Introduction
Instagram’s main line of business focuses on sharing photos and videos. While operating in this line of business, the organisation has immensely altered the manner in which people perceive the world. Kelvin Systrom who is the company’s co-founder maintains that Instagram constitutes a key element of the lives of all people across the globe.
In general, the social media facilitates an interactive two-way communication. Does Instagram have negative impacts? What is the reliability of information that is exchanged across the media? Focusing on Instagram, this desertion proposes a research to determine both negative and positive impacts of social media on people’s life nowadays.
Literature Review
Little research has been completed on how social media sites influence people’s way of life nowadays. Much research dwells on the impacts of social media on nations’ economic development. Using technological knowhow in a business such as Instagram has the potential of raising one’s returns from business (Awoleye 2012).
In fact, efforts have been put to investigate how Instagram can be deployed fully by organisations to maximise their profits. The proposed dissertation research builds on the work of Awoleye (2012) who offers a discussion of the advancements of Instagram and its roles in enhancing economic development among its users.
The works of Laurent (2013) will also be used in the research to shed light on the way Instagram has altered individuals’ perception of the world. Given that the existing researches such as the works of Heinrichs, Lim, and Lim (2011) confirm that the application of media platform has the capacity to do away with meeting stakeholders in person.
With media platforms such as Instagram, businesspersons can even get in touch while they are far apart. It is most likely that a significant portion of the population has a right of admission in terms of watching images that have been shared through platforms such as Instagram. More so, it takes seconds for such images to spread to as many people as possible, thanks to the invention of Instagram.
The amount of money that individuals spend to promote their products and services through platforms such as Instagram considerably reduced in relation to other options when one considers the distance and number of people who get the promotion content. Thus, social media constitutes a sustainable platform for executing organisations’ promotion campaigns.
For operations that focus on the youthful generation, it is quite convenient to deploy the services of media platforms since majority of this category spend much of their times surfing the internet (Anwar, 2012; Heinrichs, Lim & Lim, 2011; Eltantawy & Wiest 2011).
Through media services, businesses have had an opportunity to develop successful partnership, regardless of their geographical locations and/or customer age category. In fact, companies can upload advertisements on Instagram to draw awareness of the target spectators and/or respond to any issues that arise from the consumers promptly.
With reference to the US context, ICT investments had minimal implications on organisations’ economic growth. The current desertion builds on this assertion by evaluating the impacts of Instagram on economic gains in graphic-oriented organisations.
Chowdhury (2000) asserts that sceptics fail to understand the effects of ICT innovations in alleviating poverty, enhancing communication, and enhancing organisational growth. Nevertheless, the issue of addressing food shortage has been declared a difficult task.
Nevertheless, it is wise for stakeholders to find other avenues of handling the matter before it goes out of hand. As such, Instagram comes in handy to facilitate efficient sharing of information in the form of still and moving images.
Consistent with literature on the role of ICT in enhancing the manner in which people communicate, Instagram manipulates the manner in which people communicate with one another. A study by Lee (2013) shows the central role that Instagram is playing in terms of boosting business connections across the world.
As such, the study will be crucial in this research in revealing how the platform has influenced people’s business lives. For instance, the co-founder of Instagram observes that the organisation has immensely transformed the fashion industry by facilitating the sharing of outfit images to facilitate the democratisation of fashion across the world.
However, amid this achievement, Mariella (2014) reckons that social media has some negative effects on individuals, including low self-esteem, depression, and loneliness among others. Mariella (2014) informs that the worst negative feelings are related to the sharing of photos.
Can Instagram possess positive effects on people’s lives? This dissertation proposes a research to respond to this interrogative. The obtained answer will be useful in future researches that wish to focus much on the contribution of social media sites such as Instagram, not only in business, but also in the life of any individual.
Research Objectives
Social media is becoming a part of people’s lives. Through it, people can instantly share videos, images, look for work connections, and/or establish friendships. Based on these gains, the objective of the proposed research is to determine the negative and positive impacts of a specific social media, the Instagram, on its users’ lives. The second objective involves determining whether Instagram has any notable overall negative or positive effects on its users.
Methodology
To help achieve the aforementioned objectives, this project will utilise two approaches to garner data. The first approach will be secondary research while the second approach will encompass conducting a primary research.
For the first approach, a literature review will be completed on the impacts of ICT inventions such as social media sites, specifically Instagram, on people’s lives. The impacts will specifically focus on how Instagram has altered people’s lives in terms of the manner in which they communicate.
The second approach will entail conducting online interviews on randomly selected Instagram users. Analysis of the interview data will help to justify and/or assess the degree of agreement between the existing scholarly knowledge on the impacts of social media on people’s lives and the effects of Instagram on the same.
The interview questions will focus on areas such as the amount of time that Instagram users spend online in the process of sharing videos. The data collection methodologies suggest that this research deploys mixed methods of research.
For primary research, random online interview will be chosen as the preferred research mythology since it will avail a means of acquiring both qualitative and quantitative data to increase the rigor and reliability of research findings.
Time Scale
In any research, time is required to prepare for the interviews and/or arrange how data will be analysed among other activities. This research will be completed within three (3) weeks. The chart below shows an exclusive plan for all activities of the research. The chart shows all activities that will be carried out until the research is complete. It also shows the duration of each activity.
References
Anwar, M 2012, ‘Consumer Attitudinal Insights about Social Media Advertising: a South Asian Perspective’, The Romanian Economic Journal, vol. 45, no. 3, pp. 265-290.
Awoleye, M 2012, ‘Economic value of ICT investment in Nigeria: is it commensurate?’, International Journal of Economics and Management Sciences, vol. 1 no.10, pp. 22-30.
Chowdhury, N 2000, ‘Poverty Alleviation and Information and Communication Technologies: Towards a Motif for the United Nations ICT Task Force’, International Journal for Economic Development, vol. 3 no.1, pp. 423-457.
Eltantawy, N & Wiest, J 2011, ‘Social Media in the Egyptian Revolution: Reconsidering Resource Mobilisation Theory’, International Journal of Communication, vol. 5 no. 2, pp. 1207-1224.
Heinrichs, J, Lim, S & Lim, K. 2011, ‘Influence of Social Networking Site and User Access Method on Social Media Evaluation’, Journal of Consumer Behaviour, vol. 10 no. 7, pp. 347–355.
Laurent, O 2013, “Instagram has changed the way people see the world,” claims co-founder Kevin Systrom.
Lee, E 2013, Impacts of Social Media on Consumer Behaviour, Turku University, Finland.
Mariella, A 2014, How Instagram Is Affecting the Way We Perceive Ourselves and the World around Us.