Blog#2 Social Shaping of Technology

The article “13, Right Now” discusses what it is like to be growing up as a teenager in the new age of technology by using the example of Katherine Pommerening; a 13-year-old who appears to be addicted to social media. This article demonstrates the heavy reliance on technology in our every day lives. It shapes everything we do and how we go about it. This change in technology can definitely be both positive and negative given the fact that it has allowed interconnectedness within our world that was never possible before. Yet, this dependence has created new anxieties that were also never present in the past as well. Unfortunately, like the youth of this era the case of Katherine Pommerening is not any different from what is seen everyday.

More specifically, within the text Baym discusses how “social media platforms engineer particular kinds of sociality even as their users develop norms around their use”(51); this is evident in the example of 13-year-old Katherine. An individual enters a different world when using the internet and it generates its own norms different from what is evident in reality. Katherine gets into the car and doesn’t even notice the other person in the car with her since she has already entered her own technological world. Instagram was one example of a social media platform that creates anxiety but another example of this could be seen through the use of Snapchat. The social media app, Snapchat, allows people to live their lives through short videos and pictures that are shared with other followers. This creates a sociality through the app that has become a norm around its use. For instance, when someone goes to a special/big event you would see more than half of the experience through their Snapchat. As opposed to living in the moment, pulling out your phone and video taping it has a become a norm in our society today. Our anxieties towards social media stem from our frequent use of it. Users start to get insecure when not enough people are liking their Instagram photos, viewing their Snapchat stories, or even retweeting their tweets. Again this is seen through Katherine given that she only has 25 Instagram photos because she deletes that ones that don't have "good lighting" or don't have enough likes. We become so caught up in this alternate technological reality that is normalized the more it is used.  

I related to this framework the most because social media sometimes pushes me into trying to be something I am not based off of what is posted by people I do or do not know. Posting on social media has become normalized even for someone like myself who wasn’t always a fan of it. With that being said, I became more conscious of what I post and subconsciously started caring about what other people thought about it as well.