Photo by Robin Worrall
Exploring the accessibility of public acculturation of social media
All kinds of videos go viral daily, from talented cats playing the piano to sculptors in the jungle, to just a girl in her room sharing a political non-secret under the guise of talking about eyelashes. Travel videos with peaceful undertones and fly-over drone footage in Vietnam, or brash, fast, and selling a dream in the Santorini night scene.
Ada Senelli, 29, is a social media manager for a digital agency in Milan. “Personally, I’ve been using instagram and TikTok as a way to approach things I wouldn’t learn by myself in a traditional way,” she says. Today she uses these platforms to learn photography tricks from content creators, finding it more engaging than learning from a book. “I think that’s because of my sort of addiction to the medium, as I also work with it, but it’s also a natural progression we’re living through.”
As our attention remains trapped in our phones, apps like Blinkist and Deepstash have been advertising, on social media sites, no less, to get you off the mindless For You page scroll and switching those swiping fingers onto their supposedly more-intentional “micro-learning” platforms.**
Not only do you learn something new every day, but you can glimpse into whole words. you can click on an account, like that of photographer Melissa Spitz, and see a collection of over a decade’s worth of images of her mentally ill mother. You can scroll down the page, the way you might have scrolled that of an ex, and after ten minutes you can have a new log of visual information that gives you a more intimate understanding of mental illness.
Each reel video has its own spiral subculture attached, and there’s a massive network of images, still or moving, that layer across layers upon layers of other things we’ve seen or know. So, if we have a receptive brain, we become Metacultured™ (patent pending).
But this relies also on our ability to be perceptive and selective, too.
“For me, everything I see on social media merges into one meaningless clump,” says London student Nicki Detain, 22. “I’m sure I’ve seen more information than someone who lived a hundred years ago, but none if it’s been retained.” Though he does find looking at stuff on social media is a nice way to pass the time, it’s just that: a passive activity.
The rapidity of accruing information can be hard to keep up with, or distracting – enter the infamous doom scroll. But when we do strip away from that darned screen, our heads may hurt a bit as our brains file away that information into the appropriate places. We may not remember every seven second video we watch, or carousel of aesthetic squares we coveted, but everything we consume informs our world. And if we’re taking in so much information and making decisions from what we know, then imagine what possibilities these micro-culturings can provide us without us even knowing it.
These days, a lot of news sites are moving onto social platforms as well. “The only way we have to know about what is really happening in Gaza is through the social media accounts of people in Gaza,” says Ada, “as the mainstream media is too corrupted.”
So in trying to solve all the world's problems as young people do, maybe there’s a fast track cheat code for teaching the next generations or lower privileged backgrounds the tools to use their inevitable social media addictions for wealth of knowledge. I mean, you don’t read the whole book when you write a literature review, do you?
As always, Error 's got more questions for you:
Has social media expanded your breadth and wealth of mind?
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Has social media expanded your breadth and wealth of mind?
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Has social media expanded your breadth and wealth of mind?
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