I found that there are fewer young people choosing to use Facebook these years. Probably it’s because their parents and grandparents started using this social media platform, and they are trying escaping from their family’s eyesight on the internet. Instagram, a platform that you don’t have to show your real name, is becoming more popular. It is very interesting to realize that a lot of adolescents are using more than one accounts on Instagram. They will use the different account to present different aspects of themselves; they also use it to see the new trends among young people and those trends influence them a lot.

As an educator, I think no matter which social media modality we want to introduce to our students, the first thing is to let them know that people always “Discourse” themselves in the way they want. I read Plato’s Allegory of the cave in my undergrad, and I found this story was particularly giving me a lot of thoughts on social media when I was an adolescent, and I believe it can also help today’s young adults to learn about social media. The allegory is that a group of people was sitting in a cave, facing the wall, and seeing nothing but shadows that cast by a fire behind them. That’s the way they learn about the world–they might think that was the real world, but it is just the world that being projected on the wall in front of them. As long as we see this world thru a lens (media), they are modified by a filter and are presented in a way that not necessary they original like. I will help my students to understand this and let them know that there is always a real world beyond this “projected world” on the internet, we should never be fooled by those filter, and we should have the courage to walk away from the wall and see what’s really happening in the world.

In terms of the merit of Instagram, I think this app can be a tool to find the same group of people. By typing a tag that you want to research, you can easily find the related pictures and videos. If a student is struggling with some issues and also want to know how do other people like them dealing with that issue, they can search topic like #ADHD to figure out how other people with ADHD deal with this, and maybe some professional accounts giving advice to issues related to ADHD.

I also believe Instagram can be a useful tool for community learning. By searching “near me” in their searching engine, young people can figure out what’s happening in their community. Or if they want to learn somewhere else in the world, they can search the name of that specific place and see what people are doing, what is happening in that place.