Do We Use Social Media or Does It Use Us?
Fresh off the electrons is this fascinating piece: “Social Media is using us” by benedikt koehler, who points out how we feed and sustain the flow of data, and that sometimes it seems like we are servants to that flow, not the other way around.
I would argue that this is simply the beginning of a new level of existence. At each stage of growth in human societies, we have gain a new level of abstraction. First we were mostly physical, then we became coherently social and had to recognize abstract entities like “the state” and “the economy”, things that don’t directly refer to objects of perception. It probably felt contrived, strange, and tense to those first city-state dwellers, too.
Now we are in a new stage of the same kind of development, with a new kind of set of abstractions: the net, online presence, etc., and are feeling similar pressures. Yes, social media is using us, as much as the economy, the law, or the state are. They are abstractions that have become structures that allow for the possibility of what we now consider “normal human interaction”. In a sense, they are symbiotic structures of the collective consciousness…we need them to survive as we are now. Social media is just the newest of these online structures.
Thoughts?