What happened to us? When we discovered social media, we shared ideas. We searched for prescribers we could trust, we read threads full of curious facts we didn’t know, and we even echoed others’ articles, underlining in quotation marks a phrase from the author that gave us pause. This had nourished us with a critical consciousness.
But now we are talking. We talk about almost anything and everything. We are in a constant state of irritation. Let’s go straight to screaming the one who doesn’t tell us what we want to hear. Because we only hear, we don’t listen. In fact, we no longer seek to find people with proven knowledge who can open our minds. We prefer the demagogue who always agrees with us. And we applaud it. A lot. we want kind of Zacas. We want revenge. Such an epic leads us into a vicious circle, since we have ended up naturalizing that hoaxes always come from an ideology antagonistic to ours. And we take the bait even if we think we are defending honesty. Each of us has at some point legitimized a bar comment without knowing the depth of the subject. Even on TV. Because we retreat into easy ideas that do not represent a complex world. We want life to be summed up in advertising slogans.
How did we arrive at this paradigm shift?
Social media algorithms push us toward abbreviation. Twitter started with its character limit which became standardized. When publishing a video, Instagram itself warns of the sanction: “THE reels more than three minutes will not be shared with new audiences“There is no time to express nuances, you have to be very energetic. Thus, digital society has internalized the table shot as the most effective form of self-affirmation in the tidal wave of hundreds of audiovisual impacts that pass faster and faster before our eyes. As a result, the brevity and stress of viewing This took us from the cordiality of Fotolog’s quiet beginnings to the hostile susceptibility of today.
How far away was it when the networks were a meeting point naive where dialogue between fragments of experiences and ideals. But it is no longer enough to download an image that constitutes a nice souvenir. The strong competitiveness of the content encourages us to be the envy of staff. Even on vacation, we need to be productive to show the world that we are successful beings. From uploading photos in which it doesn’t matter how good or bad we turned out to be, because the important thing is that the whole gang remembers and comments on this moment of joy, to publishing only “reels” in which We treat our friends directly as if they were our fans.
So, surrealism: Social media is full of people with few followers who talk like influencers with millions of subscribers. What will they eat at a McDonald’sthey explain the McPollo as if they were in Chef. When they enter a Zara, the models talk as if they were special correspondents at London Fashion Week. It’s normal, we are replicators. We imitate what we cannot stop contemplating. And we are surprised during the day by such a mixture of reels who try to seduce us with perfect lives, with preaching of exemplarity, with hyper-realistic scares created by AI and with populism bottled in seventy seconds… which leave us dazed.
The absence of legislation and controls has caused a transformation of social networks, going from the initiatory status of the time when Facebook became popular, in 2004, to that of social networks. a showcase of the triumph of individualism. Even when we defend rights that belong to everyone. What can go wrong in an ecosystem in which the citizen is reduced to a simple consumer who, even if it is a sheep imitating the other sheep of the flock, he feels relevant because he thinks he has a speaker. A loudspeaker that amplifies our ability to shout, but does not enhance the serenity that allows us to listen to understand.
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