harshalipadmanabh-blog

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Face-to-Face conversations, remember those?

As time goes by, the pace of life increases. We have lesser time to relax and soak in the moment. We often find ourselves wound up in work, for students it is academics, for adults it is balancing work and personal life, for kids it may be school and extracurricular activities. Now as the lack of time becomes a growing concern, individuals strive to find ways for doing things in a way where they can save time. Texting is easy, quick and efficient as compared to meeting up with someone to discuss something. This brings up the question of the century, “are we living online?” 

Sherry Turkle’s opinion piece explores this question. She asks, “what happened to face to face conversation in a world where so many people say they would rather text than talk?” She tries to draw a parallel between solitude and empathetic conversations. It is true that conversing ‘online’ takes away the human component from conversations since there is a clear lack of emotions, expressions, mood, etc. While we try to fill this gap with the use of emoticons, it has not helped much. The younger generation these days often wonders “why did they send me the straight face emoji, something seems off” instead off “Hey, you don’t seem alright, do you want to talk about something?” 

In the pursuit of staying on track in our own lives, we get caught up and lose the sense of empathy. Sherry claims that by spending time by yourself and gaining solitude we recognize emotions of our own and that translates into empathetic conversations. I agree with her, I also believe that cellphones are often the barrier in this solitude to conversation transition. We get distracted, we do not engage, and conversations are ‘superficial.’ While we can pick up on textual clues through chat, we fail to engage in the same way face-to-face. 

The phone has become a ‘time saving escape’ which is a rather global reason for why we converse the way we do. This may not be the solution, we need to be more aware about the actual world around us, the real people and the physical environment. It’s almost like we have lost our ability of ‘activating the human senses’ to understand the world, the world is now only what we see on our screens. We are missing out; we are not actually ‘living’ and so we shall act soon before our ‘online’ identities start to fade, and we are left alone ‘offline.’

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Be Your Selves

It is no ‘news’ when Derek Thompson says that we try to represent ourselves a certain way on social media. As an individual who regularly uses all the media platforms mentioned in the article, I understand how each platform has its own culture where all users are expected to conduct themselves and engage in activities in a certain way. Often, we find ourselves ‘confirming’ to this expected behavior. On Instagram, our feeds are expected to be a spectacular pictorial representations of our lives, on twitter we are forced to express a strong opinion towards an ongoing debate, on Facebook we are expected to provide regular updates like relationship status, job updates, travel plans, etc.

In the pursuit of being a regular user we find ourselves following the cultural norms of each of the social media platforms, so is it fair to say that we change who we are? I like to see it in a way that we are altering ourselves to ‘fit in’ and at the same time trying to be the best at doing that in order to ‘stand out.’ The standing out bit is where I see that people might try to change themselves, based on trends we change how we express ourselves so that we get the likes, shares and comments. In times like that, yes, we may be changing our true opinion or our true self just to stand out.

On the other hand, I find myself trying 6 filters on a photo before I post it. Does that change who I am? Probably not. I wish to be perceived a certain way so I try my best to make sure I am portraying what I wish the audience sees, exactly how Derek says in the article, “our audience is our identity.” While a lot of it may still be left to audience interpretation, the user has the platform to express themselves. The need to fit in sometimes might overlap with true self-expression and that’s where the fine line of ‘not being yourself’ and ‘taking time to self-edit your identity’ lies.

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When Memes Go Digital; Reflection Piece

Shifman’s piece titled “when memes go digital” explores the concept of how memes are ‘shared’ in the new age digital culture and highlights the attributes that make a meme successful. Being a ‘netizen’, I am aware how quickly memes can become viral and often, the successful memes are usually the ones which have longevity, fecundity and copy fidelity. If we consider these 3 attributes, success is measured in accordance to visibility of the meme across digital platforms, the rate at which people can reproduce this (which in the web culture is extremely high) and lastly, the ability to make accurate copies of it. Although, in recent times we have seen that some viral memes have been reproduced as a ‘tweaked’ version of the original one and it could be because everyone wants to “participate.” This participatory culture symbolizes that individuals want to be a part of this “web community” and ‘repackaging’ a meme is one form of validation for the same. This concept is discussed in the reading and it also explains that memes are repackaged by mechanisms of mimicry (redoing) and remix (technology-based manipulation). Lastly, successful memes are shared at a significantly high rate in today’s internet-era, be it on social media or any other digital platforms. This ease of sharing memes has made a huge difference in the visibility factor of every meme, we see different versions of the same meme repeatedly and the next thing we know, that meme has become the next digital trend. So to conclude, it is fair to say that the internet has truly helped ‘digitalise’ the concept of memes and has created a new dimension for how they are shared and perceived.