Not Having Social Media Has Given Me A New Confidence!

Everywhere I go I see younger children, teenagers, and young adults snapping everything they do. My sister literally stays on Snapchat/IG so much that I do not enjoy her company because that’s ALL she does. I see people dying to post on Instagram. I see old people on Facebook 247. My mom can barely get though the door before she is on the computer looking at her newsfeed, for hours. Both of my grandparents are 70 and they both are on Facebook, and they comment on EVERYTHING, it is beyond annoying.My grandma has at least 50 repost a day, seriously. About 3 in half years ago I deleted my Instagram for many many reasons. I ended up deleting my Facebook this year, because it was just too many old people and all long post that were just to annoying to take anymore. The first reason I deleted my social media was because I was always stalking someone, wanting to see what they were up to, simply being nosey and accidently liking their pictures…. embarrassing.

A Deep Fear of Sharing Online

My internet persona, which does not acknowledge or talk about the issues that plague my true, physical self

Every time I have had to write a blog post for this class, I have ended up sitting in front of the computer for what feels like hours, thinking through all the different personal stories I could share. I find a lot of the posts on this blog fascinating because I could not imagine being so open about my life online. I am afraid of letting the world know that I have problems just like everybody else.

Gifs, Emojis, and Avatars: Self-Expression on the Internet

The internet creates a strange liminal space where we must invoke our bodies in order to represent ourselves. In the absence of facial expression, body language, or verbal description, one can express emotion and identity with other methods, like pictures, gifs, and emojis.

This video talks about how people on the internet often represent themselves through pictures, gifs, and videos. They caption or tag it with the phrase “Me RN” meaning “Me right now”. Even though these gifs or pictures are taken from shows, movies, or places that don’t relate to the user, through their abstraction and decontextualization people can appropriate these images to create themselves in webspace. These images capture a feeling or mood that can be difficult to evoke on the internet because it would require long descriptions, finesse of diction, and/or visual depiction that’s not possible or desirable to pull off.

In a similar vein, emojis are abstracted images used to represent emotions and ideas in internet liminal space. However, emojis differ from things like reaction images in that they are designed by the owners of the webspace themselves. Whereas reaction images derive from a third-party source and can be easily manipulated to suit the user’s needs, emojis are dependent on its creators. We could assume that while reaction images derive from a bottom-up appropriation of culture, emojis represent a top-down system that is limited by the ideology and resources of website owners and creators.

However, I’d like to think it’s more complicated than that. We cannot characterize website owners and creators as from the “top” and users at the “bottom”, when many creators derive from lower or middle class backgrounds and found their work through their own funding or crowdfunding. Users can be creators and creators are also users. Thus, while some of the same privilege systems are recreated on the web, we cannot assume that this is always true.

That’s why I believe that the internet represents an amazing new space for people to represent themselves and perhaps create new identities away from everyday restrictions.