting and challenging episodes of police brutality and the misinterpretation of racialized bodies in mainstream media. Both of these reading creates a sense of the undeniable impact of social media in human life. Despite the fact that both articles talk about social media, there are many differences. The very first one is, the article ‘Taking risky opportunities in youthful content creation: teenagers social networking sites for intimacy, privacy and self-expression’, in the introduction, basically talks about the numbers of how many people under 18 use social media such as MySpace, Bebo, Facebook etc. Also, the introduction introduced how people construct their social profile, in other words, how they use it for their communication. Author Sonia Livingstone generally wrote the article targeting teenagers. On the other hand, the introduction of the article ‘Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States’, the authors described an incident regarding police shooting of an unarmed black man and how it later created a very strong reaction among peoples in different social media. There are also three more incident described of unarmed black men killed by police and how strongly people in the social media reacted to it. Protesters in social media raised their voice against these incidents which they thought is not acceptable in their society. Social media has its impacts on people, both negative and positive according to research. …show more content…
However, all three authors of the article discusses how important and impactful social media is to peoples daily lives. But the three authors presented it differently. Author Sonia Livingstone talks about how teenagers are using social media. She included a lot of information about social media users, stated specific numbers of users of different social media. The article shows how the use of social media can be impactful in teenagers life. The article consists of some interview from teenagers who are very active in their social media. Most of the teenagers are aged 9-13. From the interviews various things were discovered. For example, it looks like teenagers are very careful how they construct their profile. But the article by Bonilla and Rosa talked about the impacts of social media in a different way. The article focused more and described how social media is used to raise voices against what’s not right. Authors of the article included a lot of incidents where people used the social media as a platform where they could express their opinion. There were a lot of times when people created an impact through social media. For example, about 3.6 million post appeared on twitter after the death of Michael Brown, showing how people all around the world voice in their opinion in something they think is not correct. Comparing the two article, it