Social Media Reality

Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, said in the Social Network movie something like:

"People are not interested in looking at famous people anymore. They are tired of seeing the same perfect faces. People want to see people they know, people like them."

Based on that idea, Zuckerberg eventually came to create Facebook.

With the boosting popularity of social media such as Facebook, combined with the growth in reality shows and their populatiry, it is safe to assume Zuckerberg's intuition was right.

People are desperate to connect to each other. People want to see people with their same issues, limitations, personalities to reassure themselves.

But what happens when even those people are playing into the impression management expectations?

If people relate to social media and reality shows to find real people but in fact find tailored versions of people and take those as true, their sense of self becomes even more threatened.

So the social media, which was supposed to serve the purpose of connecting real people to other similar real people, no longer fulfil the needs of individuals who seek out to each other because people will never find those behind the images being portrayed.

But can you blame them?

How can people be theirselves if they are constantly being judged by the image they show?

Maybe if social media was truly anonymous, we could expose the truest versions of ourselves and feed off of each other in a more genuine and meaningful manner.

As it is, Zuckerberg and reality shows are not putting real people out there, but more illusions of what it means to be real.

American Dream

The American Dream paradigm is a modern approach to success.

It is based on the premises that if people work hard engough, if people are good enough and if people's ideas are strong enough, people will be successful.


Well, the whole culture behind social media in terms of things going viral (or people succeeding) conforms to the American Dream as it suggests that if enough people can relate to something, then that thing become valuable.


In that way, if something is important enough, or enough people believe in it, or enough people want it, the paradigm leads us to think that it will go viral, that we will all hear about it.

But the American Dream ignores the fact that some people just cannot or do not know how to participate.

Maybe their cultures will not allow (like in China), or they do not belong to a Western culture and value social media types of communication (like in Tibet), or they simply do not have the means to be involved (like the indigenous people of Canada).

But nonetheless are these different cultures less significant, less insightful or less successful.

Maybe people should stop relying on the things the media, whether from their friends or national broadcasts, tell them to talk and think about.


Instead, we should be reaching out to different ideas through other media rather than sustaining our one culture alone by only regurgitating what we recieve from other people which, if you read my previous posts, I believe are just reinforcing the status-quo, not giving people a voice.

It is not because it is viral that it is important, or that it is not viral that it should be ignored.

There are various reasons why some things recieve more attention than others, and those reasons are not necessarily based on what society needs.

Success and progress comes from looking at multiple pespectives. We must not rely on social media to tell us something is important. We must be proactive and find different ways to listen to everyone.

Everyone CAN, but who DOES?

Henry Jenkins inspired me to talk about the collective intelligence of media, especially social media.

He suggests that the developing technologies allow people to put together materials faster and easier creating a collaborative pool of ideas and possibilities of which each and every participant takes advantage and controls.

And I agree that there is potential for anyone to get involved, to share ideas and to be heard. It is important that people feel that significant in building the world around them.

However, the idea that all voices are heard online is merely a romantic illusion.

How many of us really take the time to contribute to anything other than our own lives and support the status-quo?

How many of us even have the time or access to this opportunity all the time?

Yes, the technology and the potential exists, but this social activism does not belong to everyone's world.

I mentioned in a previous blog that we rely on each other to keep us in check, exposing anything detrimental to our society, and that the power pertains to the majority.

But the majority who is online
is not representing the real majority.

If you go to Brazil, for example, the majority does not have personal computers at home with internet access, let alone smart phones to photograph and post their realities.

In Venezuela, Chavez passed a law that gives him more control over the internet. He watches over every move and is able to stop rebellions before anything goes viral.

The same is true with the Chinese whose media are constantly under surveillance and blocked from certain content.

And didn't Microsoft pay someone to manipulate Wikipedia entries and affect public opinion?

The majority in this sense becomes the minority.

Not everyone has the technology, the time, the money, the knowledge of issues, or education to make a point and have their voices heard.

Everyone CAN go out there post things and spread opinions, but who really DOES?

YouTube Trend Research

By studying the given behaviors and ideas of college students in America by conducting interviews, I identified the reasons why people are attracted to YouTube, under what circumstances people log on to YouTube, and what motivates people to engage in posting, watching and sharing experiences through YouTube videos.

I found that this trend is growing tremendously and it is already becoming part of people’s everyday lives. YouTube serves many different purposes for people in terms of entertainment and education, but, in my opinion,

YouTube serves especially as an attempt to rescue human relationships and connections by opening up barriers of communication.

By sharing experiences in such a vivid manner, people are able to feel comforted, accepted and supported as their lives and thoughts become open to the world.

People are inclined to access information on this website at any given time of the day depending on their goals.

There seems to be a place for everyone on yet this other social trend, a place from which people cannot get away as it becomes each day more emerged in their realities and daily routines.

If you would like the full detailed analysis of my findings,

PLEASE SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE!

A Social Panopticon

Foucault is a famous theorist who used the prison design by Jeremy Bentham, the Panopticon, to illustrate his views of the increased insidious surveillance in our lives.

The Panopticon was build so that prisoners would each take up one cell. The cells would be aligned creating a circle around a tower from which the guards observed and controlled those incarcerated. This allowed for a broadened view of the entire prison for the guards without letting the prisoners know whether or not they were being watched.

This system, according to Foucault, would reduce individuality and deindividualize power. The prisoners would slowly lose their identities as they would become alienated by the lack of true social relationships and power would transcend to those in the central tower.

And I could not help but to notice a similarity between a Panopticon and social media.

The insidious influence from our culture has convinced us that we must engage in all these virtual social worlds and present our best versions of ourselves through those media. But is that really liberating us and giving us the power?

Based on the conceptualizations by Foucault, I would argue that the social media is structured to increase surveillance over our lives and to ensure that we are doing what we are supposed to be doing.

I believe that we are consciously imprisoning ourselves into Panopticons by participating in things such as Facebook and Twitter where we register our moves.

We become individualized as all our records are structured and tailored to fit the requirements of the virtual versions of ourselves. And we deliberately give power to the watchers to judge and control our lives to the point where people can no longer freely express themselves and post versions of their characters without getting shun from society and fired from their jobs.

The euphoria behind all the advantages of the social media may help people if they can pretend to meet every social expectation, but it blinds them from engaging in real relationships and dealing with who they really are.

Why So Fast?

Information spreads incredibly fast, not only by new media broadcasts but also through the new new interactive media. Something happens and the next second it is already going around.

Accessibility is an obvious reason why information gets out there so fast. Everybody is able to just pull out their portable devices and text, email, tweet or facebook anyone in the world in a matter of seconds. Pictures, videos and recordings are a click away with the new technologies people carry around, which can also be shared across the world almost instantly.

But technology being more accessible is not the only reason why information goes around and around so fast. Jenkins offers a very important explanation: He says it depends on people having the right tools (such as cel phones and iPads) but also on their knowledge of what to do with them.

It is important to recognize the cultural dimensions behind spreading so much news. Yes, it matters to live in a society in which these tools are accessible, but we cannot forget that people do not necessarily use the same tools for the same purposes.

There might be some standard behaviors that technology brings. The fact that people can communicate things in different media at any given time is brought upon the culture by the media, but there are things and behaviors that are characteristic of certain communities.

For instance, Brazilians on social media websites, such as Orkut or Facebook, will delete their history and tend to have much fewer photos uploaded than Americans. Brazilians will often block their conversations and consequently opt for more privacy, but will generally make more plans for going out though these media than an American.

This reflects the cultural background of the two different ethnicities. Brazilians have a more conservative and protective sense of their individuality and identity. That may be because of the history of violence in the country and their fear of exposing themselves, or a simple question of keeping their profiles mysterious leaving room for questions as is the Brazilian cultural preference.

The tools may allow for common ground between nations and cultures. Everyone does in fact have a central point in which the information is focused, but it depends on their culture to assess the purpose of each media and to use them accordingly in the way they believe they should be represented.

We must not make assumptions as to where this technology may lead us or as to what implementing these media in different communities may bring because each society can and will respond differently.

The Sense of Being Human

Last Monday, a comedian performed on the Connan Show. His humor was interesting but he stood out to me for his last extremely thought provoking joke - which was actually so shocking and deep that in fact lost its humor, in my opinion.

He said something like this:

"Today, with so much technology and such ease in getting online to find information, the time between not knowing and knowing has become so short that it removes the excitement and value in actually learning something new."

I am not sure if he realizes how many theorists have written about this exact concept of losing the sense of being human, or alienation (Marx), or anomie (Durkheim), etc, but his example is the perfect description of how technology has contributed to removing people from feeling alive.

To use a more specific example, and to explain some of the rest of his joke which he used to build up to the moment of that truly fascinating comment, I will use my own personal experience of just over a week ago:

I was hanging out outside with a friend when a moth flew by and landed on the wall right beside us. My friend blew the smoke from his cigarette on the moth in the hopes of somehow killing it or scaring it away.

I said: "If you are trying to kill it by giving it cancer, you might need to blow a lot more smoke on it."

We laughed and then wondered: "Do moths have lungs? How do their respiratory systems work?"

My friend pulls out his iPhone and in a matter of seconds we discover that moths breathe by absorbing oxygen from the air through their bodies.

We then move on to talking about something else.

The comedian on the show told a similar story to show the ease in learning brought to us by technology. But then he countered that by imagining how it used to be before the internet.

People used to ask these random questions like the one about the moth and spend days wondering about how they breathe. People walked around asking others, hoping that someone would know the answer. Some time later, they would finally come across someone who happened to put them out of their misery with a suitable explanation.

The people asking the question would feel so reinvigorated and so special because now they knew something they did not know before! They would value that knowledge so much more because the quest for the answer has brought meaning to that information!

And isn't that what it means to be human? To long for things and then conquer them?

Is it better to assign some shallow meaning

to millions of little things?

Or to deepy relate to just a few important experiences?

Could technology be dehumanizing society?