The social media platform that I am interested in discussing is Imgur. Imgur is a platform for people to share interesting images regardless of their popularity or connections with others. Users are allowed to comment on each other. The reason why I chose Imgur is simple, that is Imgur is simple.

Unlike other social media modality such as facebook or twitter which has multiple sharing content forms such as image, video, article, audio and so on, Imgur only shares images (some images have words in it) and allows strangers comment on each other only basing on the images sent. It is also easy to use, one need not having a lot of followers to get attention, as long as the image is worth stopping by, one gets the sharing done. This is a very fast and easy way to communicate online about life offline which is gaining popularity among users from all ages including teenagers which could be both good and bad at the same time.
For the upsides, Imgur offers a platform for teenagers to communicate with each other freely. It offers very positive attitudes most of the times about unfairness, sadness and pain in life with uplifting stories and warm Imgurians’ supports. It also helps release adolescents’ stress about academic and daily life by looking through entertaining images. It shares a lot of opinions about real life news event which teenagers could mostly be too busy to look at. For the downside, some Imgurians could be passive aggressive or sarcastic towards certain information which is a very negative attitude for teenagers to pick up. Sometimes it could be time-consuming for adolescents to focus too much on browsing Imgur. What’s more important is that, some information on Imgur could be personally biased from a certain stance which could influence teenagers easily because of their sensitivity.
As an ESL teacher, I would like to propose usage of Imgur in listed ways to try to help students ESL learning. In classrooms, teachers could make classes more enjoyable if bring some interesting images from Imgur to share and discuss as long as they are proof-read before and is positive and helpful. Teacher can use comments from Imgurians to teach speaking English to ESL students. What’s presented on Imgur is highly cultural in English native speaking countries so that teacher can use this aspect to help students better understand related cultural aspects. After class, teacher could build a community online on Imgur by posting images to stimulate thoughts and communication among students by asking them to comment and interact about the topic. What’s more, teacher could encourage ESL students to try to communicate with native speakers online in a respectful way to learn from them both linguistically and culturally.
Thank you very much for your time!