We live in a "me me me" world. Everything revolves around us, for better or worse. Try this new product for your good, this will make you feel better and look better. The individual is heavy emphasized; within ourselves and within the social medias of today. With our generation and contemporary social media and the advent of modern technology, everything is within our grasp at a moment's notice. Instant gratification. Which is awesome! But also has significant flaws. Internet connections are exponentially faster than they ever were; thus we can download faster, we can browse quicker, multi-task more efficiently...etc. It has great power, but absolute power can corrupt absolutely. And this corruption can be innocent, too, meaning it was never our intention to be corrupted by said power. With today's tech, the media, and everything, we are more than ever connected to each other. This can be liberating as can be exciting; we're meeting new people that we other wise couldn't have met, communicating with them too. But as we were discussing today in class, we still feel lonely at the end of day from time to time, even when we have access to all of our contacts at a touch of a button (Weak ties from class and readings maybe the cause). Not only do we feel lonely on occasion, I feel that our apathy is starting to become a major issue and the lies we put up about ourselves is growing as are the idea of lying to ourselves.
As we mentioned in class, Facebook, Twitter and other social networks has the tendency to allow us to "lie" about ourselves. We can "perform" for our contacts and generally act like a different person than we would face to face. Which, for all intents and purposes, may be necessary. Honesty can hurt others, it can also make things awkward when a person is honest about a very personal situation. But I fear that we may be lying to ourselves, which may breed apathy. As we have been talking about social activism and such, I notice when I search our generation's apathy (there will be links at the end of this blog) that journalists note our apathy towards politics. We simply are not as active with protesting in person or voting than before. Is it because these things do not completely revolve around our lives? Do they give us instant gratification? Is it trending? Will it make us feel special and as a unique individual? We all complain about the issues in America, but we simply do it through social networks, it seems like we rarely ever take the time to talk in person about it, and actually start something. I desperately wish to, though I have yet to find out the best way to do this.
However, I think how the media depicts "reality" and our heavy reliance on technology causes us to shy away; political activism events are known to take time to coordinate and to set in motion. And that stops us from pursuing because we're so use to having instantaneous results. If it's not instant, then it seems like we do not care and we'll forget about the issue and go back to what we were originally doing; not solving the issue. I worry that this will only be exacerbated in the future when a severe crisis is in effect. We simply shrug our shoulders but deep down inside, we knew something was wrong, and we knew we could have talked about it.
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