Ignorance or Strategy?

The same people who say that social media will free the world from the controlling systems of information spread, that social media will open doors for the people to rise and break away from the dominant powers of contemporary journalism, are saying that when someone gets fired for voicing their opinions:

"that's just the way it is"

It seems to me that social media is being used as personal profiling solely. It has become a pit of the most obvious forms of impression management in which people tirelessly administrate their image.

Yes, there are interesting debates going on online and people share their thoughts about the latest things on the news by posting videos, links...

But how is that contributing to the liberation of thought that everyone believes these social media can bring

if people have to constantly consider how these posts may reflect on their person?

Gilbert Gottfried was recently fired from Afflac for using a considerably tasteless statement about the Japanese crisis to explain a personal feeling.  Even though he made a comment under his personal name, he still represents the company for which he works. Afflac did not want to be associated with such an offensive comment, especially since the company has business in Japan. As a statement, Afflack deemed the comment unacceptable and terminated their contract with Gilbert Gottfried.

Afflac's extremely predictable and justifiable reaction received applauses for standing up for what so many people judged wrong: a great move in terms of impression management on the behalf of their PR department.

This only illustrates the point I made previously:

social media really is not helping people challenge the information brought to them, but actually helping reinforce the status-quo.

The boundaries between people's professional and private lives no longer exist. They are each day more blurred when so many portals for sharing lives emerge each day.

If those media were to just expose the truth about how people feel and think, then assess each comment or behavior by discussing and debating alternatives, then analyzing the causes to each problem or praise, and then developed new ways to encourage the positives and transform the negatives, these social media really would bring freedom of thought to people.

People could have a chance to change the world together with the things in which they really believe and admire. And if any of those would fail, these same people could find new solutions together, by sharing and working together. A true democracy.

But we all know this is way too romantic and utopic. It is based on the idealistic modern hopes that people will act rationally rather than emotionally.

Even though the modern theorists have interesting approaches in terms of the enlightment philosophies which believe that everyone has the potential to do anything as long as they are taught to do so, it still remains unrealistic that people could own up to so much responsibility and use the social media in such a democratic fashion in our society.

If our society continues to use these tools to punish certain behaviors without addressing the causes and understanding the circumstances, people will continue to reinforce the status-quo

by playing into what is acceptable and what will make them

look good.

How many times do we hear to make sure we don not have anything that could compromise our image on our profile pages? There are even classes, conferences, and books that teach people how to act and how to manage these information portals.

The most that people are willing to push against the existing realities can be explained using Simmel's theories of fashion: people will deviate enough to stand out, but not enough to where they no longer fit in the group.

Maybe these slight deviations will be enough to eventually reorder society through the media, but

as long as people are afraid to expose their true selves

and, by that, potentially exposing societal trends of values and thoughts, people will just carry on ignoring the fact that there are still people who thing about tragedies in the way that Gilbert Gottfried does.

Those issues will keep getting swept under a carpet as people hide behind their personal online profiles publishing only what people want to hear, and therefore, reinforcing the status-quo.

Whether people act that way because of a false consciousness at to what I am so humbly trying to explain, or whether they deliberately choose to keep ascting that way as a strategy to protect themselves, I cannot say.

Maybe it is a little bit of both, like in my case.

But history has taught us that big changes take big risks, and maybe that is for what we should be using these media, rather than simply managing impressions: for our long term goals as a society.