Social media the best and the worst of all things is a concept that couldn’t ring any truer. But it’s undoubtedly here to stay, though with the pace at which the modern world evolves, it seems inevitable that the methods in which we channel ourselves now shall be just as unfamiliar in a generation’s time as to us accurately foreseeing what they’ll be at present. Communication is at the epicentre of humanity. With so multiple different facets of life, the fact of social media intrinsically here to stay makes it feel redundant to exert an overall positive or negative opinion of it in itself, but rather to adjust your opinion of it in accordance to what it is; fake.
I’m far too aware of the irony of me voicing this opinion through social media, but in a world so unrecognisable without it, there hardly feels a more apt way of trying to expose it for what it is than through itself! I was a pretty late bloomer with it anyway. The first real format that I recall contemporaries becoming swept away by at school was MSN Messenger, to which I never succumbed. Myspace was my first foray into the practise, aged 17; I think and this was still in the now unrecognisable world where the idea of banning smoking in U.K. pubs and restaurants would have felt about radical as it did far-fetched! So would the current global political situation, in which the widespread relief at not having a depraved and egocentric maniac billionaire cretin as the most powerful man in the world could also never have been envisaged.
Like so many situations, the chicken or egg question automatically arises when analysing the relationship between social media and political surprises. Feats such as Corbyn’s election as Labour Leader, Brexit and of course Trump’s single (thank our lucky stars) term as American president share social media galvanising much of their support; whether it reflects or instigates remains a central question. The stilted reflection of reality that social media allows through its superficial herding of people based through opinions being voiced in such absolute and binary terms.
It is a delusion to think that there can ever exist such things such as a discussion through an online format. Such pretences ever read far more as lectures than any real exchange of views. That is my real point raised. I’ve no issue with social media in itself, providing that we all recognise its limitations for what they really are, rather than as any guise as a true representation of yourself or anybody else.
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