Faculty Introduction for “Chinese Young Adults’ Sense of Self in Social Media: Through the Lens of Beauty Apps”

Jia Zou wrote “Chinese Young Adults’ Sense of Self in Social Media: Through the Lens of Beauty Apps” for my Spring 2020 Writing as Inquiry class. For this assignment, students were required to respond to course texts, conduct research, and develop their own original argument in response to sources. Jia Zou’s essay models the development of a complex thesis statement through weighing and synthesizing differing perspectives. Jia Zou evaluates the effect of selfie-editing apps on young people’s self-esteem and argues that as much as unedited selfies seem to capture one’s “authenticity,” they still promote self-objectification. By weighing the arguments of Jiayang Fan’s “China’s Selfie Obsession” and sources she found through research, Jia Zou makes a convincing case that social media as a platform intensifies young people’s hunger for validation. Jia Zou skillfully incorporates and weaves quotations from secondary sources to support her claims. She carefully defines key terms, such as “authenticity” and “self-esteem.” She includes social media posts as apt visual examples for her claims. Overall, Jia Zou’s essay is an ambitious, methodical response to the way social media has affected our psyche today.

Read “Chinese Young Adults’ Sense of Self in Social Media: Through the Lens of Beauty Apps”.

Alice Chuang, Lecturer in the Writing Program