Opinion Article on Social Networks

Opinion Article on Social Networks

The painful illusion of social media

You don't have to be a genius to realize the momentous impact that the emergence of social media has on the contemporary world. In little more than a decade of existence, these virtual spaces have gone from being a youthful eccentricity and a tool useful to contact old friends, to be the place par excellence where transactions of all kinds take place: from purchases and sales from products, and postings of announcements of goods and services, to falling in love and the dissemination of personal content. Everything is centralized in their digital pages, to the point that it is rare and to ask someone for the phone number, because we really want your authorization to join your vast network of contacts.

In principle, there would be nothing to worry about. Social networks are not the first invention that revolutionizes the way we interact or accelerates the clock of the obsolescence of many others technologies and practices. In fact, social networks have had a brilliant impact on the organization of social and community groups, since they allow the emergence of new forms of exchange of ideas, new modes of democratization of knowledge and new forms of protest and pressure, whose impacts on society are just beginning to be appreciated Recently.

This article is not, therefore, a call to fear social networks. But yes, which is different, it can be understood as a warning regarding what we do with them and the way we that we think about them, since under social networks there is usually a gigantic deception, a legacy of the times of the reality show and other media productions that aspired to entertain us not with fantastic stories and escapist perspectives, but by showing us - supposedly - reality.

Social networks vs. reality

The reality shows They used to start from a very traditional perspective in consumer society: the rich and famous live spectacular lives, and the mere fact of seeing them —especially if it is through a “hidden” camera in their homes— constitutes a form of entertainment. It is not very different from what magazines or television shows offer, which cover royal weddings and events of the show business U.S.

However, in these reality shows Some lucky ones were given the opportunity to participate: beginning actors or people "on foot" who, from their meeting with the fairy godmother television, they went on to live a new life: they made lots of money, starred in their own shows or simply made themselves loved or hated by the great public. But at all times the industry that made such a transformation possible: the producers and the regents of the contest, who mediated between the televised reality and the public that consumed it.

And that is precisely what social networks hide from us. The change that has occurred with them is much more insidious and the illusion is much more perfect because the social network promises us the direct interaction with the other, whether or not they are famous, whether or not they are a corporation that invests thousands of dollars in promoting their products. And so, we are sold a manufactured reality, again, but this time under the promise of an immediacy, a truth and an objectivity that are, let's say it once, a lie.

By this, I don't just mean the blatantly disguised advertisements as ¿reportage? evidence? - What are the entries in social networks? - In short, disguised as reality. No influencer spends so much time talking about that brand of pants, if he does not receive from the company a corresponding payment. That, up to a point, is obvious. But there is an even more insidious spell and it has to do with the cutting of the reality that each person exhibits in their networks, and that the system passes as true.

Machines produce dissatisfaction 

This is the reason why an increasing number of active users of social networks show symptoms depressive or dissatisfied: social networks operate based on desire and the desired object is a fictitious life, sold as real. And that does not happen only with influencers who, after all, are actors, constructions with which to capture our interest: what we see of others, our friends and our acquaintances is nothing more than a convenient cut of their lives because nobody wants to show the morbid eye of the general public when they are doing badly, when they are frustrated or when reality disappoints them.

Perfect lives simply don't exist. And if any of them seem dangerously close to perfection, it may be because we have the fairy-tale filter on — consciously or unconsciously. Perhaps worse still, it was activated by a third party for us, behind our backs. A third party that profits from the exchange of our attention for dissatisfactions.

References:

• "Opinion journalism" in Wikipedia.
• "Social network service" in Wikipedia.
• "The threat of social networks" by George Soros in The country (Spain).
• "Social networks in the network and their impact on social movements" in Explore of the Government of Chile.

What is an opinion piece?

A opinion piece it's a kind of journalistic text in which the author exposes to the reader his personal position on a specific topic. It is essentially about argumentative texts, who use the information to promote a perspective, that is, to convince the reader to take her point of view. For this reason, they are usually signed and of a personal nature (with the exception of press editorials, in which reflects the institutional position of the newspaper), since the reader may agree or disagree with what is stated in them. it states.

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