“Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading.”

(Carr).

 

As a millennial it feels like I cannot leave my phone. This doesn’t necessarily mean I can’t but it refers to the idea of FOMO. FEAR OF MISSING OUT.

FOMO applies to the current epidemic in most parts of America that tempts people to post an alternate version of almost every part of their lives on social media. I personally feel like I have to check my phone’s notifications every five minutes to keep up with what’s going on, especially in my group chats. If you miss a notification it feels like you weren’t there when it happened. Social media commentary has become a means for people to make comedic acts such as memes and funny videos online that are out of the norm. These videos serve as news about unimportant things that do not benefit the society and then it becomes shared making things viral. Its the sad truth about how we live our lives constantly glued to our phones. We subconsciously notice it but we ignore it because we are addicted.

“In November 2015, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention noted in their report, “The percentage of U.S. adults who smoke cigarettes declined from 20.9 percent in 2005 to 16.8 percent in 2014. Cigarette smoking was significantly lower in 2014 (16.8 percent) than in 2013 (17.8 percent).”

It feels like were getting dummer because clout has become the drive for most people pursuing temporary recognition as people are proud of it because it feels so good. Maybe this has become our nicotine because we have literally dropped the smoke and picked up our phones. Who knows what we’ll become more addicted to, is virtual reality up next?

For this week’s blog post, I am choosing to respond to “I’m an Addict” and Other Sensemaking Devices: A Discourse Analysis of Self-Reflections on Lived Experience of Social Media.” By Katrin Tiidenberg, Annette Markham, Gabriel Pereira, Mads Rehder, Ramona Dremljuga. “This reflects a dialectical struggle to make sense of their lived experiences and feelings.” (Tiidenburg,1), this quote sticks out to me because due to social media apps like twitter, instagram and snapchat, people begin to struggle with their own experiences. I often find myself losing myself in these apps, and spend random time just scrolling down the feeds. I would usually stay on twitter just to keep up with what’s going on, that app is the last thing I see at night. “This discourse utilizes the above-mentioned addiction grand narrative, relying on the reified rhetorical elements of narcissism, FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) or vanity.” This quote vividly expresses how my meaningless scrolling could actually be a phobia of missing out.

Work Cited

Katrin Tiidenberg, Annette Markham, Gabriel Pereira, Meghan Dougherty, Mads Rehder, Ramona Dremljuga, Jannek Sommer. “I’m an Addict” and Other Sensemaking Devices: A Discourse Analysis of Self-Reflections on Lived Experience of Social Media.”

For this Journal entry, I had chosen to reflect on Defining the Initial Shift by Elizabeth Einstein. In this reading she discusses the evolution from scribal culture to printing culture. The change to printing culture served as a catalyst in many revolutions such as the Renaissance. Print was such an technological advancement that it allowed for more books and information to be spread. I enjoyed this reading because it directly coincides with modern society. We have evolved from the print era into the digital era, publications who have relied heavily on magazines and newspapers are switching to more digital media outlets. It makes me put into perspective of how society has yet again gone through any shift in the way we spread our knowledge and information. Print was once the hot new invention in society, but slowly began getting displaced by more digital advancements. This reading highlights the change from scribal culture to print culture, and that revolutionized society in a meaningful way. The shift from orality to literacy detailed in the reading is the same shift our society faced when switching from print to digital.

Communication has always been the center of our beings- no matter what shape or form it’s in. We have always had a way to communicate with one another. I strongly believe that we’ve lost a sense of what it’s like to truly communicate with one another. Yes there is social media and other sites like LinkdIn to help us network, but what about when it comes to meeting someone and speaking to them in person? On page 11 of James W. Carey’s “Communication as Culture”, he opens up a sentence with something Dewey had said in his book which is “…of all things communication is the most wonderful.” I couldn’t agree more. In a way I feel that we kind of take the fact that we can communicate with one another for granted because there are some people who can’t. Communication is the key to the most important things in our lives. School, work, friendships, relationships, having to call the MTA customer service line because your transaction for a $32 unlimited failed but it still charged your card… (still bitter and very annoyed cause I haven’t gotten my money back). But when it comes to interactions, we become extremely anxious and don’t know what to do. Instead we freeze up and panic. And it’s because we’ve become so accustomed to talking to one another through these tiny computers. When having to network, you have to build personal relationships with people in order to get somewhere and put your foot in the door. Without communication we become the robots that people have always feared of becoming one day in the very far future (hopefully never- they’ll end us all).

This week I decided to read “Missed Connections” by Safiya Noble.

A quote that stood out to me was:  “Cuts to public education, public libraries, and community resources only exacerbate our reliance on technology, rather than information and education professionals, for learning.”

To me this quote just shows how bad our dependency has become on technology. Future generations will never know how to do things on their own or think for themselves because they are going to be eaten up by the internet. Books will be a joke to them and this will be a proof of just how lazy technology has made us become. Cuts shouldn’t be made to public education. libraries or community resources. Kids should be learning how to get out there and actually work for something, not just go running to the internet for answers that aren’t even always accurate.

I chose to read “I Am an Addict” for this week. While reading it, I did get a bit overwhelmed because all I kept thinking to myself was “wow, here I am reading research when I should be doing my research project which is based off this same topic.” My mind was definitely all over the place but there was one line that stuck out to me- that I just might use for my research project for my Communications Research class.

“Young people’s social media use- its possible effects and implication- persists as one of the most popular areas of scholarly interest surrounding networked technologies. This heightened interest stems from the group’s intense usage habits and the greater public’s anxiety around networked technologies, their benefits and pitfalls.”

This mainly stuck out simply because as I do my research for my other class, I realize just how true this statement is. There are so many researches done about social media and how it’s affected today’s youth, regardless if it’s beneficial to us or not. It also stuck out because the authors write how researchers are mainly interested in this because of the grand anxiety social media has put on the public- the same reason I chose to focus on this for my research for my other class. I find it interesting how social media has created societal norms for us without people even realizing until they come face to face with the actual norm – if that makes sense. Social media definitely has its good, but it also has it’s bad. It’s now a way to network, entertain, educate and even work. People now depend on social media to live and I think it’s incredible how something that means nothing has completely taken over us.

Final for OLCT FALL 18