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Keeping in touch is no longer about face to face, but instead screen to screen, highlighted by the fact that more than 1 billion people are using Facebook every day. Social media has become second nature -- but what impact is this having on our brain? "In a recent study, researchers at the UCLA brain mapping center used an fMRI scanner to image the brains of 32 teenagers as they used a bespoke social media app resembling Instagram. By watching the activity inside different regions of the brain as the teens used the app, the team found certain regions became activated by "likes", with the brain's reward center becoming especially active." This article goes into depth on how social media like instagram is changing our brain. It shows us what parts of our brain are getting stimulated when we use social media! It also talks about peer influence, social learning, and reward circuitry.

This article outlines research-based advice regarding teen use of social media. Psychological scientists examine potential beneficial and harmful effects of social media use on adolescents' social, educational, psychological, and neurological development. This is a rapidly evolving and growing area of research with implications for many stakeholders (e.g., youth, parents, caregivers, educators, policymakers, practitioners, and members of the tech industry) who share responsibility to ensure adolescents' well-being.b Officials and policymakers including the U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy have documented the importance of this issue and are actively seeking science-informed input.c

This article highlights the importance of social media and how it has the potential to change interactions, dialogue and exchange of new ideas. It specifically goes into detail about how social media is giving voice to thousands of people worldwide who struggle with political oppression. Social media is gaining more popularity and governments are recognizing the its power and responding to the power threat by blocking or banning the use of platforms such as Facebook. Social media is a powerful force that is expanding information across international borders.

This articles talks about how social media has affected the way college students communicate with one another. What I found interesting was the statistics they found in the college students with 39% of the people who took the survey feeling closer to their friends because of social media, and 26% saying that they have more friends because of it. It was surprising to see the positive effect that social media had on people rather than all the negative affects it has.

From unfriend to selfie , social media is clearly having an impact on language. As someone who writes about social media I'm aware of not only how fast these online platforms change, but also of how they influence the language in which I write. The words that surround us every day influence the words we use.

From unfriend to selfie , social media is clearly having an impact on language. As someone who writes about social media I'm aware of not only how fast these online platforms change, but also of how they influence the language in which I write. The words that surround us every day influence the words we use.

Developmentally, teens are at particular risk for reckless online behavior, including secrecy regarding social networking. Many people - adults and kids alike - view likes, loves, comments and followers as a barometer for popularity, even within a smaller, closed group. Teens can quickly get caught up in the feedback loop, posting and sharing images and videos that they believe will gain the largest reaction. Over time, teens' own values may become convoluted within an online world of instantaneous feedback, and their behavior online can become based on their "all about the likes" values rather than their real-life values. There is a very real biological basis for this behavior. The combination of social media pressure and an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, the region of the brain that helps us rationalize decisions, control impulsivity and make judgments, can contribute to offensive online posts. In a recent study, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that the areas of teens' brains focused on reward processing and social cognition are similarly activated when they think about money and sex - and when they view a photo receiving lots of likes on social media. When teens viewed photos deemed risky, researchers found the brain regions focused on cognitive control were not activated as much, suggesting that it could be harder for them to make good decisions when viewing images or videos that are graphic in nature.

This article discusses the impact that social media has on youth. Because most modern teens are learning to do the majority of their communication while looking at a screen, not another person, they are missing out on the extremely critical social skills required for social situations. When you replace face-to-face interactions with screen-to-screen interactions, children do not learn the social cues such as body language, facial expression, and vocal reactions. The article discusses indirect communications, how to lower the risks of your child having bad social skills, how cyberbullying and the imposter syndrome affect teenagers, how stalking other people accounts can lower their self-esteem, and what parents can do to help. Experts worry that because social media and text messages have become so integral to teenage life, they are promoting anxiety and lowering self-esteem.

Studies show that people who spend more time on social media sites feel more socially isolated than those who don't. This might be because of a disconnect between our online lives and our real ones.

Interesting video on how using social media in different ways can affect mood positively / negatively. Specifically passive versus active use of social media.

The growing number of Hawaiian language accounts on social media is sparking discussions on how ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi can take advantage of platforms like Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. Traditional approaches to language revitalization, like classroom instruction, have been fruitful, but using social media may help raise the visibility and accessibility of ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi.

Is social media good for you, or bad? Well, it's complicated. A UC San Diego study of 12 million Facebook users suggests that using Facebook is associated with living longer -- when it serves to maintain and enhance your real-world social ties. Those on Facebook with highest levels of offline social integration -- as measured by posting more photos, which suggests face-to-face social activity -- have the greatest longevity. Online-only social interactions, like writing wall posts and messages, showed a nonlinear relationship: Moderate levels were associated with the lowest mortality. Facebook users who accepted the most friendships also lived longest.

Social Media can be beneficial and also detrimental when it comes to books. Social media allows for readers to connect with authors to ask questions and to connect with other readers to discuss books. It can also be detrimental in that it removes the realm of "fiction" from many books. Since everything is so widely discussed, it prevents readers from coming up with their own ideas to fill the holes in books.

For teenagers these days, social media is real life, with its own arcane rules and etiquette. Writer Mary H. K. Choi embedded with five high schoolers to chronicle their digital experiences. (This article is an example of qualitative research: data is triangulated and comes from various sources (self-report, actual online behaviors, digital posts).

Skepticism of online "news" serves as a decent filter much of the time, but our innate biases allow it to be bypassed, researchers have found - especially when presented with the right kind of algorithmically selected "meme." At a time when political misinformation is in ready supply, and in demand, "Facebook, Google, and Twitter function as a distribution mechanism, a platform for circulating false information and helping find receptive audiences," said Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College (and occasional contributor to The Times's Upshot column). Why? Here are the key reasons: 1. Individual bias/first impressions: subtle individual biases are at least as important as rankings and choice when it comes to spreading bogus news or Russian hoaxes. Merely understanding what a news report or commentary is saying requires a temporary suspension of disbelief. Mentally, the reader must temporarily accept the stated "facts" as possibly true. A cognitive connection is made automatically: Clinton-sex offender, Trump-Nazi, Muslim men-welfare. And refuting those false claims requires a person to first mentally articulate them, reinforcing a subconscious connection that lingers far longer than people presume.Over time, for many people, it is that false initial connection that stays the strongest, not the retractions or corrections. 2. Repetition: Merely seeing a news headline multiple times in a news feed, even if the news is false, makes it seem more credible. 3. People tend to value the information and judgments offered by good friends over all other sources. It's a psychological tendency with significant consequences now that nearly two-thirds of Americans get at least some of their news from social media.

Quinn Norton is a technology writer whose job offer from The New York Times was rescinded after tweets from her past caused backlash on social media. In her essay, Norton describes how the controversy built and destroyed a falsely-constructed version of herself. The article talks about the potential perils of social media use, including context collapse, where online culture that was meant for a particular in-group becomes disseminated to other groups via social-media platforms. Consequently, it can be taken out of context and recontextualized easily and accidentally.

"Tweenage girls who spend endless hours watching videos and multitasking with digital devices tend to be less successful with social and emotional development ... The girls' answers showed that multitasking and spending many hours watching videos and using online communication were statistically associated with a series of negative experiences: feeling less social success, not feeling normal, having more friends whom parents perceive as bad influences and sleeping less. ... The survey findings are bad news, given that the 8 to 12 age range is critical for the social and emotional development of girls, and because children are becoming active media consumers at an ever-younger age. ... Higher levels of face-to-face communication were associated with greater social success, greater feelings of normalcy, more sleep and fewer friends whom parents judged to be bad influences. Children learn the difficult task of interpreting emotions by watching the faces of other people, Pea said. ... For the negative effects of online gorging, "There seems to be a pretty powerful cure, a pretty powerful inoculant, and that is face-to-face communication," Nass said."

Like Facebook or Twitter, Yik Yak is a social media network, only without user profiles. It does not sort messages according to friends or followers but by geographic location or, in many cases, by university. Only posts within a 1.5-mile radius appear, making Yik Yak well suited to college campuses. Think of it as a virtual community bulletin board - or maybe a virtual bathroom wall at the student union. It has become the go-to social feed for college students across the country to commiserate about finals, to find a party or to crack a joke about a rival school. Much of the chatter is harmless. Some of it is not. "Yik Yak is the Wild West of anonymous social apps," said Danielle Keats Citron, a law professor at University of Maryland and the author of "Hate Crimes in Cyberspace." "It is being increasingly used by young people in a really intimidating and destructive way."

This article heavily focussed on some of the ways in which language has been affected by social media. Particularly how there have been more acronyms or shortening of words to fit a more limited media.

"Two scholars of the 17th and 18th centuries say the earlier era prefigured the "information overload," with its own equivalents of Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Social networks have been key to almost all revolutions - from 1789 to the Arab Spring." Also includes an short, interesting video interview with the researchers.

Recent research suggests older generations are actually more avid users of social networks than their younger counterparts, and that parents are more likely to be active on such networks than non-parents. There is evidence that these digital experiences can have negative effects. Frequent social media use is also a risk factor-one of many, of course-for depression. Sarah Coyne, a psychologist at Brigham Young University, found that new mothers often compared themselves with other mothers on social media, and that this behavior was in turn associated with "higher levels of maternal depression." Annual surveys conducted by The Center for the Digital Future at USC Annenberg show that, since 2012, people feel increasingly ignored by others in their own family households because of smartphone use.