In Eugenia Siapera’s “Understanding New Media”, she contends that ‘understanding media … means understanding humanity’ (2013, p.2). With this in mind, Siapera (2013, p. 2) goes on to explain that ‘understanding new media is expected to lead to an understanding of changes and transformations in social processes, norms, ideas and practices’. A logical leap, really, now that I’ve attended the lecture and the tutorial—things are clicking into place.
Siapera (2013, p. 5) goes on to say that the term, new media, ‘include all kinds of media formats as long as they are indeed evolving’.
This infers (at least, in my opinion) that society is evolving. We, as humans, are evolving; we’re changing. This change doesn’t necessarily mean “good” change, and nor does it have to indicate a “bad” change.
Scrolling through my Facebook feed, I came across this:
That’s change, right? That’s us, adjusting language, adjusting the way that we socialise, the way that we speak, because of social media. “Lol” is slang created for the internet, as it’s more efficient to type three letters than three words.
Let’s try to use an example.
(Lightly edited to preserve and distinguish my friends’ identities.)
There’s multiple things happening there—first, I’m “lol”ing and “lmao”ing all over the place, which, after rereading it now, makes me cringe because they weren’t needed. But, the same sentiment applies. The first time I used “lmao” is because I didn’t want to seem like I was completely dismissing my friend’s idea for a challenge.
Second, that heart emoji sent by H. She later clarified that it was an accident, because the notification drawer allows people to easily send a thumbs up emoji (we customised the thumb to a heart—as seen beside the text input bar).
I thought it’d be worth mentioning, since Elaine also noted this in her lecture, drawing from her example of accidentally interacting with a post when she meant to scroll as the interface has become so “clickable”.
But I digress.
Siapera notes that Stiegler compares media to language (Siapera 2013). Language is the way in which we communicate information to our successors. Media, like society, is part of a long chain of narratives. It, as Siapera (2013, p. 8) quotes from Foucalt, is ‘constructed’.
Stories—fiction, non-fiction, documentaries—exist to control us. Basic fairytales like Little Red Riding Hood or Hansel and Gretel teach us not to go into the woods; and as an addition, to listen to authority figures when they tell you not to go into the woods. Parables of blindfolded people touching various parts of an elephant teach us not to condemn people; to listen to other people’s perspectives.
Society controls us by using stories to dictate the way we should behave.
There’s this thing (saying, rumour, I’m not sure how to label it) going around that people active on social media (i.e. posting images of being social) are actually unhappy with their circumstances. The more often they post, they more they wish to convince people that they’re content with their life—that they’re fabricating a life, a narrative.
Ultimately, this becomes the memory that we pass on–our legacy. This is the way that we evolve; we create stories; we tell people about the amazing dinner that we had with our friends. Instead of consulting history books, we’ll look at Instagram pages to catch a glimpse of what life is like in this post-Web 2.0 era.
References
Siapera, E 2013, Understanding New Media, SAGE Publications Ltd, London.