What role does social media play in keeping millennials from making sound financial decisions?
I chose this topic because most sources define millennials as people born between the late 1980’s to the early 2000’s. (Sources vary but on average, these are the years that conclude the millennial years). As someone a part of that range, I’ve seen over and over again how we are stereotyped as entitled, and bound to live in our parent’s homes until forever. Most of us won’t be able to afford our own homes, so instead, we splurge on less expensive, instantly gratifying, but also useless-in-the-long-run things that we call “experiences.” Thus, our financial decision making is strongly influenced by impulses to have something in the now. But why is that?
When adjusted for inflation and salary wage increases from the time our parents were our age, I don’t think it’s impossible for us to achieve the same things our parents did. However, the older generations never had something that we can’t live without today: social media. These new platforms serve not only to feed our narcissism and our need to know what our peers are up to, but it also serves as marketing platforms, vision boards, and sales converting mechanisms for companies. It also allows us to get a broader view of how others are living. We are no longer constrained to seeing what our peers have, but celebrities, influencers and self proclaimed “rich kids of instagram” also have a platform to show off their lavish lifestyles and materialistic tendencies.
In my paper, I’d like to explore this topic further by doing the following research:
- the psychology of “flexing on the gram”
- the effectiveness of advertising on social media
- the importance of achieving social media fame
- where did millennial stereotypes about poor finances came from in the first place
- credibility of social media stars and why we still fall for it.
- Does peer pressure and crowd mentality have anything to do with how we make our decisions
- The importance of belonging (a materialistic point of view)
- Are millennial finances as bad as the media makes it out to be?
This reminds me of the BBC series ‘The Men Who Made Us Spend’ that talks about marketing strategies used by the business capitalist to prompt a higher rate of sale. With the development of social media, new forms of advertisement also emerged—influencer marketing—targeting the millennials.
When you think about it, it sounds very silly that social media has a negative effect on the financial decisions of people, but in reality, it happens more times than one could think. I’ve seen many people who buy overpriced or unnecessary things just to flex or look trendy. I wouldn’t advise spending money like that, but it’s their choice and social media definitely plays a role. I think you have a solid research question, but if I were to suggest anything it would be to state it as: How does social media keep millennials from making sound financial decisions? I think it sounds more straightforward.
I think this is definitely an interesting topic! Since we basically aged and grew up with social media, I feel as though teenagers especially do not think carefully about how we are targeted as a group on social media and the effects that it has on us mentally, let alone financially. All of the bullet points that you might mention in your essay are great, I think it would also be interesting to research stocks and trading amongst college students and teenagers, as it’s something I notice that a lot of my peers invest in and get into without really knowing much about money or the trade market.
I really like this topic as it relates with majority of students today. We all practically grew up in the age of technology and I would also like to mention that I’ve seen an increasing amount of ads regarding financial services like Robinhood for example which is just a terrible brokerage and since it’s relatively easy to setup an account on there even though I haven’t tried for myself I do know that the platform is lacking in regulations and audits on people that open accounts and in some cases give people “leveraged” money that belongs to bank and they end up losing the money and have to pay the bank back even though they’re broke and it’s because of clever advertising to draw in uneducated youth into a field where if you don’t have a strategy you’re going to lose your assets. This can put people in serious financial debt as this broker isn’t structured and I’d also like to add that this incident happened to a young man quite recently and he ended up taking his life because he didn’t know what he was doing.
Here is the article I’m referencing:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/19/business/robinhood-suicide-alex-kearns/index.html