Social Media Articles

The use of social media in today’s world makes a huge difference in how people get information. A rough representation to a similar moment in history was when families started to get TVs or radios into their homes and people able to watch or listen to the news instead of getting the newspaper. Social media has ultimately combined all 3 of these to be used all around the world. It is now easier than ever to see what is going on anywhere on the planet if you feel inclined to learn about it. The hashtag activism article is the perfect example of this because I too learned of the Ray Rice incident over twitter. All it takes is one person to post a tweet than one person could like and retweet. It turns into a snowball effect and soon a man in India could be reading how a Baltimore NFL superstar punched his fiancé. Many people will say that Facebook and Twitter are their own to communities along with Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn and many more. The problem is you might not now if what you say will upset another person who reads or sees your post. It can start many problems in a twitter community if someone opens up about how they feel on a subject, but that is why we are all human, because of our opinions.

            Quoting Harris, “In such views, community becomes little more than a metaphor, a shorthand label for a hermetic weave of texts and citations.” Though everyone on Twitter or Facebook are part of a community, one must remember that some do not care what others think and write just to write while others write to hate and others write for support. “Healthy discourse communities, like healthy human beings, are also masses of contradictions. . . . We should accustom ourselves to dealing with contradictions, instead of seeking a theory that appears to abrogate them. ('What" 18-19)” This is a perfect example to show how one might be saying or showing one thing but mean another. A good example of this is in Facebooking: Why I Didn’t Post This, which the author, Erin Zammett Ruddy, makes it clear that she did not want to post her photo of her children smiling with their snowman because it was not how the day had actually gone. She did not want to put a false sense of feeling out to the public eye when that is not really what happened.

            These communities are obviously special in their own way for them being comprised mostly of people who will never meet each other and yet they all have a huge influence on one another’s lives.