SOCIAL MEDIA
Just How Social Do We Want Our Media, Really?
Many claim to want a platform where we can be part of a community, but is that actually what everyone wants?
We all think we know what we want out of life, but time and again, we are proven stupendously unreliable. We claim to desire privacy while constantly sharing intimate detail of our lives with perfect strangers. We revel in our inalienable independence while following the herd off every cliff, quickly disseminating disinformation because we’re too lazy to check to see if it’s true. We rail against consumerism, carbon emissions, and third-world factory conditions, as we hit submit on yet another Amazon delivery of toxic waste.
Not me, you say. Yeah, okay. No one admits to eating McDonald’s either, but they serve nearly 70 million people in 118 countries EVERY DAY. Someone is ordering those fries. Lots of luxury SUVs in line at those drive-thrus. It’s not all happy meals.
The recent slow-motion demise of legacy social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, has sparked a plethora of conversations concerning the nature of the global social experiment we’ve been inadvertently self-conducting for the past two decades.
