Background of the studyTheinternet is taking over the society nowadays.
Everyone loves to surf theinternet and seeking it as basic needs in their lives. People uses social mediato share their lives and also share photos or stories. Accordingto Greitemeyer and Kunz (2013), There are 1 billion active users on Facebookwhich is the most popular social media, with an average of 552 million users logging into the site perday. People uses Facebook tocreate a personal profile and posting photos or statuses to share theirlifestyle or feelings. Besides Facebook, there are also popular social mediaplatforms like Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube and more which also couldallow people to share their content. Social media is a popular venue for both self-presentation andcommunication. According to Seidman and Miller (2013), howpeople view the information in a social media profile, and how their attentionto the profiles are affected by physical attractiveness and appearances of theprofile owner. Specific details of a profile can affect the impressionsof the profile owner, including description written or videos and photographsthat posted in the profile.
According to Greitemeyer and Kunz (2013),social media is used to view the effects of interpersonal attraction from theirphysical attractiveness or profile names. The profile names and physicalattractiveness are shown to be associated with how people judge and behavetowards the profile owner. This is why people are putting effort in arrangingtheir social media profile and post pretty photos or better-looking content tocreate good impression of themselves.
Furthermore,people would try a lot of ways just to gain more attention on social mediaincluding taking prettier pictures of themselves or create interesting contentto attract attention. Social media is getting more popular and it could reachto a lot of people. For now, it could be obviously seen that people with betterphysical appearance including body shape or pretty faces gain more fame andattention on social media. Social media content creators also used people witha sexy appearance as thumbnail to attract audience on their content. In fact,Seidman and Miller (2013) suggested that physical appearance may be the mostimportant element of first impressions.
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Therefore, the physical attractivenessof the profile owner should play a significant role in attention gave to differentfeatures of the profile. Significance of the study This research will understand how people view socialmedia content based on physical appearances of the profile owners. Understandhow physical appearance could affect the attention attracted on social media.As today, people who is famous on social media are mostly because of thegood-looking appearance. Physical attractiveness of the profile owner played animportant role in attention gave to the profile. Hypothesis 1: People who has better physical appearance could gain more attentionand fame on social media.
To understand the reason why physical appearances isimportant on gaining attention, it’s important to study people’s perspective ongood physical appearances. This is because people have their differentperspective on the attractiveness of an individual. People have different thoughtson a good physical appearance.
It could be just a good-looking face, a goodbody shape or maybe both. However, people are still more likely to be attractedby people who has better physical appearance. This research attempts to showthe effects of attraction on social media by including the elements of physicalappearance. Hypothesis 2: People are more likely to be attracted by people who has abetter physical appearance. Purpose Statement This study aims to find out why people with good physicalappearances could affect the attention gained on social media. This researchalso aims to find out the perspectives of young people from age between 15 to25.
Young people are the most active on social media and their perspective isvery suitable for our findings in this research. Research Questions 1) How does physical appearance affect attentionon social media? 2) Why physical appearance can affect attentionon social media? LiteratureReview According to Seidman and Miller (2013), peopletend to pay more attention to the physical appearance which is the main profilephotograph of a female than male profile owners. However, people pay moreattention to the personal information for example likes and interests of a malethan female profile owners.
For the profiles of unattractive individuals, theyfocused more on information that was not relevant to form an impression of theprofile owner such as advertisements. They are putting more effort to learn aboutthese unattractive individuals. This isbecause areas with texts used a large proportion of the profile area comparedto the picture areas. Besides that, forming an impression is the background ofthe current study, and the text areas were needed in this task.
Hence, it showsthat viewers examine the profile photograph briefly to judge the physicalattractiveness and gender of the profile owner. They spend more time reading theinformation of the profile owners to try forming an impression. Sexual interest towards the profiles of attractiveindividuals is reasonable but not expected from the perceivers because thebackground of the study was not romantic. The participants have not expectationon meeting the profile owners. This research shows that people will beattracted by the appearance of the good looking individual to form animpression. However, people will focus on other information which is not relevantto form an impression of the unattractive individual, more effort is needed tolearn about the unattractive individuals.
Profile owners felt less socially attractive whencomments that are other-generated were different with the self-presentation ofthe profile owner. It cannot be successful without acceptance from others nomatter how they package themselves with exaggerated self-presentations. Having more social interaction inprofile pictures does positively affects popularity and social attractiveness. Ifthere are negative comments, people judge the profile owners as less attractiveand thinks that the profile owners have less friends on social media. This isbecause people base their impressions towards the profile owners not just onself-presentations but also on other people’s feedback about them.
The findings show that social media user’s awarenessof controlling self-presentations online is very easy. However, they tend to relymore on other-generated content that are seems to be more difficult to control. People tend to rely more on information that areother-generated than self-generated while forming impressions. To achieve apositive self-presentation, being aware of other-generated information is moreimportant. Besidesphysical appearances, other-generated information does affect the attraction onsocial media. This research shows thatother generated information will affect the impression of the individual nomatter the physical appearance. (Hong, Tandoc, Kim, Kim & Wise, 2012) Aresearch by Greitemeyerand Kunz (2013) stated that friendship requests of users who haspositive names and who are physically attractive are more likely to be acceptfrom other social media users. As a matter of fact, both names and physical attractivenessdoes affects friendship acceptance on social media like Facebook etc.
This iswhy people arrange the details of their social media profiles including aproper name to create good impression. Moreover, results revealed that name-valencecan be replaced or recovered by physical attractiveness. Requests from userswith positive names but moderately attractive and requests from users withnegative names but attractive did not significantly different from people withpositive names and attractive on acceptance rates. There are both negative andpositive implications in their findings. On the negative side, people who has anegative name and not physically attractive are disadvantaged.
However, on thepositive side, it appears that the negative effects of one can be helped andimproved by the other. Besides on having a good physical appearance, thetidiness of the details in the profile for example names could also affect theattention gained on social media. According to Jaschinski & Kommers (2012), thereis a direct positive impact on the social attractiveness of the target on theirfriend’s attractiveness. The friend’s attractiveness of the target user couldaffect the popularity and attention gained on social media. The person tends tobe more likeable and seen as a potential friend when he has friends who aregood-looking. The gender of the target user and the gender of their friends isnot a significant element of this relationship. However, the friend’s gendercould create a main influence towards the target user. This is because physicalattractiveness of others can be carried over to a target user who is relatedwith this person’s.
Visual cues can support the impression making process, itdoes not matter if the cues are provided by the target himself or by hisfriends that are related. There is no significant relationship between profileowner’s gender and friend’s physical attractiveness. This caused the predictionof the attractiveness stereotype which is female profile owners are moreattractive than male profile owners were not supported. However, men are morelikely to like a stranger on Facebook and consider them as a potential friendthan women no matter their gender and physical appearances. This is becausewomen are more concerned about the privacy issues. Men are usually more openedup to strangers on social media platforms. This could explain that thesignificant main effect of the perceiver’s gender on social attractivenessaccording to the research. Friends could also be one of the elements to gainfame and attraction on social media.
A research by Amon, M. (2015)stated that in mixed-gender groups, women wereviewed more frequently and also longer periods of time than men. Besides that, observersare more likely to look at women first and last.
Men spent more time payingattention on pictures of women when there are fewer women in the group. Butthere is an opposite effect for women, women viewed less on pictures of men whenthere are fewer pictures of men in the group. Compared to male observers,female observers spent more time looking at men. Men’spreference for looking at women was magnified when women were the minority. Maleobservers also do spend more time looking at women compared to femaleobservers. However, in overall, both female and male observers were looking atwomen more than men. As stated clearly, women’s appearance does gain moreattention and interest than men in mixed-gender social groups.
Doesn’t matterof the number of pictures presented or the composition of the pictures,observers spent almost equal time lengths paying attention to pictures ofpeople versus the blank screen space. The research shows that men and women hada nearly same baseline interest in viewing other people, this contradicts withprevious findings that women used more eye contact on social interactionsincluding gaze. Methodology Method Quantitative method isused to answer the research questions. A survey will be created online anddistributed to young people aged between 15-25 who are active on social mediaplatforms. This survey is divided into two sections. The first section will befocused on the participant’s perspective on physical appearances on socialmedia. The second section will ask about participant’s knowledge on “clickbait” in social media.
Click bait is an eye-catching link or thumbnail on a website orvideos which encourages people to read on. It is often paid for by theadvertiser or generates income based on the number of clicks. (“clickbait”, 2017) Procedures An online questionnaire will be created usingGoogle Forms, which is an online platform for surveys. Questions are to beanswered privately which the participant’s details and information includingname and contact number is not required.
The questions are created according tothe research questions. The questions must be relatable with the research topicand the findings of this research. The data will also be collected and analyzedby Google Forms. After the survey questionnaires are prepared, it will berandomly given out to approximately 75 participants from any gender. The numberof participant’s gender is not required to be equal. Findings and Discussion Results There is a total of 75 participants took thesurvey.
Participants demographic data is categorized under gender, age range,average time spent on internet, most used social media platforms and sexual preference(not compulsory). There are 51 females (68%)and 24 males (32%) took part in this survey. Participant’s majority age rangedbetween 18 to 20 (74.7%) with a total of 56 participants. The second largestage group is between 15 to 17 (21.3%) with a total of 16 participants. Followedby the least age group 21 and above (4%) with a total of 3 participants.
Majority of the participants (60%) spend 5 hours and above on the internet perday on average which consists of 45 participants. Followed by 27 participants(36%) who spend approximately 2 to 4 hours on the internet per day on average.There are very few participants who spend lesser time which is around 30minutes and 1 hour on the internet per day, it consists of 3 participants. (4%) The top 5 most usedsocial media platforms form the participants are Snapchat (85.
3%), Instagram(80%), YouTube (73.3%), Chatting apps (WhatsApp, WeChat etc.) (69.
3%) andFacebook (57.3%). Other social media platforms like Twitter (33.3%), Tumblr (1.3%),Spotify (1.
3%) and more is not very popular between the participants. Consistent withHypothesis 1, 30 participants (40%) strongly agrees and 34 participants (45.3%)agrees that people with a better physical appearance could gain more attentionand fame on social media.
Participants in this research are very active onsocial media. This shows that good-looking people or people who has goodphysical appearance does gaining a lot of attention on social media at thismoment. Also, consistent withHypothesis 1, 32 participants (42.7%) agrees and 18 participants (24%) stronglyagrees that people could gain more attention with showing more of their skin ora sexy appearance on social media. Hence, most of the participants (49.4%)agrees and strongly agrees that gaining fame and attention can be succeed withonly a better physical appearance and good-looking face.
This shows that sexyappearance is used on social media and good physical appearance does help togain fame and attention on social media effectively. The results from the datacollected does fulfill Hypothesis 1 clearly. Consistent withHypothesis 2, majority of the participants (50.7%) agrees or strongly agreesthat they are attracted to people who has better physical appearance, followedby 30 participants (40%) chose average.
A total of 39 participants (52%) agreesand strongly agrees that they will follow and keeping up with people who hasbetter physical appearances on social media. This results shows that peopledoes attracted to people who has good physical appearance and willing tokeeping up or follow their statuses or posts on social media. However there arestill people who stays neutral. For the results from section2, Majority of the participants (72%) which consists of 54 people saw the most”clickbait” on YouTube videos, followed by Facebook (42.7%) and Instagram(33.3%).
This shows that “clickbait” are mostly used at social media platformsthat has more videos posted like YouTube or Facebook. This means that”clickbait” are mostly used on videos for gaining attention on social media. Also, consistent withHypothesis 2, most of the participants (57.3%) does attracted by the”clickbait” and clicked in to the content. Which 41 of the participants(54.
67%) agrees that the most common “clickbait” seen are with people who showna lot of skin on thumbnails and uses sexual words or photos as title onthumbnail. However, 46 participants (61.3%) chose interesting content used astitle and thumbnail is the most common clickbait they have seen. The resultsfrom the data collected also does fulfill Hypothesis 2 well.
Discussion RQ1: How does physicalappearances affects attention on social media? This research makesseveral contributions. It shows that people does arrange their social mediaprofiles well to gain attention on social media. It also includes usingphysicalappearances to attract audience. According to Greitemeyerand Kunz (2013), people with a proper name and good physical appearances doescreate good impression to the audience and increase their attractiveness.People who are not physical attractive are more on the negative side and can’tgain attention as much as people who has good physical appearance.
Because ofhaving physical appearance like showing more skin or a sexual appearance doesattract more attention, people started to use “click bait” which is an eye-catching link orthumbnail on a website or videos which encourages people to read on. It is oftenpaid for by the advertiser or generates income based on the number of clicks. (“clickbait”, 2017) Inthis research, it is found that people are really using their physicalappearances to attract audience on social media. They use it through thumbnailsor posting a photo with a good physical appearance on their social media.
Themost common “clickbait” that seen on social media also includes people who shown a lot of skin on thumbnails anduses sexual words or photos as title on thumbnail. It is reasonable tofind out that people are mostly attracted by the “clickbait” and clicked intothe content because of the physical appearances shown. Most of the “clickbait”are usually girls with a good physical appearance or sexy appearance. Accordingto Amon, M. (2015), both female and male observers were looking at womenmore than men in overall.
So, women’s appearance does gain more attention andinterest than men in mixed-gender social groups. It concludes that people usedpeople who has good physicalappearance or sexy appearance which are mostly women as “clickbait” to attractattention. People also post pictures of themselves with a good physicalappearance to gain attention on social media. RQ2: Why physical appearance can affect attention on socialmedia? Since there is a solid evidencethat people who has better physical appearance could gain moreattention and fame on social media, this research also discussed about peopleare more likely to be attracted by people who has a better physical appearance.
Hence, the reason why physical appearance can affect attention on social mediais because people does more likely to be attracted by people who has a betterphysical appearance. The findings of this research showed that people agreedthat being good looking and has a better physical appearance does gainattention and fame on social media. People also agreed that showing more skinand has a sexy appearance could attract attention effectively, which is used bymost of the “clickbait” on social media. Most people also admitted that theyare attracted to people who has better physical appearance and willing to followthem on social media and keeping up with their posts or statuses. According to Seidman and Miller (2013), peopletend to pay more attention to people who are attractive and has a better physicalappearance.
It concludes that people does attracted by people who has a betterphysical appearance, and this is why physical appearance can affect the attentiongained on social media. Conclusion,Limitation and Suggestion Conclusion In conclusion, physical appearances do affects attentiongained on social media. The reason of why physical appearances affectsattention on social media is because people with good physical appearancescould form a good impression to the audience.
And the audience are willing tokeep up with people who they have good impression with on social media.
