A Vast Digital Society

1787 Words8 Pages
Chasia Wong
Professor Suman
Communications 10
1 September 2015
Closeness in a Vast Digital Society As social beings, humans rely on one another to thrive not only physically but also socially and emotionally. Early humans depended on people within their families or societies to nurture and protect them, as well as to share knowledge and communicate ideas. The significance of communication to human livelihood stems from primary needs for validation, acceptance, and approval; as individual entities, it is difficult to live in isolation, physically or mentally, because we instinctually define the nature of our existences in relation to the people around us and to the way they affirm, reject, or ignore us. Today, as technology connects the
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By abstaining from Facebook for a week, I discovered the influence of my subconscious intentions for using mass social media through acknowledging my previously unevaluated lack of and desire for strong interpersonal intimacy, while struggling through the impracticality of long-term abstinence from such means of communication in a modern society. Abstinence from Facebook and a resulting period of meaningful introspection led me to realize the corrupted foundations of my digital identity, one built upon a deep-rooted fear of being unseen. During my abstinence, every impulse to post on someone else’s or my own wall forced me to evaluate my motivations; perhaps I wanted to appear funny to whomever read my post or to seem artistic and insightful through some painstakingly edited, thoughtfully captioned photo. Even deeper than this motivation is the conception that the social plane has a few broad, set standards, but it is largely dictated by individuals’ relative social standings; in other words, there is a factor of superiority and inferiority, wherein the former can be evident in the number of likes, comments, tags, friends, and notifications—all of which, in this context, only have significance when compared to that of others. My problem then was not an addiction to social media or uncontrolled nosiness but rather a skewed perception of intrinsic self-worth that manifested itself in the meticulous crafting of an essentially false digital identity.
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