A few
months back, an article appeared in the Washington Post about a 13 year old
girl. In the article she spends 12 minutes on her phone, jumping from one app
to the other: Instagram, Buzzfeed, Youtube et cetera. This online world is
extremely important to her, as described in the article ‘it is the place where
all her friends hang out, so it’s the place where she is, too.’ She needs to
stay connected, from the moment she wakes up until the moment she falls back
asleep. Getting as many notifications, tags and followers as she can. Pictures
that don’t get enough likes will be deleted. As if she is valued by the amount
of like. This creates a certain anxiety.
There are
many girls like Katherine, wanting to be ‘better at their phone’. Everyone has
their own norms about it. For Katherine this means getting about 100 likes for
a picture. If she does not succeed in that, the picture will be deleted. The way
social media guides her life like this is an example of social shaping. This
phenomenon is described by Nancy Byam in Personal connections in the digital
age (p. 51) as ‘a mix of "affordances" - the capabilities
configurations of technological qualities enable- and the unexpected and
emergent ways that people make use these of those affordances.’
I chose
this framework because social shaping of technology is something we deal with
every day, and most of the time we are not even conscious of it. Katherine
mentions that the online world is the place where all her friends hang out. It is
likely that even when she is hanging out with her friends in real life, she is
still constantly checking her phone and being active on social media. This urge
to be online instead of offline is something many people experience. Instead of
living in the moment we want to share that moment, in order to get likes and
show people ‘how much fun we have’ and to create an unrealistic image of our
lives.
I agree, Carolien, especially your point about how instead of living in the moment, we create unrealistic images of our lives. I think more often than not, people stage events in their lives because they think a certain picture would get a lot of likes on Instagram, for example, instead of living and letting things happen spontaneously. And in this way, like you said, social media guides our lives. We've given meaning to it that wasn't necessarily the original intent. For example, on Instagram's website, the site is described as a home for "visual storytelling," presumably, of people's real stories. The problem is, how much is actually real anymore?
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