Essay on Social Networks

Essay on Social Networks

The silent footprint of social media in our culture

The changes that the internet has brought to modern society are many and very profound: facilities in the commercial exchange, interpersonal communication, handling large volumes of information, and so on. However, of all the positive and negative effects it has, those that have to do with our way of thinking is probably the least visible and, therefore, the least known. speaks.

It is not our intention in this essay to defend conservative positions that perceive the technology as a threat, but quite the opposite: to draw attention to the cultural phenomenon that takes place there, under our noses, on each “smart” phone that we give to a child and, above all, on each social media profile that we leave them manage. It will be on the latter that we focus our reflections.

Calibrating the sight

Much has been said about the physical and psychological risks that are run when entering the spaces of social networks. The warnings regarding computer security focus, in general, on the custody of personal and private data (telephone numbers, phone numbers, credit card, postal address) and in contact with strangers (“grooming”, “cyberbullying”, extortion), and not so much in the type of content that circulates in these spaces. This despite the fact that the latter is actually one of the aspects with the greatest impact on contemporary culture.

Numerous studies have been done in prestigious universities to try to define the emotional impact of social networks, trying to respond to an increasingly evident phenomenon: that we deposit in them a quantity of emotional content significant. In fact, a study on the esteem and the social networks of Penn State University, in the United States, highlighted in 2016 the obvious: the continuous Exposure to the lives of others that occurs on social media has a devastating effect on the self-esteem of the Username.

This is easily interpreted as a collateral effect of the exposure of young people - especially adolescents - to long periods of interaction on social networks. However, what is striking about the study is that a large percentage of its study subjects were adults young people, who are precisely expected to have a greater commitment to reality and a more solid management of expectations. We may be targeting the problem in the wrong way. What if, instead of addressing the issue as a collective mental health issue, we do so in cultural terms?

The culture of the exhibition

In his classic work Watch out and punish, the theorist Michel Foucault rescued the medieval concept of the exomologesis, that is, the public display of one's own sin and repentance that was practiced in the ancient communities Christian, and whose result was absolution from exposure to the group: once sin was publicly admitted, forgiveness could begin. And this concept could be useful to think about the culture that we are building in social networks.

The continuous exposure of the routines and episodes of life are part of what in the late 1990s came to be called "reality shows" and was broadcast on television continuously. There were entire channels dedicated to the recreation — fictional, who can doubt — of the daily life of a rock star, or an actor's family, or a group of young people locked up for a month in a cabin. The central idea of ​​the show is that the real is a consumable, desirable, interesting matter, as long as it is about another person.

This implied a certain margin of naivety when the protagonists of the show were the rich and famous. But now social networks have shifted the axis towards the users' own lives, and invites them to share it as if thus they could occupy the central place of the old rock stars, at the same time that it invites them to compare it with the lives strangers. And, as the Anglo-Saxon proverb says, the grass is always greener on the sidewalk.

Thus, the culture of exposure rewards the individual with the validation of others (strangers, old acquaintances, relatives, colleagues, anything goes the same: a "like"), as long as he complies with exposing his life or his thoughts, competing hysterically with a formless and anonymous mass of users. So, to be consumers of content, we become its generators, without charging for it but a symbolic, unreal dividend. Facebook "friends" are not really friends. Twitter "followers" don't really follow us.

The house always wins

It becomes clear, when you think about it this way, that the game cannot be won. The dream of all "famous" users of social networks, that is, influencers or "influencers", is to be adopted and squeezed by the gear, to provide entertainment to the rest and allow corporate brands a captive audience to promote their products: openly, in the case advertising, or in a veiled and manipulative way, in the case of "product placement", that is, advertising that is disguised as the real life of the "Influencer".

In this way, the house always wins: it keeps the user base thirsty for fast entertainment, designed directly for our tastes and curiosities, in exchange for kidnapping his time, his attention and his self-esteem, since the continuous comparison with "exemplary" lives makes him perceive that his It is, on the other hand, insignificant, since nobody reveals the special effects of the film, nobody draws the curtain of the lucrative fiction that is in the networks social. There is no way to see the backstage, to observe the movie star without makeup, since what is shown of her is supposed to be "reality".

This is, finally, the basic approach of a culture of the exhibition that is established in the young generations. Not for nothing is seen in them a continuous disposition to victimhood, narcissism, to adopt easy labels politically, socially, or even bordering on the psychotic (such as flat Earth and other theories of conspiracy). The effects of this culture, of this education that demolishes the healthy barriers between desire and their ghosts and daily reality, ironically, can also be seen on the networks social. But also, if we know how to look, in our real life.

References:

• "Essay" in Wikipedia.
• "Social network service" in Wikipedia.
• "Social network" in the Pan-Hispanic Dictionary of Doubts of the Royal Spanish Academy.
• "Social networks a communication revolution" in The vanguard.

What is an essay?

The test it's a literary genre, whose text is characterized by being written in prose and by addressing a specific topic freely, making use of the arguments and the author's appreciations, as well as the literary and poetic resources that make it possible to embellish the work and enhance its aesthetic features. It is considered a genre born in the European Renaissance, fruit, above all, from the pen of the French writer Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), and that over the centuries it has become the most frequent format to express ideas in a structured, didactic and formal.

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