For our second project I knew I wanted to do something about social media just because lately I’ve been seeing it used in various different ways. For example, on every news station, no matter if it’s the weather or Fox 2’s Let It Rip section they keep showing the responses of the people that either follow them on twitter or have commented on their facebook page. I just find it ridiculous and a bit offensive, even though I know it’s meant to make the news more approachable, to make the people feel like they have a say or they matter but most of the time I feel like their comments just take away from the discussion. Anyways, I wanted to play around with this in my work and I took actual facebook posts from a number of my ‘friends’ and incorporated them into the text.
The content itself discusses communication and the problems that we still have even though using social media is so accessible now. The narrator, although it seems ‘his’ (I say ‘his’ but I never specifically address him as a male in the short series of narrations) words have no meaning, and actually to him they don’t, it appears that his struggles are with ‘his’ interactions with others. He is influenced by other’s opinions easily and feels pressure to keep up this facade of a social life yet, although he takes his lack of social interaction into account, he doesn’t want to go on an date with his girlfriend, he doesn’t want to go to work and he becomes suspicious of the new intern that keeps smiling at him.
The organization of the content also follows this disconnect between reality and this social sphere, it’s jumbled together and sometimes confusing, it’s up to the reader to follow the stories and connect them on their own. Also, the fact that I never address the narrator by name or pronoun asserts this question of identity that people seem to always be searching for and now turn to social media to express this desire. I also try to deal with societies attitude towards things that don’t necessarily concern them and their lack of interest in anything that doesn’t directly benefit them. I don’t know if anyone would really get these things from my work but at least that was what I had intended when I started on it. And so, that is the summary.
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