Att tackla sociala medier : En kvalitativ intervjustudie med personer som påverkats negativt vid användningen av sociala medier samt om deras hanteringsstrategier

Over the last couple of years’ social media has come to have an influential role in our lives. With the broad use questions has raised if social media use can have negative effects. We have seen a recurrent tendency in media and society that encourage people to overlook their social media use and seen cases of people reducing their private social media use. The purpose of this study is to examine attitudes in young adults whom have taken a break from social media or reduced their usage. Furthermore, we wanted to distinguish what types of strategies they have used when they renounced from social media. With a qualitative approach we interviewed five young adults that had waived from social media during different periods of time due to negative usage experiences. We examined our empirical material along side with previous research on social media, Goffman’s impression management theory and Nanna Gillberg’s notion on Bourdieu’s forms of capital. We found that people tend to see the opportunity of impression control as something tedious and time consuming which had lead to a diminished use of social media. When tackle this aspect of social media, it came down to reducing your usage to an extent without having to compromise the possibility social media offers to keep in contact with friends.