Bandwagon Effect Dangers of Social Media
[Music]
if we were to take a time machine
and travel back in time what would we
see
in my opinion the world of 100 years ago
is vastly different
than the world of today thanks to the
innovations of our forefathers
modern humans live a very technocentric
lifestyle
and the benefits of technology can be
seen all around us
through the phones in our pockets to the
display powering our presentations today
while the benefits of technology
couldn’t be more transparent
there are also downsides to this problem
as we can see teenagers are spending
more and more time
up to seven hours of their day on this
on social media platforms such as
twitter instagram video entertainment
applications
tick tock youtube with this new asia
technology also comes the rise of more
internet dependent jobs
for example the role of the influencers
there are people who rely on
sponsorships and advertisement
as ad revenue to make money and a common
characteristic that they share
are the large followings on social media
platforms
that is not my primary concern what i’m
more concerned about
are there are young children due to the
internet accessibility
traversing these sites daily while
they’re already exposed
to the pre-existing dangers such as
paedophilia
and harassment i also want to address
the more hidden dangers
such as influencers and social media
and also companies trying to exploit
them
for the under the disguise of raising
awareness but actually
for profit then how do we plan to solve
these problems
actually as a matter of fact i don’t
think it is possible to completely
detach yourself from society from
technology
social media and technology has deeply
rooted itself onto our
culture and onto our livelihoods
so i don’t really recommend you to try
but
you are very well welcomed as a member
of the gen z
i fully understand the need to
keep updated with the trends as i too
have perfected my wap dance
but that is besides the point because
really we need to understand how these
trends
can impact us physically and mentally
we need to understand how our trends can
be
can hurt us and through the use of
thorough researching
and also fact checking we need to
understand how these
trends are often
police trends often affect the cultural
and religious backgrounds
and how it offends them an example of
this would be the fox eye trend
where it shows people of non-asian
descent stretching out their eyes
but actually this is racist towards
asian people who have received harsh
treatments due to the
nature of their eyes forcing some into
double eyelid surgery for example
now i’m sure that all of you have
experienced your own fair share of
internet embarrassment
myself included but the story that i
am going to present to you is more
deeply rooted into who i am as a person
it is something that took me a lot of
courage and a lot of power
to go up here and share it to you so
flashing back to 2014. uh
i just got over my first ever instagram
account
i was planning to run a photography
account because through the eyes
of a 14 year old anything can be
any anyone can be a photographer if you
have a camera
am i right well
i’ve quickly uploaded my first ever
photo with like 30 hashtags and
a beautiful deep instagram caption
like every other 12 year old kid but the
matter of fact is only got 40 likes
only 40. but i was happy
it was my first ever instagram post 40
likes is a lot
but then as i kept uploading i kept
getting smaller
and smaller amount of likes 30
20 15. and before i realized it
i developed social media addiction i
became obsessed
with numbers more more specifically
how to gain more of them
this i let then then i would came into a
cycle of self-depravity
and self-hatred why can’t i replicate
the same success
why can’t i be as good as the other
people
and agree to hate myself i my
self-esteem was killed
but luckily with the help of my friends
and my family i was able to pull myself
out of this dark time
a privilege that i believe that a lot of
teenagers often
do not get now we need to
understand how much social media has
impacted
our our lives then we need to understand
the people that play a role in it the
social media influencers
i have selected three for us to analyze
and compare and contrast here we have
with the first one
case study number one here we have
uh influencers uh they are tick talkers
they are charlie and
dixie and emilio they are known for
their tick tock dance covers
and they have a combined following of
135
million people that is a lot
now look if you take a look at what they
do
they’re often doing dance covers and
also a lot of like
uh collaborations with other big brands
like prada
and chanel but the most important thing
is that
they also use their platform for good
purposes
like when charlie like when charlie
talked about the black lives matter
movement
or when they did adverts on body
positivity campaigns
i think that is an incredibly good thing
that they are raising awareness
and promoting a good cause now
moving on to the next case study number
two
mr beast now he is somewhat
a personal hero of mine mr beast
known for his youtube channel youtube
channel and more specifically his
challenges online
where users where his participants can
get a large sum of cash
if they succeed the challenge of course
but the thing is
the thing that earned my respect for him
the most is this team trees initiative
launched in 2019 team trees is an
initiative
where people can donate money to plant
trees
evidently but the more important thing
is that team trees has raised 22 million
trees
as of 2020. the
amount of impact that this initiative
had on the environment
is huge and i would like to thank mr
beast
for using his platform in such a good
manner something that a lot of
influencers do not do which is why we
should move on to our next
and final case study okay study number
three
jstation now this guy is absolutely
deplorable
someone that you should not follow in
any form manner
so if we take a look at his content he
basically does a lot of click-baiting
videos
where he exploits the deaths of recently
passed celebrities
for money imagine being a relative
of those people who recently passed and
see that another person
has used their death as a monetary gain
i believe that everyone should not
follow this guy
because he’s an example of what a bad
influencer is
now i don’t believe that every
influencer are bad
they’re actually really good but we also
need to understand that they are at the
end of the day
they need to make money and so does the
companies
and so a lot of the companies and
influencers
they create these trends
not basically to generate revenue
not all of them but most of them do i’m
going to pick the harmless example
is the black pink awesome scream awesome
grammar strong battery life dance trend
as an example of this on the surface it
might seem to be a harmless dance trend
on tick tock
but if we dive deeper into it it’s
actually an advert
for the next coming samsung phone now
for all my life i’ve hold up to this one
value
is that if you do something nice and you
stick a camera up to it
then it’s just for money and i believe
that a lot of these
modern modern time trends are doing
something like that
they’re doing a good pro they’re doing
raising good awareness
but if the pr if the goal of the
product is not from here but from your
pockets
then it is something else it is
advertisement
not awareness and thank you for
listening to my tedx speech
you