The Sound of Social Media's Subtle Stumbles
My best friend is addicted to social media, plain and simple. He is constantly sharing, liking and commenting on every post that comes within a four hundred meter radius. When he's not doing that, he's creating his own content. He takes and posts selfies, where he has to take, at the very least, 3 before he gets a "good" one, he's perfected the art of, what I like to call "speed-meming" where he'll take an existing meme, pop it into Photoshop and have something new to share within a couple minutes, and he has even started to get into making gifs. Who makes gifs? How do you even make those? I thought those things were like unicorns, only being referenced in dusty old tomes, being kept safe for centuries until the seal is broken and an apocalyptic wave of new content is made.
My friend isn't the only one. Have you ever noticed the amount of time people spend on their phones, looking at banal "content?" Pictures of cats, other people you may, or may not, know, or even discussing the "meme economy." Reddit, I'm looking at you on this one. This is nothing new, after all, that content is there to be consumed as if it were a buffet of medium rare steaks, juicy chicken and the occasional cat.
There are others out there that, instead of consuming and digesting content as if it were a buffet on a treadmill race, post pictures of themselves, their new car, their new clothes, their happy relationships or whatever else. These are the ones that produce the content that most consume. These producers, for the most part, are narcissists.
One day, This friend and I were at a coffee shop, chilling, relaxing all cool, when the sudden need to urinate erupted into a cosmic existential crisis.
After finishing my business, I walk back to the table where I find him sitting, his back toward me, and over the shoulder I get a glimpse into the everlasting abyss. Unimaginable horrors spewed from the screen of his phone, every frame lasting longer than the one that came before. My mind is racing with explanations, of which, none were enough.
What I saw that fateful day, was a man, scrolling through an album of 350, maybe more, pictures of himself. Not deleting them, not seeing if there were new comments. Just a man. With a phone. Looking at himself.
I understand that this could be somewhat of an isolated instance, but after doing an extensive 7 minute investigation into this, it seems to be much more common than I'd anticipated. Going through my social media platform of choice, I found several friends who post pictures of themselves way more often than what we as a society should deem acceptable.
And it's not just my friends. Rawhide, a nonprofit organization that assists at-risk youth in Wisconsin, shows that 1,000 selfies are posted every 10 seconds on Instagram alone, and 93 million selfies each day from all social networks.
It is also estimated that just under 10% of the population takes more than 8 selfies per day.
This is narcissism at it's finest. People want to show others their glorious face whether we want to see it or not. These people then get "likes," "thumbs," "updoots," or however else you can relate your giddiness to the glorious grandeur set before your very eyes, and this act of posting and others encouraging, justifies their narcissistic tendencies.
My mom recently closed Facebook. Possibly forever.
She was telling me how she was stuck in a perpetual debilitating spiral of left-wing extremists arguing with right-wing extremists and vise-versa. Every time she read something, there were comments about how the reporter was biased, how the publication is slanderous, or how the CEO embezzled drug money to buy a Bugatti for his brand new tiger that he stole from the zoo.
These echo chambers of political extremism are the most common. It's just people constantly spouting misinformation that justifies their own belief to people who reinforce those beliefs by agreeing, or, at the very least, not speaking up. Flat Earthers are the most extreme example of this. I mean, if someone were to just pick up a book, look at a globe or go outside, they would realize that the Earth is round. But because people blabber about the Disk Theory, with others "confirming" the theory with an explanation containing a fundamentally lacking knowledge of gravity, and physics in general, the others continue to believe.
These antisocial symptoms of social media, narcissism and segregation, is why, if we continue on our current trajectory, we will become a very sad, egocentric, lonely species. One that wants to post selfies, but are outcast because they said that the NSA is a good thing for society, or because they posted too many selfies and their narcissism made an isolated environment.
'Most people aren't narcissists,' I hear you saying. And I would have to agree, but social media definitely promotes it. Writer Mark Mariani, of Psychology Today, writes that "social media may give existing traits a greater outlet." Most of society doesn't condone that kind of narcissistic behavior. But Facebook gives them that, oh so sweet, self-aggrandizing satisfaction the millisecond someone Likes their post.
If someone has a different opinion than you, you should listen, make an effort to research the topic for yourself and make an informed discussion about the topic on your own accord. I wouldn't be mad at anyone for looking into these topics and telling me I'm wrong. At that point, we can have a level-headed discussion about the subject, and the worst that can happen is that we will agree to disagree.
It's just sad to see that some people are unfriending others because they have differing opinions, while others are being pushed away by people who post several selfies a day with the caption "OMG! accidentally took a picture (while being perfectly in frame and posing)!" The amount of narcissistic traits I saw while scrolling through social media is the biggest reason I no longer use them. That, and the fact that if I say something that someone deems even mildly controversial, I get blocked. That is not a social network. That's an antisocial network. That's why I'm anti- social network!
I have given up the perpetual treadmill race because I can't compete with the narcissists that inhabit them. Spending hours upon hours editing and re-editing their profile page, to the point that finding an actual human being, rather than an idealistic image of one, is getting harder and harder. The fact that echo chambers are abundant in my extremely right-wing neighborhood, including my own family, is a terrible thing to see. It had gotten to a point where, if I said something even remotely leftist, I would have 10 people jump on it to defend their "team."
It's sad, it's scary, it's Facebook in a nutshell. So please be reasonable with yourself, if you can't stand the kind of behaviors rewarded by social media, the narcissism, the echo chambers, the need to feel justified, turn it off.
My best friend is addicted to social media, plain and simple. He is constantly sharing, liking and commenting on every post that comes within a four hundred meter radius. When he's not doing that, he's creating his own content. He takes and posts selfies, where he has to take, at the very least, 3 before he gets a "good" one, he's perfected the art of, what I like to call "speed-meming" where he'll take an existing meme, pop it into Photoshop and have something new to share within a couple minutes, and he has even started to get into making gifs. Who makes gifs? How do you even make those? I thought those things were like unicorns, only being referenced in dusty old tomes, being kept safe for centuries until the seal is broken and an apocalyptic wave of new content is made.
My friend isn't the only one. Have you ever noticed the amount of time people spend on their phones, looking at banal "content?" Pictures of cats, other people you may, or may not, know, or even discussing the "meme economy." Reddit, I'm looking at you on this one. This is nothing new, after all, that content is there to be consumed as if it were a buffet of medium rare steaks, juicy chicken and the occasional cat.
There are others out there that, instead of consuming and digesting content as if it were a buffet on a treadmill race, post pictures of themselves, their new car, their new clothes, their happy relationships or whatever else. These are the ones that produce the content that most consume. These producers, for the most part, are narcissists.
One day, This friend and I were at a coffee shop, chilling, relaxing all cool, when the sudden need to urinate erupted into a cosmic existential crisis.
After finishing my business, I walk back to the table where I find him sitting, his back toward me, and over the shoulder I get a glimpse into the everlasting abyss. Unimaginable horrors spewed from the screen of his phone, every frame lasting longer than the one that came before. My mind is racing with explanations, of which, none were enough.
What I saw that fateful day, was a man, scrolling through an album of 350, maybe more, pictures of himself. Not deleting them, not seeing if there were new comments. Just a man. With a phone. Looking at himself.
I understand that this could be somewhat of an isolated instance, but after doing an extensive 7 minute investigation into this, it seems to be much more common than I'd anticipated. Going through my social media platform of choice, I found several friends who post pictures of themselves way more often than what we as a society should deem acceptable.
And it's not just my friends. Rawhide, a nonprofit organization that assists at-risk youth in Wisconsin, shows that 1,000 selfies are posted every 10 seconds on Instagram alone, and 93 million selfies each day from all social networks.
It is also estimated that just under 10% of the population takes more than 8 selfies per day.
This is narcissism at it's finest. People want to show others their glorious face whether we want to see it or not. These people then get "likes," "thumbs," "updoots," or however else you can relate your giddiness to the glorious grandeur set before your very eyes, and this act of posting and others encouraging, justifies their narcissistic tendencies.
My mom recently closed Facebook. Possibly forever.
She was telling me how she was stuck in a perpetual debilitating spiral of left-wing extremists arguing with right-wing extremists and vise-versa. Every time she read something, there were comments about how the reporter was biased, how the publication is slanderous, or how the CEO embezzled drug money to buy a Bugatti for his brand new tiger that he stole from the zoo.
These echo chambers of political extremism are the most common. It's just people constantly spouting misinformation that justifies their own belief to people who reinforce those beliefs by agreeing, or, at the very least, not speaking up. Flat Earthers are the most extreme example of this. I mean, if someone were to just pick up a book, look at a globe or go outside, they would realize that the Earth is round. But because people blabber about the Disk Theory, with others "confirming" the theory with an explanation containing a fundamentally lacking knowledge of gravity, and physics in general, the others continue to believe.
These antisocial symptoms of social media, narcissism and segregation, is why, if we continue on our current trajectory, we will become a very sad, egocentric, lonely species. One that wants to post selfies, but are outcast because they said that the NSA is a good thing for society, or because they posted too many selfies and their narcissism made an isolated environment.
'Most people aren't narcissists,' I hear you saying. And I would have to agree, but social media definitely promotes it. Writer Mark Mariani, of Psychology Today, writes that "social media may give existing traits a greater outlet." Most of society doesn't condone that kind of narcissistic behavior. But Facebook gives them that, oh so sweet, self-aggrandizing satisfaction the millisecond someone Likes their post.
If someone has a different opinion than you, you should listen, make an effort to research the topic for yourself and make an informed discussion about the topic on your own accord. I wouldn't be mad at anyone for looking into these topics and telling me I'm wrong. At that point, we can have a level-headed discussion about the subject, and the worst that can happen is that we will agree to disagree.
It's just sad to see that some people are unfriending others because they have differing opinions, while others are being pushed away by people who post several selfies a day with the caption "OMG! accidentally took a picture (while being perfectly in frame and posing)!" The amount of narcissistic traits I saw while scrolling through social media is the biggest reason I no longer use them. That, and the fact that if I say something that someone deems even mildly controversial, I get blocked. That is not a social network. That's an antisocial network. That's why I'm anti- social network!
I have given up the perpetual treadmill race because I can't compete with the narcissists that inhabit them. Spending hours upon hours editing and re-editing their profile page, to the point that finding an actual human being, rather than an idealistic image of one, is getting harder and harder. The fact that echo chambers are abundant in my extremely right-wing neighborhood, including my own family, is a terrible thing to see. It had gotten to a point where, if I said something even remotely leftist, I would have 10 people jump on it to defend their "team."
It's sad, it's scary, it's Facebook in a nutshell. So please be reasonable with yourself, if you can't stand the kind of behaviors rewarded by social media, the narcissism, the echo chambers, the need to feel justified, turn it off.