1. In what way is the media involved in shaping our identities? Refer to at least two theoretical perspectives that you have encountered on the course so far to help develop your response.

In the society present today, we are completely surround by all types of mass communication, also known as mass media. Either we think it’s a positive or negative way of evolution we have no choice but to be surrounded by it all day, every day, and there is no way of escaping it or removing it from our everyday lives. Everything nowadays has the ability to expose mass media to us, for example; our phones have the ability to connect us with the world that surrounds us. No matter where the person is, phones allow us to have an immediate link to social media and to easily carry that type of media everywhere we go. Furthermore, there are more ways in which the media manifest itself in our everyday lives; from the news on our TVs, to celebrity news, and therefore I believe that the mass media have a deeper and more meaningful effect on us and help us to shape our identities, even more than we think. Consequently, in this essay, I am going to analyze the ways in which mass media affect us and how that aids to shape our identities.

The use of social media has gone through the roof, especially in the last ten years which was approximately when the most popular social network website “Facebook” came into the picture and also our lives. It is estimated that an astonishing 60% of internet users are also member of a social network (including Twitter and Tumblr), which is an increase of 43% from 2007 (Dutton and Blank, 2011). “An emerging online practice that involves creating a persona, sharing personal information about oneself with others, performing intimate connections to create the illusion of friendship or closeness, acknowledging an audience and viewing them as fans, and using strategic reveal of information to increase or maintain this audience.”(Marwick, 2010). This is a suggestion that social media has a massive role in shaping our identities as it is through social network websites that people can re-create their idea selves otherwise unattainable in the real world, and therefore end up “branding” themselves online in order to escape the real world and the perception the people they know outside the web can have a different perception of them. Moreover, reshaping ones personalities is not the only ability that social media enables users to do; presence of their peers is always constant so users are more likely to engage in risky and/or dangerous behavior as appropriate or normal behavior are blurred; they are most likely to reveal private information and therefore lead to illegal situations, also sexting and cyber bullying are more likely to occur- situations such as cyberbullying