1. University of Northern Iowa
Social Media Narrative Essay
Emma Hingtgen
Cornerstone: Section 20
Professor Eric Braley
October 2nd, 2014

2. Social media usage is as prevalent in our society today as party lines were in my grand
parents’ age. Of all adult Internet users, seventy-four percent use social media (“PewResearch”).
The images and words people put on social media have begun to make an impact on their
professional life. Employers have denied jobs to potential employees due to inappropriate
content on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Privacy settings on social networks
have become a common way to hide information from employers, but society should take a step
back and reflect on what they are putting on the Internet.
I am among the ninety percent of eighteen to twenty-nine year olds who use social media
(“PewResearch”). I am active on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram but more so on Twitter and
Instagram. My profiles on these sites remain open for anyone to see because I am very careful
about what I put on social media. In school and at home I have repeatedly been reminded that
anything you put on the Internet is not confidential and can most likely be accessed after its
deleted.
If someone who did not know me stumbled across my social media accounts, they would
portray a valid image of who I am in “real” life. Because I am not on Facebook a lot, it mostly
consists of posts people tag me in. The posts usually include information on what I am doing
with my family or birthday wishes. Twitter reigns as the most popular social media website for
our generation. Many people become absorbed in Twitter and spend countless hours on it
everyday without even realizing it. Wade and many other gunters do the same thing on the
OASIS has they hunt for Halliday’s egg. Wade declares he “logged out of the OASIS because he
had been online for twenty hours” (“Ready Player One”, 100)*. He spent a large amount of time
on the OASIS without even realizing it because he was so consumed with what he was doing.
This happens very often with social media websites; you think you are going to sit down and

3. catch up on social media for five minutes and those five minutes easily turn into thirty minutes
and then an hour. My twitter is more active and personal than my Facebook simply because my
peers are more active on Twitter everyday. Although one may not tweet, most people scroll
through their feed to see what the people they follow are doing. I follow my friends and a few
verified accounts such as MAC cosmetics, Vogue magazine, and famous designers. I use my
Instagram everyday as well. I post a picture every once in awhile but always look through the
pictures everyone else is posting. I generally follow the same people on Instagram that I follow
on Twitter. Our culture, myself included, has become obsessed with what everyone else is doing
through social media.
After critically looking at my Facebook page, it appears that I am a very happy person. I
have not posted anything on Facebook for a long time, but the posts I am tagged in include
pictures of my family and me in Mexico, at Iowa State University football games, in Milwaukee,
for a long weekend with my family, my college move-in day, and my mom tagging me in posts
about loving cats. Facebook has recently redone their “things you like category,” so I do not have
any pages liked. I am friends with a lot of people on Facebook with whom I do not have a lot of
contact or interactions. After going through some of these people’s profiles and seeing their
inappropriate pictures, such as an under age drinking, an employer could assume that I do the
same things. I should consider deleting these friends, so that I do not create a bad image of
myself simply through the people I am “friends” with. My Facebook page is a fairly good
indicator of who I am as a person, and it is easy to see the kind of activities I am involved in.
My twitter appearance is slightly different than my Facebook appearance. I always seem
to be having a good time on Facebook but because I use Twitter more, it follows my emotions
more accurately. I portray both a positive and a negative person on Twitter. I appear positive on

4. Twitter when I retweet pictures of my friends from UNI Snaps, talk about how great of a
weekend I had, or tweet supportive and motivation quotes. I come off as a negative person when
I tweet things such as “things couldn’t get much worse” or “distance sucks”. Twitter is similar to
a diary for most teenagers because it is a place to freely express yourself. There are very few
people that have a Twitter that never complain on it; people share their high and low points with
the people who follow them. I keep my tweets and the pictures that I post on Twitter appropriate,
but some of the accounts I follow do not. One account would be UNI Snaps. Everyone on UNIs
campus can send a picture to the account, and they will tweet it anonymously. These pictures
aren’t always appropriate, but if an employer were to see that I followed this account, I believe
they would not assume that I participated in the inappropriate behavior sometimes displayed.
Employers would not draw this conclusion because it is a campus-wide account. Although my
Twitter represents who I am, it would be very easy to create an account that would be
misperceiving.
Misleading accounts pop up everywhere. Many celebrities have people making fake
accounts using their names and tweeting things they would never say, sometimes making them
look like really bad people. Besides celebrities being victim to this type of false representation,
accounts like this were created in high school. If a group of people did not like a person, they
could simply make an account and tweet things that would make other people dislike that person.
Any person could make an account that gives a vague personal representation with pictures that
aren’t even of him. Wade and almost everyone in the OASIS do this with their avatars. Wade
describes how his appearance in the OASIS is different from the real world. He says, “I’d
designed my avatar’s face and body to look, more or less, like my own. My avatar had a slightly
smaller nose than me, and he was taller. And thinner. And more muscular. And he didn’t have

5. any teenage acne” (“Ready Player One”, 28). He also describes how you can change your
personality in the OASIS, just like people do on social media. Wade admits that he “is a
painfully shy, awkward kid, with low self esteem and almost no social skills – a side effect of
spending most of my childhood inside the OASIS. Online, I didn’t have a problem talking to
people or making friends. But in the real world, interacting with other people – especially people
my own age – made me a nervous wreck” (“Ready Player One”, 30). The way Wade describes
his personality is very similar to the way our generation is today. We easily send direct messages
to people on Twitter and express our feelings, but in the “real” world, we struggle to keep a
conversation going or tell someone how we feel. We subtweet mean things about people but will
never confront them, making solving problems even harder. Twitter is a popular place to see
what everyone is doing, stay in touch, and tell people what you are doing. My personal twitter
reflects my appearance and attitude, but it is very easy to create an account that does not mirror
who a person really is.
Instagram is slightly less popular than Twitter but still remains a top social media site for
young adults. As a picture orientated site, Instagram is very simple and does not include a lot of
information or words. My Instagram has seventy-five pictures on it, all of which consist of my
friends or family and I, my cat, and other miscellaneous pictures. My Instagram has nothing I
would be ashamed of on it. A few of the people I follow do not always use their best judgment
when posting pictures, but an employer would not accuse me of doing anything wrong because I
am not in those pictures. Most people make good decisions when posting pictures, such as
making sure the background is clean. On Instagram, the pictures are really saying a thousand
words about you.

6. Google has become a powerful tool that can present the searcher anything they are
looking for if it’s on the Internet. A link to my Facebook profile, my Pinterest profile, and one of
my senior pictures show up when I Google my name. I have not used my Pinterest since I was a
freshman in high school, so there is nothing inappropriate on there. I am pleased with the
information someone would find if they searched my name.
Social media started as a couple websites and has developed into an interconnected web
of many websites. It has a heavy influence in our lives, especially the lives of our generation.
Wade states, “My generation had never known a world without the OASIS. To us, it was much
more than a game or an entertainment platform. It had been an integral part of our lives for as far
back as we could remember” (“Ready Player One”, 34). This is extremely true for our
generation; we have never lived without technology or social media. It is engrained into our
everyday lives. We are constantly looking for feedback. We seek ‘likes’ on our Facebook and
Instagram posts and retweets on our tweets. We are obsessed with the superficial feeling that
other people admire us. We engage in interpersonal communication all day, every day on social
media, and it’s beginning to make a larger impact on our lives than we ever would have guessed.

7. Works Cited
Cline, Ernest. Ready Player One. New York: Crown, 2011. Print.
Pew Research. "Social Networking Fact Sheet." Pew Research Centers Internet American Life
Project RSS. Pew Research Center, 2014. Web. 25 Sept. 2014.