Social Media Created to Reinforce Sharing, but did it?
Social media are mediated technologies made to create a medium for people to share information, data, careers and other forms of interests via network and virtual communication. It allows people to communicate worldwide within a matter of seconds and share large content easily, this made globalization spread much faster than expected.
Couldry (2012. p. 142): Media is the means of transmitting information: data, sounds, images, written or spoken word, noise.
The first step building up social media was to change the users from passive recievers to creators and receivers at the same time, people known as audience became active participants in content production. This mean of change developed from being a positive form of development to a negative one. Nowadays you can find your most valuable and personal information posted on social media platforms, and you might not even know it.
What is sharing? Sharing is a word and act that societies and cultures have maintained to keep for thousands of years, it considered one of the basic norms of living in a community, to share is to give and take, you share what you have with the people you find to be worthy and taking something back from it, it’s basically a big part of communicating. You distribute and divide, what you have and what is offered to you. When you share something, it means you are giving someone the privilege to have things in common with you and using your space. When you do a this, you are basically creating a bond with people and building relations, and when you do that then you are giving someone your trust to be part of something you consider valuable. You share experiences, emotions like happiness and sadness and this is how you keep in touch with people, you build friendships, family bonds and even with your beloved ones. Sharing is the means of being alive and being part of a group, community and society. This is why cultures have always admired the idea of sharing, it keeps people connected to each other and complement each other’s needs and wants. Without the creation of sharing we would have never had generations and cultures inventing in one another, ideas that are not shared did not survive this world of knowledge, so did cultures.
Sharing deviated from being an event into bcoming a daily part of our lives, thanks to social media platforms such as Facebook, instagram and twitter we are down to sharing our locations, pictures and most valuable events within minutes all over people’s homepage. Privacy is no longer an option, either you isolate yourslef completely from the media world or your life will be an open book to whoever wishes to read and view.
In a press written by Daniel Cobb in 2018, he quoted a person called Mandracchia saying, “I think this idea of sharing isn’t new at all, I think social media has just given a new outlet for that sharing, we’re very focused on ourselves, so sharing ourselves is very important to us.” This opinion brings a new argument on the table, did social media actually made us focus on ourselves more so that we want people to share our focus, or do we actually just want to share ourselves on social media just because we are culturally obliged to do so, if we want to fit in?
Today, social media platforms present themselves as the key facilities to sharing and socializing, on those platforms you tend to make new friends, gain more knowledge and even helps you build a lifestyle. Yet lately we have noticed that those friendships and groups who we share mutual interests with have turned into a something materialistic that can be caught and sold, more of a commodity. The surveillance that those platforms have managed to overwhelm us with, turned our personal interest and lives to brands and ads all over our new feed. But the main question remains, are we actually preserving our privacy or are we considered robots with interests that are always available for us to look at without us noticing where did those media platforms got the information around our interests? A very typical example is when you search Airbnb for accommodation in a certain area or country and suddenly ads on hotels and deals for reservations are all over our Instagram and Facebook pages and feed! Then you wonder how all of this happened and your search history is available for other companies to look at.
So here does the term “exploiting” makes sense? It does to a certain extent, but not to be so objective and putting limits to our vision, social media platforms are a huge development the world have witnessed, we can’t deny the fact that it brought the world closer and made life much easier with the facilities it provides. The media world does exploit us but who actually gave them the privilege to do so? We did. Us and the organizations complement each other, we created the platforms and they created a medium of sharing for us that is indispensable. The people are the basic funders of the organizations and platforms, we are in some way shareholders in those companies.
sources :
Couldry (2012) Media Society, World, p. 8; & Communication, Culture, Media Studies. Key Concepts, p. 142.
Source: Hartley, John (2002) ‘Medium/Media’ in Communication, Culture, Media Studies. Key Concepts, Routledge, London and New York, p. 143
Source: Giddens, 2013, p. 855); https://sites.hks.harvard.edu/saguaro/web%20docs/GarsonSK06syllabus.htm
Source: Kenedy (2013) ‘Rhetorics of Sharing’ in Loving, G & Rasch M. Unlike Us. Social Media Monopolies and their Alternatives, Institute for Network Culture, Amsterdam, p 130
Cobb (2018) Science of sharing: Has social media changed us? News-PressNow.com
