R4: Quotations

Users have the opportunity to portray, experience, and express unexplored aspects of the self (Turkle, 1997).

Postmodernism: A definition of what is right or correct, a reality deemed true by the current society. It is a time period, a movement, and many other concepts which are decided by whomever chooses to do so.

Social media is a new concept in regards to how long media has been around. Postmodernism is valuable for understanding social media in the sense that it allows people to create their own realities. On social media, you can become whoever you want; you can be yourself and be honest in your posts, you can be yourself but lie about things in your posts, or you can present yourself as a whole other person entirely. In Turkle's passage, one user says "It is a complete escape... on IRC, I'm very popular. I have three handles... So maybe I can only relax if I see life as another IRC handle" (Turkle 179).

On social media, things are validated and supported by the amount of likes, retweets, or shares that they get. If someone's post has 100,000 likes and 560 shares, this post would appear to be more publicly supported than one that has 100 likes and 4 shares. This is a way that society deems what is "true." When scrolling through my Facebook, if I see an article about how teenagers are spending too much time on their phones that has 570,000 likes, my opinion is going to be swayed to think "wow, if this many people like this article, they must agree with it, so there must be some sort of truth behind it," even if beforehand, my opinion did not exactly align with them.

It's as if as if things were all in quotations. They can be "true" in the sense that they are actually true to one audience, but not to another. To the user, that is their "reality", that is the "truth"- although it may not be the case to everyone else. On the Internet, people can be whatever, or whoever they want to be. The world is open to experimentation. Postmodernism helps bring out the unconventional side of that for people to explore.

Cited
Turkle, Sherry, “Aspects of the Self” Chapter 7. Life on the Screen, Simon and Schuster, New York, NY, 1997