Inquiry Project: Part ARebecca Teich

Question: What are the implications and effects of the relationship between social media (Web 2.0) and social issues?

Social media, a fundamental crux of the recently-created Web 2.0, has

inundated a large chunk of the globe, drastically altered the way we understand

interaction, communication, and connection, and has arguably even altered the way

we are able to understand our own presence and sense of self through the constant

choices we make concerning what our audience perceives from us. Yet beyond this,

social media has become a platform for the dissemination of news, current events,

opinions, and more with which individuals chose to engage with social issues of the

time in front of a known audience or to share articles and information with that

audience. Oftentimes this serves as an extremely beneficial way for those that

otherwise would not have a voice to contribute to the broader conversation and to

self-educate. However, the presenting of opinions and the open sharing of

knowledge and beliefs manifests has, in my mind, evolved into a beast that is a far

cry from a platform of open discourse and the distributing of knowledge that many

at times claim it to be. From hash-tag activism of various twitter campaigns to he

‘slacktivism’ of changing one’s profile picture to suit the liberal ideology of their

social sphere without research into the campaign they’re endorsing to sharing

articles without concern for the validity of the facts within it, it comes to light that

social media has begun to transform social issues and stances into a commodity—

cultural capital to be exchanged and collected for social gain. In order to better

understand the implications of this phenomena I would like to look at texts that

tackle the idea of cultural commodification, cultural capital, and the culture

industry, particularly through the lens of various critical theory texts such as The

Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord and The Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max

Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. In addition I will look at more contemporary

analyses and applications of the dialectical and theoretic framework these thinkers

provide. I also would also like to refer to the anthology Signs of Life In The USA. I

believe this will give me a degree of specificity in how to approach the implications I

want to explore, through the lens of a Marxist critique with an addition of semiotic

analysis. From here, I would like to do a case study of either one or a few different

examples of transforming social issues into cultural capital through social media

source and apply the framework of thought explored in the theoretical texts to the

example in order to gain greater insight into the societal implications of this

phenomena in order to seek an answer to my framing question.