Social media life: not always what it seems to be...

Morien Raeymakers
16 feb 2016
2 minuten om te lezen

New media does seem to cause new cultural anxieties, as Baym says in her Personal connections in the Digital Age (2015). My first thoughts were about social media that raises more and more issues in both academic as the mainstream world. Like the text suggests, I think too that those are based on the idea of authenticity in het interaction.

Representativeness on social media

A particular type of technological determinism says that people who use it, lose their own sense of place and it impacts social life. On social media, like Facebook for example, people are seen as making strategic choises about what they use use, show, manipulate while constructing their virtual identity.

That way of self-construction and the tendency to "create a perfect/different life" is very visuable in the movie and tv-show Catfish, as an extreme example. But actually the milder ways of Socrates' idea of writing not truth, but only the semblance of truth are the most prominent. Social media users know that there are things that they put on Facebook that they would not do in that way in real life (because it is boring, not cool, etc.). Because if you want to show an alternate version of yourself, "nobody knows you're a dog", right!

Fighting back with awareness

Social media do offer useful personal connections in this digital age, as like Baym suggests with bringing/keeping family/loved ones togeter, etc. I think fighting the gaps in representativeness with awareness of the issue can bring a solution. Awareness by showing the possible deceipts like in the MTV show or with fun experiments as graphic designer Zila van den Born did. I think, if people know that a social media life is never the full representative of real life, they cannot get disappointed by it or use it as a replacement for it and just enjoy the merits of it!

Zila (25) from the Netherlands had taken a five-week vacation to Southeast Asia posting photos and statuses of her activities on Facebook. Or so everyone thought. What the graphic design student actually did was far less adventurous: she stayed in Amsterdam for the 42 days, misleading everyone on social media including her own family and closest friends.