Social Media: Shamed if You Do, Shamed if You Don’t

jakewgoldman13 years ago

It’s no secret that our generation is technologically savvy. Recent college graduates are capable of effortlessly streaming live jungle porn from Thailand while older generations can barely use their computers for actual work. We took budding social media innovations and we made them into full-blown industries. Today these social media outlets so affect society that it is hard to imagine living without them. Think of all of your acquaintances in college. Now try to tell me you know more than ten people without a Facebook profile. However, although we are the most “interconnected” generation because of all of these electronic social outlets, one thing is for damn sure: we are also the most collectively fucked generation because of social media.

Having things like spring break pictures floating around the internet means that something like running for a political office just got a whole lot tougher. Fifteen years ago if you didn’t end up doing rum shots out of a b-hole on MTV’s Spring Break or pulling up your top for “Girls Gone Wild” you were golden. Nowadays every single person’s spring break is recorded. Every single night of drinking is recorded, to one extent or another. Until someone invents an app that causes your phone to blackout when your brain does, it’s going to remain this way. Side note: for the love of God please invent that app.

When applying to grad school one of the first things a lot of people do is change their Facebook names, or deactivate their account. Even though this strategy might work against the meager searches conducted by the Bumfuck State law school admissions office, don’t take that to mean you’ve erased your Internet history. Do you think the data miners of large lobbying firms wouldn’t mind floating some dime Zuckerfuck’s way so that they can get a hold of those old pictures of you funneling whiskey while pissing downwind in Key West? Even if the picture was deleted from your profile, the idea that these pictures aren’t still floating around in cyberspace is about as unlikely as you actually hitting Fidel Castro in the face with that wind-carried golden shower. If you have posted something on the Internet it exists there forever. Don’t believe me? Ask every busted pedophile ever.

Another big problem with social media is the fact that it has enabled the try-hard pricks in our society who have an unwarranted sense of self. Social media has also created MORE of those people than ever before. Remember the jackass in high school who thought every joke he made was gold? You know that guy, he’d either make a joke about some topical bullshit or endlessly quote a mediocre movie. He was so infuriating and unfunny that it took all your self control to not jam a pencil into his eye.

Thankfully every person around that kid told him to shut the fuck up. That doesn’t happen on Facebook and Twitter. With social media there isn’t someone telling that idiot to keep his mouth shut. Instead there is an entity actively asking that person, who has no business broadcasting his thoughts to the world, “what’s on your mind?” Were this person to broadcast these thoughts out loud he would be met with eye rolls or the deafening silence that comes along with the pointless crap they post.

This whole mindset of broadcasting your thoughts and business over the Internet makes people believe that their actions and beliefs are important. Moreover, the ability to comment on everything and tell someone if you like something or not reinforces the belief that you should have the ability to give your opinion about everything. Because of this our generation is turning into a bunch of hypercritical twenty-somethings who feel like they have to self-narrate their existence to a bunch of people that don’t fucking care.

What’s worse is the fact that if you decide to not partake in Facebook, you lose all ability to regulate content related to you that is posted on the Internet. If you don’t have an account, imagine all of the pictures that would be floating around the Internet WITHOUT your knowledge. By all of us volunteering to participate in social media, we have created online personas that our extensions of ourselves in representation. At least you can delete that drunken rant that you posted the night before if you have a Facebook account. If you do not have an account who is keeping your pledge brother from posting that picture of you naked spread eagle on the administration building steps? Not only do you have to worry about the shit you do getting you arrested when you get drunk, but now you have to worry about two people: the one in reality and one on the Internet. The fact we have two people we have to be concerned about is fucking mind boggling when you think of the fact we voluntarily submitted ourselves to the process. Especially because you are more fucked if you try to leave than if you stick around and regulate.

The social media network is not geared to aid people who have awesome social lives. Our generation may have made social media one of the greatest industries of all time, but the fact remains that we may very well become restricted from certain careers because of it. If Herman Cain is getting shit for buried cases that are decades old, how do you think any of us are going to get away with drunkenly posting derogatory nonsense and rage-faced pictures on Facebook and Twitter. Keep this shit in line, try to regulate as much as possible, and teach your kids VERY well so that they can bypass the bullshit.