Searching for Meaning: Intimacy In the Age of Social Media

 

I have spent a lot of time contemplating about the culture we live in - the culture of social media. 

In this considerably new culture, we are encouraged to put everything on display, including our private lives. As a result, what we display very rarely reflects the reality. Instead, we post the improved and better version of the reality. Worst, we post the fabricated version of our reality. We don't post our unfiltered photos, instead we have them edited to make our lives look better in the picture. As a result, we don't only fool others, we fool ourselves. 

We are living Jean Baudrillard's prophetic reality. We live in an age of hyperreality. Social media was supposed to be the simulated version of our reality. What happens instead, the simulation has become the simulacra, a shared reality whose origin is practically nonexistence. Because of it, our lives have been reduced to pretension where meaning is a precious little thing. Or, has meaning gone extinct? 

Watch the following videos to learn more about Jean Baudrillard and read here for a brief introduction to Simulation and Simulacra.

I had my 26th birthday last May which I deliberately kept under the radar. I changed my social media settings, so that no one would be reminded about my birthday. Why? I detest the social media culture that encourages people to celebrate publicly what would have been an intimate occasion. Why can't people do that in private? You could send a private message congratulating the person - which, I argue, would have been a much more meaningful gesture. 

The same thing happens in all other occasions: wedding, graduation, having a baby - and you name it. Instead of sending heartwarming messages privately, we celebrate our friends' happy moments on Instagram story where other people (our IG followers) can see it. For me, this whole thing looks disingenuous. We treat our friends' lives as our social media contents, to show others how kind we are. We are not genuinely happy for our friends, we do it because we need to show the world that we have lives. If I were the person being tagged in the IG story, I would think that the celebration and congratulation have no meaning at all.  

I would much appreciate it being congratulated via private messages. For me it shows a genuine gesture, that he or she really means what he or she says. 

I would do the same to you. When others congratulate you on public forums (Whatsapp group, Instagram story, etc), I'd prefer to text you directly. For me, it shows that I really mean what I say. That's my way to keep meaning in a culture that fosters fakeness. 

borrowed from the internet