Blog Post 1: Sharing

It is hard to think about a time when the internet was not available in our lives, yet harder to imagine a life without social media. Today, it seems that the internet without the use of social media sites is almost impossible. Social Mediums began to make life easier for people. It duplicated everything humans did in their daily life onto a newer medium, and facilitate everything that we have to do. Not long after, people would no longer have to go to the store to buy music, food, clothes, and electronics, because with the use of social media people could now do all of that while sitting in the safety of their own homes. People have created a medium for our own good and we are benefiting from it nonstop. We are constantly sharing with our friends and family, making ourselves feel good for always keeping in touch with our surrounding.

The social platforms themselves have also gained huge influence of the social capital generated by sharing. As metioned by Jenny Kenndy in Rhetorics of Sharing, Data, Imagination and Desire: “As curators of publicly generated content, these providers also shape what content exists. They curate not only content but the discourses around that content.”

Yet we have to keep in mind that sharing is never selfless, it’s a means of survival for us now that we are living in the Gen Z generation (those who never lived a life without social media sharing). Sharing our skills, and communication and information about the world is really the key for humans. We are social animals that have found another medium for it. We are enhancing our own ability to survive, and socializing is building trust between individuals to survive as a group.

Baym(2015), stated how our contributions in these different social media platforms, have advantaged social media companies, to that extent that our online socialization became the core of the modern business.

There is a feeling of belonging and finding your identity online. You find your own group of people who will vocalize how they feel about you and your content, which builds screen confidence. Before social media, real life communicating on the daily was a little different, and still is. People always censored themselves because they would immediately see people’s reactions to their opinion. Today with the help of media platforms, we can play around with people’s reactions (we can delete their comments, block them completely without them knowing, or just delete our status and erase its existence).

It was a way for people to communicate with each other from all over the world, a way to keep up with events, and a way to navigate through cities and buying houses easier. Trust in this medium was imbedded in us from the very beginning. We trusted media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. so much that it was almost impossible to think that any harm coming from it would be on a large scale.

But what happened is that the people behind those platforms started to benefit from our lawful trust in them, that they began to take matters into their own hands. They felt how much power they had on us: we were opening up and taking hours out of our days to contribute to their creation. Thus, naturally, they began to benefit from our trust and laziness to question them. Social media platforms began to categorize to use us in markets. As their pockets got bigger, we did not bat an eye, we thought that they were only try to make our lives even easier by marketing products on sites such as Facebook.

Yet again, we still believed that we had power over our information more than they did. Yet that is not the case. Sometimes, your information is in the hands of your “friends” on Facebook.

Facebook’s alliance with Cambridge Analytica is a proof of this. If any of your Facebook friends took the “This is Your Digital Life” quiz that was being shared on people’s homepage in 2015, then your data was being used (Meyer, 2018). Cambridge Analytica marketed themselves as providing research about consumers, targeted advertising (sort of like what Facebook and Instagram do), and so much more great things (Ingram, 2018). Slowly people began to realize that this company was behind Kenya’s President Uluru Kenyatta’s campaigns, which Cambridge Analytica denied happening. And in 2014, they got over 50 million Facebook users data, most not knowingly as mentioned before (Ingram, 2018). Ingram (2018) also mentioned that they were behind the massive Trump campaign aids during election year.

With all the sharing and work we give back to these social media platforms, and all the information they are taking from us for their own good, we still have what seems to be barely a little say in what goes on. People behind these media platforms suddenly decide what is ethical for us to write on this white canvas they are giving us, what they can remove and put back without our notice.

The people creating it are getting billions of dollars out of a white canvas that users at home are spending hours a day contributing to without getting anything in return.

Communication, interactions, and sharing of information are inescapable and unavoidable actions that are necessary for our prosperity and development (Fuchs, 2014).

Some would say that we are technically editors to these media platforms writing daily content, meaning we should get a percentage out of it. While others look at it the way the makers of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are selling it, we getting paid back with easy access, sharing, easy communicating. And when you do contribute enough to these sites, they do pay you. Instagram being one of the top social media platforms known to give back to its users who are using the application on an hourly use, replicating a job.

References:

1. Ingram. (2018, March 20). Factbox: Who is Cambridge Analytica and what did it do? Reuters .

2. Meyer. (2018). My Facebook Was Breached by Cambridge Analytica. Was Yours? The Atlantic.

3. Baym, N. (2015). Social Media and the Struggle for Society”

4. Fuchs, Christian. 2017. Social Media: A critical introduction. London: Sage. 2nd edition. Paperback

5. Kennedy, J. (2013). Rhetorics Of Sharing: Data, Imagination, and Desire.