Marie Burguin

This blog post was produced as part of the course “Social Media, Ideologies, and Ethics in the United States” at the University of Turku.

Marie Burguin’s piece was published on Medium, December 7, 2019: https://medium.com/@mariebrgn/why-do-people-in-their-mid-50s-or-60-s-despise-the-youth-so-much-916caba82360

Yuxin Liu 

This blog post was produced as part of the course “Social Media, Ideologies, and Ethics in the United States” at the University of Turku.

When I was a child, I watched the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, which tells the story of a media mogul trying to launch a global war to control global public media. When the movie was released in 1997, the Internet was still unknown, so the weapons of the villain Carver were only a “Tomorrow Newspaper” and some satellite TV. Maybe no one thought that controlling public media would gradually become a reality with the rise of the Internet and social media.

Media is the most important link

Firstly, we must understand the relationship between media, information, and people. Human beings need a lot of communication – to pass their cognition to others, to seek approval, or to accept the information of others. What’s the role of media? Media delivers information to people.

Granted, social media offers a lot of conveniences. Criminals can be brought to justice, people around the world can communicate for free and sharing information becomes very fast. We generally recognize that social media is a double-edged sword, emphasizing that the user’s ability to control social media determines whether it is positive or negative. But what if social media was born to manipulate and make everyone addicted?

Social Media, Born for Addiction

All addictives have the following characteristics:

  1. The stimulus to break the “boring”

  2. This stimulation is effortless

  3. Once addicted, withdrawal is painful

So, is social media addictive? The answer is obvious. Looking at these several definitions of addictions, we may get a better understanding of the strange phenomena of social media.

●The stimulus to break the “boring”

Why is social media always full of weird pop culture? You can find everything but the normal. Because most of our lives are boring, lackluster, and ordinary. Our lives start and end, like a Mobius ring with no end. However, human existence is complex and sensitive. We are always looking for our kind, but we are eager to be different. This is one of the root causes of the popularity of social media. 

●This stimulation is effortless

The stimulus brought by addictions is effortless. Smoking marijuana is just like smoking cigarettes, the only action required is to light it. In other words, addictions relax the brain and make it stop working. Addictions can degrade the brain. The same is true of social media. After all, taking and editing a photo to convey a false location may take only 2 minutes – effortless compared to the hard work and toil of an actual trip. 

●Once addicted, withdrawal is painful

It took my father three months to quit smoking and he told me that it felt awful. Can you stop checking your social media in a day? No Facebook, no Instagram? Will you feel like there is nothing to do? Or will you feel inexplicably empty inside? If the answer is “yes”, as for most of us, maybe leaving social media is not easy for you. This is good to notice. When social media has been an indispensable part of your life, how could it be easy to get rid of it?

Evolve? Degrade?

Generally, the reading time of a social media article is limited to about 5 minutes. For videos on Tik Tok it is even less, 15 seconds, 30 seconds, etc. Article after article, video after video, your attention is being torn. At the same time, the soundscape is so diverse that it weakens your ability to think independently.

Some people liken these characteristics to “new evolution” and believe that the future of humans will be more short-term, efficient, and multi-threaded. But unfortunately, the ultimate goal of this evolution is not for the progress of the human race, its goal is to eliminate the vast majority of people.

At present, manipulating personal thoughts through media is already a routine operation. “Mimeng” cheated a lot of people by sensational titles and spurious content. But think about why some people are willing to become her followers? The reason is the lack of attention and ability to think independently. The followers gradually become the tools of a manipulator. This evolution is in progress. I hope everyone can distinguish whether they are headless animals or manipulating hands.

Read more: 

New York Times, March 6, 2017: “Why We Can’t Look Away From Our Screens” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/science/technology-addiction-irresistible-by-adam-alter.html?_ga=2.135890993.1049120896.1574975315-191515546.1574975315

What’s on Weibo, Feb. 6, 2019: “Mimeng and ‘Self-Media’ under Attack for Promoting Fake News Stories to Chinese Readers” https://www.whatsonweibo.com/mimeng-and-self-media-under-attack-for-promoting-fake-news-stories-to-chinese-readers/

Marta Rodríguez Garcia

This blog post was produced as part of the course “Social Media, Ideologies, and Ethics in the United States” at the University of Turku.

Marta Rodríguez Garcia’s piece was published on Blogspot, December 2, 2019: https://socialmediain2019.blogspot.com/2019/12/do-we-all-know-what-is-social-media.html

Wong Ka Wah

This blog post was produced as part of the course “Social Media, Ideologies, and Ethics in the United States” at the University of Turku.

What an amazing memory: Me, a student from Hong Kong, walking into a class with people from different backgrounds to discuss and learn about social media in Finland. The class discussions always gave me a lot of food for thought. During and after the conversations with my classmates, my mind was full of different ideas. I was impressed by the discussion about social media, especially during the second lesson where we were asked: “Do you agree with Postman that media such as television have a clearly negative impact on public discourse? What is the positive impact of a specific medium such as social media, on public discourse?” This discussion made me think about the relation between different media and different individuals. Personally, I think this is a dynamic and complicated relationship. Social media has both positive and negative impacts on its users.

First, on the negative side, people’s thoughts and behavior can easily be influenced by different media because it is impossible to dodge the information flow. Messages from the media are everywhere: advertisements, news, television and entertainment, etc. Especially under the trend of globalization, the pace and frequency of the exchange of information is exhausting. People are exposed in a society full of information. They do not have sufficient time to digest or process the information they receive every moment. The more passive we are, the more easily we can be influenced by the senders of the information, that is to say the media. Our class provided a good example of this. We should not only take in the information presented to us without processing it in interaction with the whole class. Our thoughts can easily be influenced. Everyone can be aware this and try to employ more critical thinking.

On the positive side, new media make information exchange faster and more convenient. They provide a lot of entertainment. They can also be a platform for different people to discuss or even organize social movements. People can share their thoughts and try to convince others through discussions on these free and transparent public platforms.

Someone might think the relationship between traditional media and social media is quite competitive or that they are mutually exclusive. Younger generations tend to use social media more than traditional media, and the circulations of newspapers have been decreasing in a lot of developed countries. For me, they are not competitors. Rather, they can utilize each other. They each have their unique position in the world, and the audience will have different interpretations of these two kinds of media. For example, traditional media are more convincing.

As I mentioned, it is inevitable to receive tons of information nowadays. However, we can choose to be content creators or receivers, and stay aware of how easily we can be influenced if we do not take the time to process information. We can try to find a solution. What I wish to emphasize is that we have to learn how to strike a balance between receiving information and digesting it.