Whichever, literary example, best suits you; the question still remains, how do we avoid becoming the science fiction versions of ourselves, Cyril M. Kornbluth warned of.
One could, easily, state we are already there, but still blindfolded to the reality. If this is true, then has social media tapped open the crack, in a thinly lined, fully-wired present?
We are all “woke” now to the social injustices of the current state of affairs seen in police surveillance and FB live.
How can it be that such horror exist in the post-Obama era? We were treated to 8 years of heroism, so all of that discrimination should have been eradicated.
That is a delusion.
A fabricated bedtime story, we tell ourselves now because the outside world is a little harsher than we found ourselves prepared for. Throughout humankind there has always been evidence of discrimination and social injustice [read Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind]. While it has shifted from varied battles of race versus religion, man has not yet learned to live in unbiased peace.
What social media has done is remove the mask. No longer are the days of verbal storytelling. Pics or it didn’t happen is the modern day Grimm Brothers tale.
And how does this relate to the initial topic of lies in our present media era?
Our minds have a greater capability to fabricate our experiences than ever before. When the news has to justify its validity, it is no more apparent. Online stories become unreliable fact and through seamless sharing the lies spread like a cancer to our moral mindset.
Clearly we are more evolved than to believe all we read online.
Not quite.
Our conscious and subconscious in the ideology of Freud, is sensitive to our surroundings and while we may feel all thoughts are our own, they never really were. Thought itself is a reclaimed memory from a glimpse of a moment we once knew. An idea is borrowed from small fragments of our internal storage. Art, music, literature and science all root back to one initial fraction of a second in time. It’s like the bathroom game, by the time the original story gets to the last stall, it is so manipulated that while you feel you heard it somewhere before, you can’t quite place the fact over fiction.
So in regards to social media and how it has impacted our story-line, it is the nothing more than miscommunication of moments, strung into a news-feed with captions we “create” to appeal to an influence-able audience.
Cue in the Influencer’s, our modern day social figures.
Why go to college when you can make more as a “Social Media Influencer”. Real-life skills are not needed, just a professional camera and sponsored products. That is the current world we live in. This is my generations idea of a future. Lying has become a dream profession for the under-qualified and vainly ambitious. So while companies try to keep up by hiring these “lifestyle motivators”, the fate of their business lies in the hands of a single tweet from Kylie Jenner (no offense)–sorry to Snapchat.
Consumerism is the societal norm and we all march along with the beat lining up to snag the next best thing.
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