Social Media Essay

Submitted By gbrodish
Words: 1378
Pages: 6

Brodish 1
George Brodish

Dr. Willams

Eng 101

Sept 17, 2013

Foogle Attempts to Google

The topic that I choose to do research on was the effects of social media sites on todays youth. I think that taking a look at something like this and how the addiction of sites like facebook, twitter, and istagram have both negative and positive effects on the development of our future leaders. While there are two sides to every coin I don’t believe that most users see the underlying effects of social media and the problems that it causes. In this paper I will take a look at the information that I found and hopefully get a better insight on what is fact and what is fear mongering based on a small demographic's negative experiences. Another reason I choose this topic was because social media is something that is very prevalent in our society, it is becoming harder and harder to find people who don’t use social media on a daily basis. Just knowing that alone made me think that there should be a ton of credible information out there, but on the same token there should be a ton of personal opinions or sites out there that are not good in the aspect of research. This is what I found. The first article I choose is titled “Social Media, Facebook and Twitter use may harm grades of college freshman.” The first thing that I noticed about the site itself is it looks very professional, there are some advertisements here and there but relatively speaking it keeps it to a minimum. The site is more than just a news site it actually contains a ton of information about various medical conditions I took some time to surf around and check out the other information and I believe this to be very credible. The article itself was written by Nick Nauert who has masters degrees in health-fitness management and healthcare administration and a doctoral degree from The University of Texas at Austin focused on health care informatics, Brodish 2 health administration, health education and health policy. He is also the Senior news editor for this website and his article was reviewed by another PHD so someone has to know what they are talking about. I also found it very reassuring that you could click on the authors name and it pulled up a short biography explaining his credentials and letting the reader know that it isn’t some kid in his basement vomiting his personal opinion on the world wide web. At the bottom of the web page there is a list of resources that the author cited as well as a few links to other related articles, this to me says “hey you don’t have to take my word for it.” I like the way that the web page is laid out, it screams professional and informative much like we would expect our doctors to be. I found a link at the bottom of the page that was a link to an about us article. I found out that the website as well as the authors and contributing editors have won awards by Time magazine and have been praised for the quality of information by The New York Times. Absolutely a top resource for someone looking to do research, as well as many self diagnosis tools and quizzes, this is something that is for anyone. The second site that I took a look at was actually one that I was hoping would be a bad source. When I typed my topic into the search bar I scrolled down skimming the title, then noticing where the bold words appeared in the short text that google displays, the last thing that I look at is the name of the website. I guess I judge books by their cover but in my mind a blog or post by someone is less credible to start than a big news site or a medical journal. This approach as I quickly found out is flawed. Upon opening the web page this was clearly done by someone on their home computer and did not rely on flashy adds or fancy media to attract attention it jumped into the nitty gritty facts and actually is exactly what I was looking for. The article is titled “The Negative Effects of Facebook