I’m not sure if this is the case for everyone who has experienced this need to have more “friends and followers” on social media. I feel that I grew out of it because I didn’t exactly grow up with it being an integral part of my life. This however, is a different case for up and coming generations to follow individuals like myself. I was born in essentially the birth of social media so it did not have a chance to grab a hold of me before I matured enough to realize the value of personal physical relationships versus social media relationships. Sure social media is great for connecting with your best friend across the country but I am talking about the meaningless “add a friend just to have another friend.” The younger generation I feel is at risk of not knowing how to develop meaningful relationships due to the social media inhibitors and social media “norms” that everyone has to follow. This would be a great issue to touch on beyond peer-to-peer relationships overall.
Group one, should write about peer-to-peer relationships and social media. It seems that our new generations are all about the amount of friends and followers, versus who our friends or followers are. Quantity over quality essentially. To be honest it is a bit sad that our society is so concerned about these social media “relationships” even more so than the ones that we physically have with each other. I will be the first to say that I was guilty of this for some time but it became something I grew out of essentially.
I’m not sure if this is the case for everyone who has experienced this need to have more “friends and followers” on social media. I feel that I grew out of it because I didn’t exactly grow up with it being an integral part of my life. This however, is a different case for up and coming generations to follow individuals like myself. I was born in essentially the birth of social media so it did not have a chance to grab a hold of me before I matured enough to realize the value of personal physical relationships versus social media relationships. Sure social media is great for connecting with your best friend across the country but I am talking about the meaningless “add a friend just to have another friend.” The younger generation I feel is at risk of not knowing how to develop meaningful relationships due to the social media inhibitors and social media “norms” that everyone has to follow. This would be a great issue to touch on beyond peer-to-peer relationships overall.
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Yo! Group number 1! Loved the presentation by the way!
You should write about peer-to-peer relationships in the form of a video because I, as part of your audience found this compelling because of all the different levels of friends you taught us about as well as the different ways friends and cliques form as well as popularity. I think in the medium of a video you could express perceived popularity in some very funny and very creative ways while having a blast at the same time. A video could also show the power games of cliques and the benefits and negative associated with cliques. It would also be interesting to expand on “Free Riders,” I had never heard of them before but was very intrigued by them and would love to learn more about them (so if anyone actually makes a video and talks about free riders please send it to me!). For me videos always grab my attention because you can keep scenes under a minute each which allows me to easily focus on each scene for the entire duration (unfortunately sometimes I am easily distracted). Videos you can also throw in tons of personal touch to it and joke around a ton. They can also be so fun to make, my good friends and I made probably five or six videos our senior year for English Literature and the making of those videos formed some great memories amongst my friends and I. Hope you guys kill your unessays! -Bennett You should write about peer to peer relationships through a social media account because I, as part of your audience found this compelling because one of your points in your presentation was that the age of technology that we live in has had a huge impact on how we interact with each other and the relationships we form.
Whether this account may be through Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or some other venue of social media, you could easily reach an audience of your peers. Each individual post could cover a different aspect of your presentation such as the familiarity theory, bullying, “free riders”, the Ausch Paradigm, and cliques. You could go about presenting your information in multitude of different ways. One method could be posting a picture depicting the subject at hand and then explaining this image in the description. Another method may be posting short informational videos, in which you could include interviews, on the matter. However you choose to present your information on social media, I believe, will be effective because it is such a huge part of the daily lives of our generation. This could be a good opportunity to bring awareness to issues that you covered like bullying and may help people become more aware of their relationships and keep an open mind in their friendships. To help you get started, here are some questions I had and ideas for further research:
By creating your Unessay through social media, you would be giving an example of one of the topics you covered: the Proximity Theory in relation to the age of technology. I think this would be a creative, engaging, and relevant form of media to demonstrate this theory while informing your audience on peer to peer relationships. While looking for articles on popularity, I discovered two studies. The first, titled Variant and Invariant Predictors of Perceived Popularity Majority-Black and Majority-White Classrooms by E.B. Meisinger ⁎, J.J. Blake, A.M. Lease, G.J. Palardy, S.F. Olejnik. The second, titled Peer-Perceived Admiration and Social Preference: Contextual Correlates of Positive Peer Regard Among Suburban and Urban Adolescents by Bonwyn E. Becker and Suniya S. Luthar. I’ll refer to the first as Meisinger’s study and the second as Becker’s study to simplify things.
It’s important to note that Meisinger’s study was published in 2006 while Becker’s study was published in 2007. I believe this time difference accounts for many of the similarities and differences in each study. Many people, myself included, consider urban to equal black and suburban equals white. And, while Becker’s classrooms confirm this stereotype, they were actually trying to make a distinction between socioeconomic status unrelated to race while Meisinger was attempting to focus strictly on racial divides. One of the important similarities though is that both studies focused on perceived popularity, the type of popularity that is typically associated with “being at the top of the social ladder” but does not necessarily mean the student is well-liked. It is also important to note that Meisinger’s study took place in the rural Southeastern United States, probably in an attempt to limit the impact of socioeconomics, while Becker’s study took place in, obviously, both suburban, distinct from rural, and urban schools in the Northeastern United States. Another difference in the studies is the ages of the students. Meisinger studied 516 students in 4th,5th, and 6th grade, ages 9 through 13 while Bronwyn studied 636 7th graders, who are generally about 12 to 14 years old. Despite the different focuses of the studies, Meisinger’s on race and Becker’s on socioeconomic status, the invariant predictors that Meisinger had identified held true through Becker’s. Both studies confirmed that athletic ability (especially for guys), “personal privilege, such as external beauty and wealth, (especially for girls), prosocial behavior, and to some extent social withdrawal, which I believe refers to exclusively selecting your group of friends. In the context section, before the description of the actual study and its results, Becker specifically pointed out that many girls believe that popularity mean social dominance. This, corresponded with information provided in the book Friendfluence written by Carlin Fiorna, stating that girls will, generally, partake in more rebellious behavior in an attempt to appear cool to others. Becker also pointed out that girls engage in more relational aggression, such as gossip, in order to “climb the social ladder”. Meisinger identified three variant predictors that were further elaborated in Becker’s study. These were intelligence, socially excluding/tough behavior, and disruptive behavior (specifically for girls). As stated above, Becker reviewed previous research that supported the claim that perceived popular girls engaged, and their peers allowed them to get away with, disruptive behaviors in the classroom. Specifically, Becker’s study showed that academic application, defined as perceived intelligence by Meisinger, correlated to higher levels of perceived popularity within urban latino youth, and a bit for urban black girls. However, it was not linked as highly for urban black boys nor as highly for suburban school children. One that I found very interesting, was that high substance use and high athleticism were very closely linked to the perceived popularity of suburban boys. Becker hypothesized that since the “safety nets” of suburban schools and communities were much stronger, these behaviors would not affect them in the long run whereas it was much more likely and dangerous for urban youth to participate in such behavior, therefore the connotations were much more negative. Overall, both studies focused on perceived popularity in grade school and both studies confirmed that there were invariant predictors of high perceived popularity. However, Meisinger’s study focused on racial divisions while Becker’s study, which I believe was more illuminating, focused mainly on socioeconomic divisions and somewhat on gender. Is race an issue in friendships? Do diversity in schools make an impact on how friendships are formed?
The answer may be more complicated than it seems. Anthony Lising Antonio, an assistant Professor at Stanford University, conducted research on the effects of diversity in race and ethnicity in friend groups. What he discovered was that students believe that there is a lot more balkanization, or division into smaller groups--by race in this instance--than there actually is. Although it is true that people do tend to seek out and clump in groups of people who are similar to them, most notably by race or ethnicity, friend groups aren't as balkanized as students believe them to be. In his study, 90% of students stated that they see balkanization around campus a lot, but only 52% of them said that they rarely socialized across racial lines. This causes more diversity than students think, but there is still a huge split in groups by ethnicity. Another study done by Christopher Ingraham showed that around 75% of white people have few to no friends that are people of color--the majority of their friends are also white. Although this makes sense in some circumstances where white people are the majority of people in most cases, it was shown that black people, although the majority of their friends are also black, have much more racial diversity in their friend groups than white people do. This implies that when we discuss issues of race with our peers, we are most often talking with people who are the same race as us. These two articles show how racial diversity in friend groups are formed and how they differ depending on the race or ethnicity of the person being studied. Antonio, Anthony L. "Diversity in Higher Education: Research." Diversity in Higher Education: Research. Diversity Digest, n.d. Web. 28 Oct. 2015. Ingraham, Christopher. "Three Quarters of Whites Don’t Have Any Non-white Friends." Washington Post. The Washington Post, 25 Aug. 2014. Web. 28 Oct. 2015. Friendfluence
Chapter 3: Friendship in Childhood The Classroom, Up close This summary is based off a section of the book Friendfluences written by Carlin Flora who has been written about developmental psychology for many years but is not an academic. Developmental psychologists call the recurring character types in movies “sociometrics”. John Coie, Ph.D., of Duke University lead a study regarding sociometrics and determined that there are 6 “types” of children. He determined that 15% of children are popular, 45% are average kids, well-liked but not by a majority. 10% of children are categorized as “rejected” and there are two subsets of them. The rejected-submissive who are shy and anxious and rejected-aggressive who are over-bearing and have a temper. 4% of children are “neglected” meaning no one picks on them but no one pays any attention to them. 4% of children are “controversial” meaning some people like them but others actively dislike them. And the last group is “ambiguous” meaning they don’t fit well into any categories. Doctors recommend that parents remove children who are classified as “rejected” since studies have proven that “children are five times more likely to assign negative intentions to the actions of a rejected child in comparison to the same behavior carried out by someone in the popular category.” Popular kids do have more friends however, there is a distinction between two types of popularity. “Popularity-as-decency” , kids who are liked because of their personality, and “popularity-as-dominance”, kids who are revered because they’re pretty, wealthy, or athletic, basically anything external. Author Carlin Flora also distinguishes between friends and friend groups. She says, “Children are socialized in a group but ideally gravitate toward friends who help them manage the group while also offering a respite from its limited roles and codes.” Basically, groups teach kids how to fit in while friends offer kids a chance to explore their developing personalities without fear of judgement. MLA Citation Flora, Carlin. Friendfluence: The Surprising Ways Friends Make Us Who We Are. New York: Doubleday, 2013. Print. |
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