South Park's View On Social Media

Not Edited

                I’d like to take a moment in this blog to discuss the South Park episode “You Have 0 Friends”, as well as South Park as a whole. South Park will often bluntly skew hot topics and put in the spotlight things we often don’t take the time to focus on. This episode in specific is of interest to me as it deals with the overuse of social media and how engrained it has become in all of our lives. I only just got a Twitter as of recently which is why I can associate with the pressure Stan feels as his friends and family become absorbed into the virtual world. The episode opens with the boys bragging about how many friends they have on Facebook, which is funny to me as I can remember a time when I was younger in school and would witness the same conversation among many of my friends.

                South Park is in no way new at stabbing at popular trends, and while these are normally on a much larger scale, it is amusing and interesting to see the show pick on a topic that is such an intimate and small part of our daily lives, yet connects nearly everyone in a big way. The show does amazing at displaying how social media affect our lives in a multitude of ways. For instance, Stan is shown leaving a comic book store when his girlfriend confronts incorrectly about a status on his wall, that actually meant nothing, but through assumptions she is outraged and yells at him. I personally see this as a great example of how using social media as our main source of connection. By ignoring important face-to-face interaction, we can miss the important aspects of their lives that we are truly interested in, and by missing these we are reduced to only knowing the few sentences that they are portrayed by through a status update. This can pull us back from seeing what a person really is, not allowing us to full understand them.

                At the end of the episode Stan’s profile has become so powerful through its large accumulation of friends that it, literally, sucks him into Facebook and challenges him to a life and death match of Yahtzee. The humorous aspects of this situation aside, Stan makes an interesting point that “friends should not be a commodity” in response to his profiles statement that it has more friends than he ever will in real life. I feel that this really speaks to how much more important we should treat our friendship and relationships we have with the people we associate with, and our virtual relationships should not be the primary source of our connections.