Maria Konnikova, author of “How Facebook Makes Us Unhappy”, engages in a reasonable discussion about “the world of constant connectivity and media, as embodied by Facebook” (3). Konnikova, author of a bestseller and contributor to The New Yorker, focuses on psychology and sciences. This piece is an example of how Konnikova explores the effects of a particular issue concerning individuals and their emotional state. As the title suggests, “How Facebook Makes Us Unhappy” essentially discusses the negative effects of social media and how they produce boredom and lack of creativity in our lives. This is a current problem concerning primarily the youth, but is equally harmful to any other age group. Relying primarily on research studies and experiments, Konnikova explains the harmful side of Facebook using words like “alienating” and “addictive” to…show more content… Incorporating the appeal to logos, she cites factual information such as the 2010 analysis in which forty studies showed how Internet use had a small effect on the overall well-being of individuals (2). Besides locating and analyzing research, Konnikova connects these findings to support the assertions made. Ethan Kross, a psychologist from the University of Michigan, argued that Facebook makes us sad and lonely due to participants’ reactions in his experiment (1). Research conducted in 1998 by Robert Kraut, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, also found that over the course of 1-2 years, a sense of happiness and connectivity dropped after using Facebook for the first time (Konnikova 1). By providing accurate information from researchers and connecting the evidence for deeper understanding of the situation, Konnikova builds her ethos as an author. She gains the trust of her readers by presenting valid sources and in turn, showing her knowledge on the
