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

Zou Jia 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. Zou Jia’s essay models the development of a complex thesis statement through weighing and synthesizing differing perspectives. Zou Jia 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 Fan Jiayang’s “China’s Selfie Obsession” and sources she found through research, Zou Jia makes a convincing case that social media as a platform intensifies young people’s hunger for validation. Zou Jia 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, Zou Jia’s essay is an ambitious, methodical response to the way social media has affected our psyche today.

—Alice Chuang, Lecturer in the Writing Program