How do social media surround us?

Many voices are being raised around the world that the Internet may besiege our lives with the growing interest in social media. This conclusion is correct, but the dispute is between two groups. The first believes that the Internet has changed our lives for the worse, because it encroaches on our privacy, because it causes addiction and depression, and because it watches us however we turn, and affects family and social relations, disintegrating them so that everyone lives in his own bubble inside the virtual world. The second team says what contradicts this conclusion, that the Internet has developed our lives and facilitated it and allowed us to communicate with our relatives more, and introduced us to new friends from around the world, and that it has brought cultures closer together, and that the attachment of new generations to the Internet is an inevitable matter similar to the generations of radio and television, and from Then the computer, and then the mobile phone. In the opinion of the optimists, it is not possible to disengage from the Internet, otherwise we will be out of the march of the world.

Is social media a historical inevitability?

Both groups are correct in saying that the influence of social media has shifted from being entertainment to being part of our daily lives.

However, the discussion has not yet reached a conclusion. Rather, the means of communication are being pursued by governments, which accuse them of monopolizing on the one hand, and of using customer data unlawfully, except that they are networks that are impossible to control and monitor. Facebook faced skepticism in its testimony before the US Senate Banking Committee on the budget, proposed cryptocurrency and alternative financial system. A major argument took place between the directors of "Meta" and several European countries, headed by France, Germany and Britain, which decided to impose new taxes on this company, so the owner of the company threatened to cut off "Instagram" and "Facebook" from Europe, clearly and explicitly. This threat shows how powerful these companies are in confronting governments. The battle between them is over the audience, and the audience is certainly with the means of communication, as the smallest virtual “republic” includes no less than three billion subscribers, in which they spend more time than they spend in their real lives during the day. Then the testimony of one of the former directors of the “Facebook” company was before a committee in the US Senate, to announce the dangers to new generations due to social media, and her testimony was transmitted through the media around the world.

Two more simple examples of the impact of social media on our individual lives, the Philadelphia Police Department has terminated the contracts of more than a dozen state officers for their racist comments on social media. Even a personal opinion about something we announce on social media is causing non-hypothetical consequences for our lives. In Russia, for example, a group of volunteers close to the Church follows the pages of teachers in schools on the Internet, and those of them openly declare their homosexual orientation, for example, or put pictures in a loud evening, these young people submit requests to the Russian Ministry of Education to dismiss them from their work, and it has Dozens of professors have been fired so far. Their justification is that male and female teachers should set an example for their students on the means of communication and in the classroom.

These are examples of the ability of social media to expose our personal lives to everyone, but on the other hand, others say that this same surveillance allows the police to arrest many criminals, for example, as passers-by cameras film them as they commit their crime of any kind. In Egypt, for example, many gangs of harassers and rapists were arrested, who were exposed through their phones and social media pages. The most prominent example of this was when the participants in the attack on the Capitol were arrested and tried prior to the announcement of Biden's victory and Trump's defeat in the US presidential elections, based on the videos they took of themselves during the invasion and after entering the offices. The videos they made themselves were an indisputable reason for their conviction.

We will become part of the Internet

Controversial businessman Elon Musk took the matter to an advanced stage, when he indicated that the distance between social media will be removed and we will use it at some point in the future by implanting in computer chips. Itself is a parallel world in all its details, and some sociologists have even expressed concern that the "metaverse" will turn social schizophrenia into a normal thing, as if the same person has a realistic personality and another within the "metaverse" that may be different and contradictory even with his real personality. And the most pessimistic fear that the "Metaverse" itself will turn into a real world, when we spend more hours inside it than we spend outside it. This was the expectation for social networks before it was actually confirmed later, when more than half of the users of this network spend the bulk of their daytime hours inside it. In an astonishing incident, a French woman filed a lawsuit against the "Metaverse", because her character there was gang-raped as soon as she entered this world. This in itself is a broad discussion in Europe and the United States, and there is no room for it to be presented here.

Read More

This section contains related articles, placed in the (Related Nodes field)

Social media, in agreement with all scholars of virtual life, including psychologists, sociologists, technology, economists and politicians, continues to develop at a tremendous speed, which makes it difficult to predict the way it will transform after each stage. For example, in 2006, Facebook had 7.3 million registered users. In the first quarter of 2019, the company had 2.38 billion active users, with a market capitalization of more than half a trillion dollars, and after only two years, the number of users exceeded three billion, with a market value of more than a trillion dollars. The same applies to other applications such as Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, and others.

Just ten years ago, I didn't think anyone would have predicted Facebook would be as big and dominant as it is today," says Kevin Werbach, a professor of legal studies and business ethics. "At that point, this was an interesting discussion about tech startups." , but without the slightest estimate, we would reach such a huge size of her entire world.” Werbach adds, "Today Facebook is one of the most valuable companies on earth, but that is not the most important thing. Rather, it is at the forefront of a whole range of public policy discussions in all countries of the world, and even united political, artistic and environmental groups from different societies with the same goals." You wouldn't have met without him." It can be added to Werbach's analysis that the means of communication were a motive and a catalyst for the Arab Spring revolutions as well as the Green Revolution in Iran, and even the US presidential elections in the previous two rounds between Trump and Clinton and then Trump and Biden. Even the means of communication such as "Twitter" and "Facebook" were able to Preventing the President of the United States of America from expressing his opinion through it. These means have managed to control the President himself, who is supposed to run the world.

The loss of free will

One prominent commentator on the negative impact of social media is Jaron Lanier, whose vehement opposition is evident in the title of his 2018 book Ten Reasons to Delete Your Social Media Accounts... Right This Moment. In his view, in the world of online social media, free will is lost, truth is eroded, empathy is destroyed, and people are made unhappy, as is evident with two or three generations of contemporary teens. The American writer Lanier is a musician, artist, and worked in an important position at Microsoft, and does not represent the owners of “paranoia” from conspiracy theories about managing the world, and he is one of the founders of the leading virtual reality company VPL Research, but what it became clear to him is that the feeling of anxiety that the Internet brings to users “Like the crude oil for the social media companies and other behavioral manipulation empires that soon came to dominate the Internet, because they fueled negative behavioral responses.”

Many are beginning to believe that the biggest challenge around the impact of social media may be the way it has changed society. “The attention-grabbing algorithms underlying social media drive authoritarian practices intended to sow confusion, ignorance, bias, and chaos, thereby facilitating manipulation and undermining democratic accountability,” Ronald Deibert, professor of political science at the University of Toronto, wrote in an article published in the magazine in January. .

Everyone is their own media company, Berger says, belonging to a certain group of people who follow them. This key brand signature used to be the path to stardom. Now artists can build their following online, and social media sure has made Fame and attention are more democratic, though not always in a good way.