Le Folklore Que Nous Créons (French for The Folklore We Create)

January 24, 1984, Steve Jobs had gone from an ordinary college student, to the CEO of a company that would revolutionize the way our society does business, performed research, and receive information. He created the first Macintosh. A computer that blew the minds (and the heavy amounts of hair product since it was the 80’s) away (Dalakov). Thirty-four years have passed, and technology has advanced in ways that would have never been imagined. We’ve advanced our research, we’ve made communication more efficient, all of these have shaped our digital footprint. The biggest contributor to our digital footprint however, is how we use current social media. Somewhere in a distant future, someone will be looking not only at journals that were written on paper, but also what we’ve documented about our lives online. What will have changed? How did we influence future generations with our posts online? What will they think hundreds of years from now about our generation based on what we posted?

The way individuals have used social media over the last eighteen years has changed dramatically. Take myspace for example: Myspace was a sight that everyone used strictly for music. It had this cool effect where you could see what people were listening to right then and there, so the way you could tell if someone was angry was if they were listening to that new Five Finger Death Punch album. Sure, it operated as a chatroom as well, but everyone was definitely finding new music to listen to via Myspace. If you looked at anyone’s old Myspace page (because everyone had one so don’t try to lie to yourselves. Unless we’ve officially entered the generation that doesn’t know what Myspace even is anymore) you could tell the kind of person they were based on the music they listened to. It was a form of labeling which definitely wasn’t cool, but you could get a clue that a girl that listened to Britney Spears wasn’t going to show up to school wearing all black.

Fast forward a few years down the road. Mark Zuckerberg would create the reason why no one in this world can ever get anything done on time, and gave grandparents an excuse to pester their grandchildren and to ask for help on how to use a cellphone, Facebook. Originally, Zuckerberg created this social media site for college students to connect by finding out information about their classmates via their profiles (Boyd). People viewing your profile could see where you went to school, your relationship status, your general interests, and it served as a public diary to share your feelings. Now we’ve gone from everyone knowing how you’re feeling based on the music you were listening to, to now you could just blatantly tell people what you were feeling that day right then and there. As Facebook became more saturated, users of the sight became a bit more creative with how they documented they’re feelings or thoughts. Some would post song lyrics that pertained to their current emotion or situation. Others would post pictures of themselves with a certain facial expression and then caption the photo of exactly how they were feeling (because clearly, the picture wasn’t enough of a clue).

Now take a look at the present. What was the purpose in us even creating these social media accounts? What’s everyone’s main goal online now? I’m sure people have different goals or purposes for having social media, but the universal goal that people were and still are trying to achieve without even realizing they’re doing it is to gain followers, viewers, and friends. So, what do we do? We post pictures of ourselves in these filters that either make our mouth and eyes larger than they actually are, or the ones that make you look like a dog, we post our feelings and thoughts throughout the day, we post our views on certain hot button topics to get people to start a discussion on your feed,  we post funny videos of dogs (because cat videos are overrated, and cats are the spawn of Satan), we do all of this because we want people to look at our page. We want to be noticed. We want people to hit a like button on something we created or shared. We went people to give feedback on what we’ve posted. We get satisfied when people get a noticeable amount of “likes” and then we wonder why no one recognizes us in real life. It’s because everyone only knows you for the brief second online, then they’re on to the next feed.

Now let’s look at the future. Two generations from now. There are flying cars everywhere, researchers and doctors finally came up with a cure for cancer, teleportation is a thing now to where you can just take a light-speed elevator from Boston to Italy in a matter of nanoseconds, things are looking pretty good. Computers, cellphones, and tablets are all outdated and no longer in use. A student attending a college course on prehistoric technology is asked to write a report on how individuals portrayed themselves through digital footprints.  This student is stumped. So stumped that he starts pacing back and forth and then he/she stubs their toe on the couch so hard that it moves a couple of inches, but something is hiding under the couch that has just now become visible. The student examines it and then comes to the realization that it’s their great grandparents’ laptop. “This will be perfect for my research paper!” the student exclaims. They somehow access the old social media sites, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr. What does this person find? He finds that people wore their emotions on their sleeves in the virtual world, but found it hard to express themselves in real life. He finds that some of the most unfunny people in the world could easily gain a laugh or two on the internet by a posting a “Meme” that they didn’t even create. There was no originality. They find that people are pretty opinionated on the internet but when confronted in real life about their opinions they clam up. The conclusion that this individual would come up with in their paper would have been simple. The human race would have faltered had social media crashed at any point, because we would have no audience to talk to about it.

Social media was created for connecting with new people and later turned into a positive way to reach out to old friends and family that you don’t get to see very often. It then turned into a public diary where you could post your thoughts and feelings or even certain events that were going to happen. It has now turned into a war of recognition. If you don’t live up to social media standards you are viewed as an outcast on society. This cycle needs to break. I don’t mean to say that we need to rid of social media entirely but use it for what its intended purpose is. To gather information about people to go out and actually meet people and connect with them based on common interests. This technology has been a great advantage to us, let’s not spoil it with anymore cat videos.