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Social Media

I've found this topic rather fascinating too. The concept of 'likes' always ends up as some form of popularity contest in my generation, and oh dear, on twitter it's like a hive mind where you see the SAME jokes, or political points, or music festivals, or slang,... all because the retweets and likes give people a short 'high' of feeling grandeur, not because they have genuine passion or enthusiasm with what they do with themselves. The jokes they post are the real telltale of how boringly 'normal' a lot of them get; they're just plain poor quality, and clearly they are trying too hard and are afraid of offending people.
Of course, on a wider perspective, yes, it's destroying face to face communication and forcing those who don't use it to eventually give in as it's their only option. Now we've got a selfie culture which breeds narcissism, constant political rubbish being thrown in a 'us vs them' manner to keep everyone arguing, and people are getting in to the habit of living their lives FOR making good Facebook or Twitter posts.
It will only get worse sadly, as they'll eventually be a technological alternative/development to SM that's even more lazy and easy to use without physical communication. We'll be like the humans in Wall-e basically :
walle-socialnetwork05.jpg
 
Step away from the keyboard / tablet / phone slowly, the Police have been called and they are on their way with a blanket and biscuits to comfort you from the withdraw symptoms you will shortly experience once the likes dry up.

Take control, do not succumb to the temptation to make another insightful post just to chase those likes.
 
IanSR said:
Step away from the keyboard / tablet / phone slowly, the Police have been called and they are on their way with a blanket and biscuits to comfort you from the withdraw symptoms you will shortly experience once the likes dry up
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You say that, but it's only a matter of time before not having a facebook account is regarded as suspicious enough to investigate. Hell, we aren't far off that now!

/me hides
 
Long pooooooosst

I'm of a much younger generation than most people in this thread. I remember very well when social media was new and before it took off with people my age. It was thought of as sad.

How sad would you have to be to sit online and talk to friends through a white website. All this "lol" culture was new to most people and was treated like a passing joke.

Word passed around and people signed up (inc. me), for us teenagers in 2010 it became quite a novelty to have a webpage with your name on it, where you could fill in boxes and upload a picture of yourself. Oh look, I'm on the internet. People would treat it facetiously.

But once the most popular guys around create their pages, with 10x more friends than anyone else, super slick profile pictures and posts that conjure up their wonderful life, suddenly it's not thought of as a joke anymore. Everyone starts to go into competition. This dumb thing that added nothing to people's lives suddenly becomes an important measure of social activity.
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I remember in my school people were generally hilarious, there'd be a medley of really surprising personalities and every day was something different. I then took a gap year and started university with the next year's bunch of people, and suddenly it's a different story. I keep an open mind, but it was astounding to me how most people seemed so phoney, living out their fantasy social lives whilst not really having much personality for themselves.

"Memes" too used to be sad internet 'in-jokes' from geeks who spent too much time online, and weren't much more than badly edited gifs that popped up on Google Images. I loved off-beat and bizarre humour, parody humour and all that, but suddenly it went 'mainstream' and the butt of the joke was now very different.

Today, if you want to make people laugh, you don't need to be a funny person, just quote the catchphrase Meme of the Day that everyone's seen on Facebook and you will get a universal response. If you want to impress, keep up the daily updates of where you have your nights out, everyone will suddenly want to surround themselves with you.

But when you'd actually talk to these people, most the time they weren't really close friends with each other at all. They'd fall out just as easily at the drop of the hat. They'd be secretly stressed out with their work, or just doing the same thing every night and not really enjoying it anymore. Yet it would never enter their minds to do something different. They'd never be able to make real humour and they seem incapable of thinking for themselves as individuals.

___

There's then the other extreme. At university I've known quite a few people who seem perfectly friendly, but whose social lives exist wholly online, with friends at home or often people they've never met. What kind of a daily life is this? They seriously never leave their rooms and stay up all night gaming/Skyping. If they do emerge, they try the basic conversations, but are unable to truly interact. They havnt learn how to.

Between the two ends of spectrum, there seems to be no real social community anymore, it's all online. So you got to play the game, otherwise you're at a disadvantage. I'm sorry, but by and large, my generation seem so jaded – and have none of their own ideas.

I am lucky to have close friends with great passions, and have worked in unconventional places where there are great mixes of people from different ages/personalities. I gladly ditched Facebook and use it only if I have no other way to message people. TowersStreet is really the closest thing to social media I regularly use now.

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Another worrying thing, is often your Facebook page with your name on it now represents you, more than you yourself

I fell for this too, where I had a hilarious friend who had a fantastic personality, who I then didn't see for a year. His Facebook page was be filled with "witty" (tedious) sarcasm, and I just thought, oh god. Shove off. He fell out of favour with lots of others too. Then suddenly, I meet him again reluctantly and he is the same hilarious, positive and great friend as he ever was. All that time, I wish I had just spoken to him in person instead.

A Facebook page captures none of someone's real personality. But from the power of social media, his posts had built up a 'persona' that came to misrepresent him in people's minds and it seriously cost him. But then, if you don't keep up a persona on Facebook, after a while, people forget you and you are made to feel like you've gone "off grid" or something.

In my opinion, any negatives about how people use social media long outway the positives.
 
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Possibly. If I has the first clue who that was. The article is written by an Ellie something, if that helps?
 
Something I have noticed in the past few months is when I see people I haven't seen or conversed with for a little while we have conversations along the lines of "So, what have you been up to?", "What's the latest?" or "Have you been away?" etc.

Before banishing social media from my life conversations like this pretty dwindled away because you already knew the answer to the question, before you asked it.
 
I meant to post this the other night, but forgot. There is a lot of conversation about 'Fake news' and the like and how social media exacerbates that problem but it fascinates me how what is posted on social media is increasingly becoming the news.

On Wednesday night, one of the most commonly read articles on BBC News online was Paddy McGuinness: I've got arthritis at 44 - essentially embedding and embellishing this Instagram post from earlier in the day:



What struck me most was this sentence from the BBC News article - 'Arthritis is a condition that causes pain and inflammation in joints, and affects around 10 million people of all ages in the UK - including some children'. The BBC were seemingly pointing out themselves that it was a none story. It's something that affects 1 in 6 people in the UK including me and can affect you at any age.

Have we reached a point where if something happens on social media and enough people double tap it or whatever, that's enough to win out the news agenda? Seemingly so... which depresses me greatly when it's a subset of our population that are the double tapping drones living for the likes.

Let the joints see the pain :rolleyes:
 
Rick said:
Have we reached a point where if something happens on social media and enough people double tap it or whatever, that's enough to win out the news agenda? Seemingly so... which depresses me greatly when it's a subset of our population that are the double tapping drones living for the likes.
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Indeed, my wife was diagnosed at 35 (it's the reason she barely goes on coasters), but that wasn't breaking news because she didn't go running to social media at the time to broadcast the fact.
 
Related to the Social media = News thing. What really grates me is the reporting of celebrity deaths. As soon as somebody dies the news turns to twitter, reporting condolences from fellow celebs. Whats all that about?
 
Croftybaby said:
Related to the Social media = News thing. What really grates me is the reporting of celebrity deaths. As soon as somebody dies the news turns to twitter, reporting condolences from fellow celebs. Whats all that about?
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I'd say lazy journalism but that's perhaps a lazy assessment. It still blows my mind that what celebrities say has such gravitas.
 
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