You can’t sit with us because you’re rated 3.2
Questioning my social existence
For the past few years I have been seriously considering working in the advertising and digital marketing. In a world where people live with their phones glued to their hands and as a person who has grown up with emerging social networks, I have been fascinated by the creative ways advertisers have tried to reach us fast-paced consumers who are exposed to thousands of different ads per day. I’ve worked as a social media intern, which involves me doing loads of research of different Instagram accounts, looking for competitors and audience. But after about 3 hours of research I start to question why I am doing my job, and why people find the need to post for their followers. The aesthetic of many posts are often copied to mimic a certain look for their profile, making every other person’s picture exactly the same. Some accounts I could tell are trying really hard to gain a larger following, posting everyday and writing lengthy captions. I guess it just made me wonder whether this is really a field I want to work in and whether working in this field would make a better world or would I just be promoting more materialism. Why do I spend a quarter or half my day thinking about or engaging with social media platforms when in reality I am excluding myself from the actual present and instead in a fabricated reality?
Why do people get so hooked?
I believe that every post made on social media is uploaded in the means of getting mostly positive feedback from other people. When you post something online and gain likes, I find that gives off an equivalent feeling to when you do a presentation and people praise you, making you feel satisfied and proud of what you’ve shared. Psychologically, humans search for rewards and are goal driven therefore if one feels satisfaction from posting a picture of themselves and getting attention, that feeling is likely to be repeated.
What might our future be?
The scariest part of the Nosedive episode is the fact that it is not far from the world we live in today. It was a satirical piece about how everyone is so nose deep into how they represent themselves and how they are perceived and accepted by others through social media. A real life example of this social credit phenomenon is Sesame Credit, a subsidiary of e-commerce giant Alibaba, who determines people’s scores by incorporating a number of factors into its algorithms, including whether someone has gotten traffic tickets, if they’ve paid their taxes, and even what they buy online.
Another example is Peeple, an app that allows users to rate people out of five stars like they would rate a restaurant on Yelp. All you need to create a profile for someone is their cellphone number and the subject of the profile will not be able to delete the comments or the rating. People are rated in three categories — professionally, personally or romantically. “You should have the right to know who somebody is before you invite them into your home,” said the CEO of Peeple Julia Cordray on the CBC Calgary. The press release of this app created a huge controversy on the internet and many were not thrilled with the concept — pushing away from the idea that the Nosedive world will one day be ours.
Julia Cordray appeared on Dr.Phil after becoming somewhat of an internet sensation for her viral app idea where at one point he states, “Now I’m thinking, you can’t possibly be that naive. You want people to go on the Internet and write anything they want, but when you came here you wanted to edit the show, review the show and control all the questions I was going to ask you. Are you kidding me?” to which she ironically replied “You have to understand, Dr. Phil. After the amount of bullying that we have received and the media misrepresenting us, we had to be really careful on who we choose to tell our story to.”.
What can we do?
I might think now that the Nosedive world is so ridiculous and human’s would be too smart to live that way. However I’m sure that our parents and grandparents never thought of a world possible where people are able to connect with distant relatives though a computer screen or make millions from a picture you post on a social media app. I believe that a start to preventing such a world is realization and making yourself aware of the negative effects of social media. I ask myself every so often “Is this information really necessary?” “Can I be doing something else with my time besides scrolling through my newsfeed?”. I question if the information you are receiving is making you the person that you want to be because ultimately you become what you absorb. Therefore if you are creating habits for yourself that you realize you are unhappy with, challenge yourself by questioning your actions and change them. When I feel too caught on Facebook when really I should be studying, I think for a second about a life without any of my social networking accounts and remind myself that my existence is more than my online identity.
