“The times they are a changing”, sang Bob Dylan in his eponymous song from 1964. It was his observation almost 60 years ago and this constant will probably follow humans forever. And that is perfectly fine. We need to be cognizant that the times are evolving and how crucial the change is for humanity. Evolution is what keeps us alive.
Social media, one of the biggest technological advancements
in the last few decades, was warmly welcomed until it started causing a stir. The
questions about it arise on daily basis – mostly in a binary, polarising format
of whether it is good or bad, although we should rethink the way we ask
questions and aim for open-ended questions that call for a discourse rather
than divisive points of view.
Humans are social animals who need connections and they
thrive in communities (The Cooperative Human, 2018), which was the social
media’s main selling point. The promise of instant connectivity, and emphasis
being on instant, felt so light and easy to engage in. Because we like things
to be simple. My problem with social media is that it doesn’t seem to create
core memories and experiences. They are fleeting and very much grounded in the
present. You will surely very rarely hear someone say something like “Hey, do
you remember that one time on [insert social media platform] when we spent
hours liking videos and posts?”, as opposed to “Hey, do you remember that time
when we found an abandoned shopping cart and we rode in it around our
neighbourhood at 2 AM? That was so much fun!”
Superficial or profound, people are using social media because
it offers a cornucopia of possibilities to have people in their lives, even if
it’s only on their screens. But it also brought about unexpected players and
by-products. This huge real-estate of empty space, in the sense that it
originally included names and pictures of people you knew or were loosely
connected to, begged to be filled. That’s when marketing kicked in. Brands and
makers of all kinds of products saw the potential and the reach that the social
media offered and latched onto it. Content marketing, a modern spin on plain
old product peddling, that triggers as little as possible of cognitive
engagement (Rossi & Nairn, 2021) has overtaken these platforms and
blatantly plays with people’s emotions, especially with younger generations who
still don’t have the psychological abilities or literacies to resist the
persuasion (De Veirman et al., 2019).
Marketing changed the rules of engagement on social media.
It isn’t about being online with your people any longer. Our connectivity has
been reduced to strings of data that are used by whoever has something to sell.
What started as an innocent way of finding your friends and classmates (I dare
to be so naïve and say it was innocent), turned into a money making machine
where our basic human needs are being exploited under the pretext of even
greater connections and experiences. Social media is still connecting people,
although making them unplugged from their real-life social scene at the same
time, but in this connectivity, we have become consumers and sellers rewarded
for our loyalty by nothing other than a promise of fuzzy feelings.
References:
Rossi R. and Nairn A., (2021, November 3), How children are being targeted with hidden ads on social media, The Conversation https://theconversation.com/how-children-are-being-targeted-with-hidden-ads-on-social-media-170502
De Veirman, M.,
Hudders, L., & Nelson, M. R. (2019). What is influencer marketing and how
does it target children? a review and direction for future research. Frontiers
in Psychology, 10, 2685–2685. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02685 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02685/full
Dylan, B., Delanoe, P., The Times They Are A-Changin’, The
Times They Are A-Changin’, Columbia Records, 1964
The cooperative human. Nat Hum Behav 2, 427-428 (2018) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0389-1
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