Social Media

Introduction

For anyone from anywhere in the world, recognizing the increase of social media usage and social media’s penetration in life could not be hard. In this review, the internet’s and social media’s process of gaining importance was mentioned. It has been hard to categorize social media because of the increasing number of networking platforms and interface platforms. They have been in connection with each other through interfaces, users, and functions. So, one would slog on to diverse them according to their functions. In this review, social media was treated as a living ecosystem.

Social media is not a steady stable thing. It is modifying itself and it is easily adaptable to the ever-changing world. Like us, social media is a living thing. One can observe this by tracing back to the 1970s’ when two countercultures that were two sides of using computer and information technologies for their benefits.

One side was representing big corporations, bureaucracy, and hierarchy. Another side was advocating freedom, individual rights, and empowerment. Finally, the World Wide Web alleviated this battle with the www. common connecting point. After Web 2.0 had promoted a participatory culture that has encouraged society to collaborate, the internet and social media have taken upon roles beyond connecting people with each other. They have become the culture creators. Social media is the culture creator and the community builder. But ethicality and morality levels of it are questionable because all contents and information about people are coded into algorithms and they are used by many corporations. Social media can destroy lives directly or indirectly. For instance, excessive usage of social media can harm an individual’s real social life(Hill and Zheng,2018) and according to some findings, it can cause depression(Lin et al., 2016), increase loneliness(Turan, 2018), with the negative experiences on it, it can also cause to perceived social isolation(Primack et al.,2019). If it is used excessively, it can harm student's GPAs(Alwagait et al., 2015). Social media can cause the dissemination of misinformation. So, it can damage societies and democratic institutions (Alcott et al., 2019). Social media can be taught similarly as two sides of the same coin. It creates advantageous and disadvantageous situations at the same time. It can create advantages for firms, marketing efforts, personal branding, and communication among people at some point.

Social media can be used effectively by firms. If it is used effectively, it can help firms to increase their customer potential(Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010). It is used for personal branding and marketing by people too. Nowadays individuals also market themselves like brands and firms. Hepekiz and Gökaliler(2019) found that people use social media as a tool for personal branding and marketing. They share contents that arouse good feelings in others and people show themselves as happier to others on social media.

Valkerburg et al. (2017) investigated the relationship between adolescent's social media usage and their social self-esteem. They found that social self-esteem increases with social media usage and social media usage increase with the rise of social self-esteem in a short time, But, they did not find any significant relationship between them in the long-time span.

Social media usage can affect an individual's psychological well-being according to some studies' findings. The self-esteem of people is rising when they receive more likes on Facebook, but for people who have a purpose in life, it is not affecting self-esteem significantly (Burrow and Rainone, 2017). Individuals who have low self-esteem engage in downward social comparison on Facebook to feel better (Cramer et al., 2016). So, one could seek a relationship between social media usage and the self-esteem of individuals. As a result, it can be deduced that social media affects our psychological well-being and self-esteem with regards to the experiences we had on it.