some light thinking about public self-indulgence.
I use social media daily. I find it interesting and entertaining, but more and more am noticing that I’m not really using it to connect with my actual friends IRL anymore. I’m connecting to people I’ve never met before, probably will never meet, and people around the world that I have never once considered I would be able to somehow have some type of interaction with. Doesn’t that blow your mind?
People who say they don’t understand the point of Snapchat, Twitter, even Tinder (really though?), clearly don’t see the insane change that the world has gone through. I can literally sit on my couch in my apartment and still interact and learn about people who actually exist in my radius. I can open Snapchat and see college kids partying while watching their school’s football game, santacon drunks running around NYC, and people just putting themselves out there, for anyone to see. It truly is a virtual world we live in now, but its also a world that for the first time in its existence, is talking and communicating all by itself. Until this recent revolution of social media, we have all been silent or depending on another means of communication. We have all been confined to our inner social circle, to limits.
Today, we can literally send a tweet and enter the void. Someone, somewhere, will see it.
What does this mean for our future? What does it mean for people to start paying attention to… other people? To other cultures? We are watching the world interact with each other without truly appreciating it… but its changing our mentality and our understanding of ourselves.
If you aren’t using social media, good for you. You probably (maybe) are interacting with people more in person.. although they might be ignoring you while they post their Instagram photo and snap story (aka snory), about their day.
But if you are using social media, start to think about it. Think about how transforming it is.
It isn’t only about the number of likes you get or the social inflation you get, or how good that 800th selfie you took over the past hour turned out. It’s about communication, information, and being involved with the world. Technology and social media are truly creating a small world. For the first time, we are seeing collaboration, unity, and even hate, in a pretty uncensored way. We are seeing how connections can send a message around the world, how emotions can create chatter and change the media, how people are finally becoming aware of their input. Imagine the possibilities… when people in very remote areas of the world begin to get involved as well…when people start to lose their inhibitions to share.
Don’t be afraid to be yourself on the internet. Sure, maybe you don’t ~care~ about other people’s lives. Maybe you don’t want to know that someone is drinking coffee in Paris without you, or you don’t understand how a person can spend time stalking someone until they start to realize they ended up on some random person’s profile that almost seems to have no connection to the original prey. But all of these things things are possible. And that’s pretty groundbreaking. It’s possible because it exists, and it exists because people everywhere are simply just eager to say something, to someone, someplace. We are social beings, and it’s our most innate traits and desires that are bringing this virtual world to reality.
