Social Media Post

These articles, for the most part, struck me as surprisingly true and applicable to my life. Social media is this new beast that effects each and every one of our lives but very few have a complete understanding of in what ways. To me, these articles show the positive use of social media and how it can be used to create connections outside of our physical locations. Thoughts and feelings can be shared back and forth with others that you have never seen but can begin to create meaningful relationships with. I think social media provides a way for those who feel unheard and inadequate to participate in more formal discourse communities, to create community of their own, to find identity and meaning in others through a way that they feel confident in expressing themselves. Social media, like I said, is this new sector of all of our lives, untapped, for the most part, by social norms. This leaves room for exploration and expression, which in my mind creates movements like “#whyIstayed” and gives people the chance to hear and be heard.  With this new way of creating connections and relationships there is an aspect of anonymity, as the author of “Why I Didn’t Post this Photo to Facebook” post discusses, we can be whoever we want to be and have complete control over what is posted and in some aspects what ideas can be taken from our posts about who we are and what our lives are like. This is a dangerous power to have. It then creates this gap between reality and the socially perceived reality that we present on social media.

In the context of writing and community’s Harris states, “Abstracted as they are from almost all other kinds of social and material relations, only an affinity of beliefs and purposes, consensus, is left to hold such communities together.” To me this indicates that social communities are some of the most raw and vulnerable types of communities. Let me explain how I came to this conclusion. First of all, even though there is a negative side to the anonymity factor social media provides, it also allows people to freely share their thoughts and ideas without being judged based on their outward physical appearance. Readers or members of the community then understand the person for their thoughts rather than their appearance and connect based on shared feelings or thoughts verses preconceived notions due to one’s appearance. Second of all, people are more likely to share thoughts that are deeply intimate to them. Without necessarily having to put a face to a post there is a stronger likelihood that writers might be apt to being more vulnerable than they would in a face to face conversation.  I think social media also provides a way for students to express themselves outside of the defined realm of conversations and interactions that academics set before us. These unspoken and sometimes spoken standards of discourse are shattered on social media. Writers are given the ability to freely think and play with ideas without having to fit them into a predefined box. “…to define their views against some ‘common’ way of talking about their subject. Instead, they simply repeat in their writing ‘what everybody knows’ or what their professor has told them in her lectures.”  

These three articles have shown how people use the internet and different forms of social media, blogging, Twitter, and Facebook to create common connections through conversations that reveals their thoughts and ideas. The flow of communication back and forth creates relationships that can not be denied their power and validity to make a difference.