Essay
In today’s world you can be anyone you really want to be. People do it all the time. They go onto to their favorite social media site, create a new person and BAM! They are whoever they want to be. I have not personally taken part in this but they have made an entire tv show called Catfish just to reveal people who have been doing this.
Social Media allows you to be able to do this, to make a new you. It isn’t reserved only for social media though, as Baym points out, you can do this in video games as well as forums or any other place where you are interacting with others. Identity has become a huge deal to people in my generation. Everyone wants to be unique and have cool things that other people don’t have. This has definitely happened to me where I wanted something my friends had or I thought I would seem cooler if I did a certain thing. It happens to almost everyone.
For me, Social media has definitely mediated my relations with others. Facebook and Twitter have caused me to know what is happening with my friends so much that with some people I have found it hard to talk about things because I already know what is going on in their lives because they constantly update the world. Texting and smart phones make this even more so because I constantly have the feed of updates in my pocket.
Video games on the other hand have helped me form bonds with people I may have never met. I play with people across the world that in any other situation I would never have encountered but because we both play team deathmatch in Call of Duty I now can team up with them and talk to them in party chat as if we have been friends for a long time. And if someone had said that I would be talking with people all the time from around the world in video games 8 years ago I would of thought they were insane. This is one of the many ways in which media is shaping my relations with people.
Facebook, Twitter and really any social media site have also changed the way society and humans interact. They make it so that people can talk to anyone they want as long as they are “friends”. They also make it easy for people to keep in touch. This has made it so people who I might have lost touch or did in fact lose touch with I have now reconnected with because we both have facebook profiles.
One way in which technology has negatively affected me is through texting. At first I loved texting, I would say I was a texting fiend. I was constantly texting all my friends and even people I was just ok friends with just because I could. However, it made it so that I was not going to go see people in person and talking to them face to face because it was so much easier just to text them if I needed something. This made it so that some of the relationships that I thought were very strong were actually not as much I first believed. It wasn’t until my phone broke that I realized how my phone wasn’t something I needed to always have. I cut back and started interacting more and my old social self came back to the surface.
Another thing Baym brought up was how media makes it so that we can form our own personal identities as well as our own social identity and that we want to be seen and known by our identities we create and that they need to be original and our own and thats why people will sometimes make up their own identities to achieve this. While I have never made up an identity I can appreciate wanting to have your own self identity that makes you feel good but also having a social identity that allows you to be the person you want everyone else to know. In facebook I hide some pictures I don’t want everyone to see because I think they make me look a certain way that isn’t how I am. It is a common trait for people to not one others to judge them based on what they have done and now with media you know what everyone has done so keeping your social identity the way you want can be tough.
When Wesch talks about Youtube and how it is a phenomena this is very much the way our generation is going. And how people upload videos of how they do something and want everyone to see it and see them as very funny or very cool because they do a cool stunt. Media has become to shape how we perceive cool and how we perceive interesting and how we perceive ourselves and identity.
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