Blog #3 - Mediated Culture

Mediated Culture           

                I moved away from the town I was familiar with and moved to a new city several years ago. I stayed connected with my friends via Facebook and looked at pictures of them having a good time - a good time without me. My perception was that their lives went on on the fun side of life and mine was stuck in boring tracks. The new city did not make it easy to meet new friends. It was a rougher start than I anticipated.  I noticed that I was almost addicted to checking on my friends lives daily and frequently.

                I tried to be optimistic and I shared only the fun part of my new city. My posts included fun new sites, fun activities and pictures full of smiles. The other side of the story was that I did not share was that I was sitting alone at home. I was frustrated because my new work did not make it easy to meet new people.

                Social media has its good and bad side to it. Social media can connect you to people around the world and helps you to stay connected. I have friends that I graduated with and people that I met throughout the years; some are in Australia, England, Spain, South America, etc. I have a friend that traveled through Argentina.  She loves to meet people through Facebook. They might be friends of other friends. She enjoys communicating through Facebook as much as she enjoys communicating in person. She ended up staying and visiting people she met through Facebook during her travels through Argentina. She saves money by staying with the newly acquired friends. Thank god there was not a single psycho person in between. I say that because people are able to hide behind their virtual profile without being held accountable for it. That means, that you can put into the virtual world of social media anything that you want to be out there. You can share the perception that you want the people to have of you. It is almost like creating a fantasy life of ourselves.

                It would not harm us to share a little bit of our real lives in social media. The personal struggle with an issue. It would give us a better perception of a real person. A person that is also experiencing trouble and hardship. But in the end it can be used against us when we put it out their into the virtual world. Employers search social media to get an impression of a potential candidate. They want to know what they post, what their political view might be, etc. It is not the qualification that counts; it becomes the whole picture.

                Social media also can lead people to like a webpage that then uses cookies to link you to similar pages. They use your browsing history to have more ads appear on your social media. That then can cause a one sided influence due to the frequent pop up of the same or similar web site adds. Those ads/web sites can then influence our perception of our environment, our political views, etc.    

                I think that we have created a surveillance for ourselves that is getting worse. We allow our location to be known almost the entire time. We allow people to view what we are doing by communicating almost everything to everyone although we add security filters. We have cameras on the computer, phone, etc. that can be hacked and you become visible to others. This surveillance becomes a prison that is created by each one of us.