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.