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How Social Media Shapes Our Identity

How Social Media Shapes Our Identity

These Days, It Is Common To Find A Photo From A Pile Of Old Photos. We Spend Hours In Photographs, Many Of Which Document Our Daily Lives In Unprecedented Ways. 

Identity Facebook was founded in 2004 and has managed to attract many people with its creative and user-friendly ideas so that some people put all the events of daily life on this social network.

In 2015, Kate Aikorn wrote in her book End of Oblivion: Growing Up on Social Media that Snapshot users shared about 30 million photos per hour on the social network, with English parents averaging about 200 photos per year. “They have posted their children online.”

 In the case of people who grew up with social media, a group of people under the age of twenty-five, the whole mysterious period of their lives has been marred by this social phenomenon.

  • Level of control over their lives that they did not have before. In the past, adults did not recognize children’s agency and imposed the ideal of innocence and purity on them. Adults were the ones who wrote books, took pictures with expensive cameras, and commissioned paintings and portraits, all for childhood memories and future memories. Despite the ability of cameras to capture instant and low-cost photos, children couldn’t produce content today. Still, with the advent of the Internet, an unprecedented level of autonomy provides all society members, especially children. Ekorn writes: “It’s no longer a childhood story that was made, paid for, and recorded by parents and then reflected on to children (for example, in the form of an assembled family photo album or a collection of home video clips). “Today, young people take pictures without the intervention of adults and share them without their permission.”
  • This method can be very effective. New technologies, especially smartphones, allow us to narrate our lives and choose what to remember and include in our stories. According to Aiken, this is the latest example of this ancient and sometimes mysterious tradition. “Children did this in their minds long before they were able to create, edit and compile pictures of their lives,” he writes. Freud called these images screen memories and believed that we use these memories to hide painful experiences. Humans are always trying to cope with the mental challenges of memory and turn unfortunate events from an unbearable horror into a safe, secure, and familiar concept. 
  • According to Aiken, on the other hand, these media can hinder the work of people who want to forget their past and prevent it from being done well. We are not the only ones sharing our lives. Our friends and family are often involved in recording the events of our lives without our consent. “Growing up in the age of the Internet may hinder our ability to edit, anthology, and forget memories,” says Aiken. There is no longer a potential danger of losing a child; It is possible to have a permanent child. “In short, there is a possibility that we will exchange the overlay memory with the screen.”
  • This is especially important for people who want to have a new identity. For example, people going through a period often want to go back to their previous life. Aiken points out that one of the first promises of the Internet was to create a continuous space for people to express mental distractions and sentences that they are unable to express in the real world in cyberspace under their own name or a pseudonym. To speak. Now that the Internet has become more enduring and pervasive, it is difficult to avoid remnants of past identities. 
  • The persistence of some images for some people can be more troublesome. Some moments have been recorded without a person’s permission and have remained on the Internet forever, and it is difficult and sometimes impossible to delete them. These situations, where an inappropriate photo or an offensive tweet can ruin a person’s public life, are miserable and widely covered. “A Canadian teenager filmed himself in 2002 holding a golf club like a Star Wars sword,” said Aiken, detailing Gizlin Raza’s case. One of Raza’s classmates shared the video, and he uploaded it to the Internet as “Star Wars Kid,” and millions of people watched it. All of this happened when the concept of virality, as a phenomenon, was not really relevant. Raza was harassed by her friends at school and eventually admitted to a psychiatric ward. 
  • Everyone enjoys the experience of adolescence, writes Acorn. In this age, we are in a situation that psychoanalyst Eric Erickson calls a moratorium. It is, in fact, a stage in which we are suspended between the moral principles learned in childhood and the moral ones formed in adulthood. Identity breakdown is a period of trial and error in which society allows adolescents to take risks without fear of the consequences of their work in the hope that by doing so, they will reveal their inner essence (the personal sense that gives meaning to life). The Internet violates the privacy of this era and magnifies the mistakes to the point of permanent errors, causing these errors to be recorded in our permanent files. Unfortunately, some universities and employers also look at the applicant’s social media accounts to check the applicant’s personality.  
  • Acorn refers to universal human rights, which is contrary to the whims of companies that use data and information. “Oblivion, this inherent and obvious resource that all human beings once possessed, has now become the basis for the tech companies to come to life,” he writes. He writes with an idealism that we have the right to forgetting and be forgotten, known as information privacy. In any case, the ability to detach from the past, that is, to change behavior patterns and become human with new mental policies, is a natural human right. We have the right to remain as we are. More importantly, attacks on people through social media sometimes lead to rebellion and defiance. Of course, social networks are not destroyed and have useful applications. Acorn briefly addresses the issue of immigrants:
  • Are all photos documented? In his book Social Photography, Nathan Jorgenson points out that most online photography is about sharing experiences, not making memories. “A selfie is not an accurate picture of me at a particular time or place, but a picture of my idea at that moment,” he writes in part of his book. According to Jorgenson, taking social photos has changed the way we look at the world. Teenagers have become cyborgs, and their phones are their mechanical eyes that help them interpret their experiences.
  • “Documentation means engaging ourselves with our experiences instead of letting them float,” Jorgenson writes. According to Jorgenson, nostalgia is exaggerated. “We should not go back to an era when we were less dependent on technology because there is no such era anymore,” he says. Our reality has always been mediated, generalized, and documented, and there is never access to some immediate purity. “We should not ask if social photography is good, but we should ask how it can be good.”
  • “Trains with speed and glass windows make nature a transient and predictable concept,” writes Jگrgenson, quoting German author Wolfgang Schiolbusch on the Impact of the Railway on Human Perception. “You look out of the train window, and the natural scenery passes in front of your eyes like a movie.” As most life is displayed through the camera screen, does this happen again with a simple omission, when all those disturbances of lived experience (experiences and choices of a certain person) have become visible? How wonderful and amazing it would be if we could see the painful moments of the past, the ones we think about deeply, dead and mummified. The problem is that photos, videos, or tweets do not record the most difficult memories. Screens are like memories, avoidance, or distraction. They turn away from the reflection of suffering. We rarely see children crying on Instagram. Recently, a friend whose mother had digitally copied all their family movies talked about one of those birthday parties at the skating rink. He remembered from that birthday party that the skates on the track were all roller skates, and he used to skate with rollerblades. So her mother had to rush to the gym to buy her a roller skate. It turned out later that none of these events record in that video, and the only thing that showed was a victory celebration and rejoicing around the skating rink. He remembered from that birthday party that the skates on the track were all roller skates, and he used to skate with rollerblades. So her mother had to rush to the gym to buy her a roller skate. It turned out later that none of these events record in that video, and the only thing that showed was a victory celebration and rejoicing around the skating rink. He remembered from that birthday party that the skates on the track were all roller skates, and he used to skate with rollerblades. So her mother had to rush to the gym to buy her a roller skate. It turned out later that none of these events record in that video, and the only thing that showed a victory celebration and rejoicing around the skating rink.