Social media is a human paradigm. The Internet is constantly changing the way humans interact both individually and collectively. What an exciting time to live in the world, when we are truly on the brink of an amazing technological discovery, pushing into the future to far greater times.
Facebook users unite in “groups” on the website. While there are many groups for students pursuing their online educations or for a group of students studying for an administration degree, there are many groups for abstract concepts or people united under a shared thought about something as miniscule as loving the smell of rain.
Composing these groups are people from all over the world. They share common ideas or experiences. Some of these individuals may have pursued an administration degree together, or perhaps they both had family members that died in some horrible, tragic accident.
A new trend has people creating individual Facebook profiles for people that don’t really exist. Sometimes, they personify political ideologies like socialism or fascism in an attempt to discredit or even support the concept through anthropomorphizing them. They give these ideologies a perceived personality, and the traits of this “person” can be negative or positive depending largely on the creator’s opinion of the concept conveyed.
Another trend is a type of profile made for unborn children or even pets. What does this say about us as a society? Well, anthropologists and psychologists believe that it is in our nature to juxtapose aspects of our sapience and passionate intelligence onto beings that may not share in our intelligence. We feel truly alone in this vast world and the universe beyond it, and we work to the end of finding qualities that mirror our own in anything from primal idols to the pets who wander through our homes.
As we embrace social media, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, historians, biologists, psychologists and other scientists have used this unique paradigm to tap into the human mind and reinforce previous hypotheses about our natures and our interactions with the instrument that is society.
While one could argue that the thought behind creating profiles for these family members without voices is simple, there exist a range of factors in our nature that motivate us to transfer human personalities onto objects or beings that cannot speak or think independently.
So what of the unlucky ones who have miscarriages or birth complications? Does this say something about our society and its optimism? Unfortunately, it would take hundreds of pages to even begin to describe the social mechanics that are the reason for the success of the social media. The social media has become inseparable from the Internet, and it is leaking into all aspects of it.
From the rise of forums to the rise of Myspace and Facebook, the Internet is always in constant transition. It is a vacuum of innovation where minutes become weeks and months become decades in terms of new and relevant information, and it is a landscape we must weather in an oncoming storm through the continued writing of the history of our species.
