For this week, I read “I’m an Addict and Other Sensemaking Devices: A Discourse Analysis of Self-Reflections on Lived Experience of Social Media.” by various authors. This article focuses on how social media affects adolescents. In the discussion about discourses, the authors wrote “People enact, resist, and co-construct social reality through their everyday discursive practices and interactions. This gives discourses certain ideological power [15,55] to, for example, reproduce heteronormativity, racism or sexism, but also to position certain phenomena as significant and others as trivial, some as social problems and others as solutions. Thus, “discourse not only puts words to work, it also gives them their meaning, constructs perceptions, and formulates understanding and ongoing courses of interaction”(Tiidenberg, et al., 2017). This quote is saying that because of the internet, the youth is more prone to having different discourses about anything involving social issues that can give others and even themselves different perceptions. Using the internet brings on these discourses due to everyone having a different opinion. This is a good and bad thing. Currently, Facebook and Twitter are pushing towards letting people, especially young people, have these social discourses online as a way of “hearing both sides”. However, we can not “hear” both sides if these platforms like one side more than the other. Through this method, young people put more emphasis on trying to be right no matter what side they are on. It is more exhilarating to argue with strangers online than leaving it alone and doing something else. Both sides use their screens to hide behind.

 

References: Katrin Tiidenberg, Annette Markham, Gabriel Pereira, Meghan Dougherty, Mads Rehder, Ramona Dremljuga, Jannek Sommer. “I’m an Addict” and Other Sensemaking Devices: A Discourse Analysis of Self-Reflections on Lived Experience of Social Media.”