Is Social Media Changing Us?
Social Media is shaping the way we interact with each other on a level that has never been seen before. We are communicating through computers and cell phones rather than face-to-face conversation. We can reach a large amount of viewers with a quick click of a mouse. It is unrecognizable to us because we are acclimated to communicating like this; it is how we’ve always done it. Social Media has shaped our interactions with one another down to the very core, for better, or for worse.
According to Michael Wesch, in his video of “an anthropological introduction to YouTube” there has been more content uploaded to YouTube in the last six months that there has been aired on the ABC network since 1948. If that doesn’t show the huge presence of social media, I don’t know what will.
YouTube is only a part of the puzzle; it is made up of so much more such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Blogger, and Vine just to name a few. Each of these sites plays a role in our communication with others. Whether it’s the seemingly “hundreds” of friends you have on Facebook, or the mass sharing of your life through a click of a button through Twitter, the way we interact is changing rapidly. We no longer rely on each other for comfort, but rather, we find comfort through a computer screen. When something tragic happens we post a Facebook status and receive instant support. When we achieve something great our first instinct is to tweet out the huge news. These are new ideas that we now see as common, every-day things.
The Social Media site that shapes my life the most is Instagram. I have gotten into this habit of directly basing whether or not people like me off of how many likes or how popular my pictures are. It’s silly I know, but it’s the truth. Nancy Baym says it best in the reading “Identity” that we craft our identities online. We chose what to post and what not to post based on how we want to be seen. If we want to be seen as someone who has a lot of fun, we will post every single fun thing we do online but leave out the boring stuff. If we want to be seen a beautiful, we may edit and distort our pictures before showing them to the public because that is how we want to be seen. This directly relates to Instagram since it is nothing but a timeline of photographs. My Instagram for example is full of mountain pictures, fun times with friends, and animals. This is the way I want to be seen by others. My online identity is important to me, probably more so than I would like to admit.
Facebook is a social media site that use to have all my attention so I feel it is still important to look at for this essay. I still remember being seen as “popular” if you had more than 500 friends on Facebook. I was so entranced by this idea I would friend request people I didn’t even know just to get that satisfaction of having a lot of friends. Another thing that Facebook made almost acceptable was stalking. It sounds terrible but it is so true. I found myself meeting people in real life then going to their Facebook to make the final judgment on them. Not only did I find myself doing this to people I knew, but also to people I didn’t know. I stalked people’s boyfriends, girlfriends, sisters, and brothers, it never ended. Now don’t go thinking I have some sort of problem I know I am not the only one who partook in these “investigations” as I would call them. I felt like I was apart of a community that I could find out anything I wanted with a simple click and could talk to anyone I wanted with just another click. So why is that?
Michael Wesch suggests an interesting reason as to why we need this sense of community more so now than we once did. He describes it as a way to cope with our changing world. We went from corner grocery stores to he super centers, small communities to huge subdivisions and in between all this hustle and bustle we stopped interacting with each other (Wesch). In order to compensate for this lack of communication, we turned to the Internet. We find joy in getting that 100th like on a picture, or to see that four people commented on your status about what you did yesterday.
When we step back and take a look at the bigger picture we see that we are living in a constantly changing world and the Internet is only speeding these changes up. Some changes are necessary and create a better world for us, but others cripple our communication and make us feel alone in a mass of people. Are social media sites the answer to our prayers, are they helping us feel like we are apart of something or are they pushing us farther away. This is still to be determined, but for now we will keep on tweeting, posting, blogging, and texting until the next big thing comes along.
Works Cited
An Anthropological Introduction to Youtube. Michael Wesch. Youtube. 2008
Baym, Nancy. Personal Connections in the Digital Age. Cambridge, UK. 2010. Web. 16 Oct. 2013
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