"People engage in [social media], I think, for affirmation."
No truer words have ever been spoken. I believe that the basis for the popularity of social media lies in it's ability to harness and make public people's opinions of you. Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, they all have a "comment" feature which allows other users to post what they thought about any particular comment, picture or witty Tweet. I honestly believe that without this features, social media would be far less popular (at least with the younger generations).
When I was in middle school, Myspace was super popular. People would upload pictures of themselves, and then make everyone know about it via a "status update". In most places, people were often ASKED to comment about the picture. Although I didn't know it at the time, it was probably the most brutal display of shallow narcissism that I have ever experienced. Although as we have aged, the begging for attention has become more opaque, it is still present. Whenever people post a funny status on facebook or twitter, really what they are looking for is people to comment on it in order to affirm their own hilarity. Same goes for people who take pictures of themselves (or of artsy BS) and then upload it; they hope that people will post positive comments and affirm their own beauty/artistic creativity.
DailyBooth.com (which I just went on) is an even more blatant example of this techno-narcissim. It doesn't even ask people to input any data besides a picture. That's all the website is: uploading pictures of yourself.
What the hell!
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