Pre-Thesis Week 4: Contextual Research

This week, I read the article, Mapping the terrain: Methods of contextualizing research, which include helpful suggestions of finding resources and organizing them. Here are some key points I would continually check throughout researching:

• Being aware of the structure of argument and the criteria of clarity, accuracy, precision, relevance, depth, breadth and reason, to evaluate the significance and value of relevant materials.
• Be prepared to have your own beliefs challenged.
• Adopt different styles of writing at different stages. In the survey and mapping stages, gather and record factual information. In the critical evaluation, demonstrate some depth of understanding.
• Iterate on searching keywords (keywords up to six), reflecting on their relevance and accuracy.
• Map resources by relevance and categories using bibliographic software.

About my own research topic, it’s about young people’s negative feelings caused by social media. And through presentation and discussion of last class, the vicious cycle of social media overuse and FOMO was found crucial to the negative feelings and interesting to research. Therefore, I read more articles about the vicious cycle this week, trying to answer the questions: How could this vicious cycle be tangible? How to see the cycle?

To answer these questions, the first thing to settle down is the criteria or standard of overuse. My searching keywords are “ Social media appropriate use”, “Social media usage time” and “ social media overuse”. Due to Statista, people spent 145 minutes on average daily among the age group 16–64, but since people at different age would have different user habits of social media, this data could be too rough to refer to. Chinese users averagely spent 64 minutes on Wechat daily according to Huxiu Website. I have not found the exact number of usage time for young people using social media and Wechat, so it might require further searching or questionnaire survey. Plus, I’d love to know how people define appropriate social media use, and how they introspect on their usage of social media. One article demonstrates that young people who visit social networking sites more than 3 hours a day are more likely to have mental problems. So far, 3 hours might be bound of social meida overuse, but still needs more data and resons support.

Then I read Anxiety, loneliness and Fear of Missing Out: The impact of social media on young people’s mental health, whose title include all four of my initial keywords while finding the topic, so I am excited to know that FOMO could be one reason of these negative feelings such as anxiety and loneliness. The author vividly illustrate the picture of the vicious cycle: for dopamine production and instant gratification, young people would fresh their social media feeds. Failure to get gratification and increasing demands for ‘likes’ on social media platform would result in lack of confidence of being ‘funny’ or ‘liked’, as well as the amplification of absent, people would continue to fresh their feeds in an anxious and lonely metal state. To further make the cycle visible and tangible, I would continue to research on young people’s motives and frequency to fresh their social media feed. Another argument putorward by the author that impressed me is protential measures to manage the negative impact, including integrating social media ‘lessons’ into subjects in school, the use of behavioural economics and increased signposting efforts by social media firms.

From social media companies’s perspective, I have been reading Hooked. The book explained a mental model of users becoming ‘addicted’ to software or applications through four phases: trigger, action, variable rewards, investment. Nowadays many designers refer to this model to improve their user experience aiming to more time usage. Some examples have description of companies’ methods to guide users’ overuse, such as waterfall view of Pinterest to browse users’ curiosity and beautiful picture filters of Instagram for users to keep recording their life moments. These perspectives all provide me information about how FOMO in social media happened.

My next step is to map these information by relevence according to Methods of Contextualizing Research, showing the facts and datas I found, and then to form critical evaluation.