South Park

We now live in a world where social media has changed the way we interact with the world around us. At a young age we are programed to worry about how strangers view our lives and our decisions. People are worried about how many likes they get and social acceptance. Though these outlets individuals build their social foundations that will later become the building blocks of their careers. People tend to fall short excepting criticism, communication skills, and analyzing information.

Since the Bulletin Board System there has been hundreds, and counting, of social networks created: most notably Twitter, Facebook, Kik, Snapchat, and Instagram. Today there are just over 3 billion active Internet users (45% of the world’s internet users), 2.1 billion of those people have social media accounts (Jeffbullas.com). People use social media for many numerous reasons. Most use social media to stay close to relatives and maintain social ties. Some of people’s most essential daily needs are accounted for by social media: whether it be interacting with friends or coworkers, following politics, or following the latest fashion trend set by the Kardashian

In the last ten to fifteen years accompanying the dawn of social media, means of communication among friends and strangers have been easier than ever. Since its creation in 2004, Facebook has grown into the largest social media site on the Internet with 30 million users and counting. The ability to catch up with former high school friends who are now across the country or see how an aunt in Pittsburgh has been doing since the birth of her son are now as simple as the click of a mouse. However, the amount of “friends” acquired on social media may not be an accurate reflection of how many close relationships one truly shares. In an article from Bigthink.com titled “Do You Have Too Many Facebook Friends?”, Steven Mazie gathers research from Pew Research Center about statistics surrounding Facebook

Social Media began affecting our communication and relationships as early as 1969 when the first internet service provider become available to U.S. universities. In 2002, Friendster, the first social media website available to the U.S. was created and gained over 3 million members in just over 3 months. One year later, MySpace launched. In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg, a 24-year-old Harvard student, created Facebook, an online social networking service. This service was originally a way for students to interact. Today it is the world’s largest social networking service and allows over a billion users to connect though posting photos, sharing links, and comments which all appear on a “News

From Clive Thompson’s article we can see how social media can completely change people, as they want to be liked by everyone. It is because we as people tend to care about what other people think of us. We want our Face book friends to like our pictures so you post pictures that wouldn’t describe yourself, like for example shy people posting “sexy selfies”. We tend to do that in order to get accepted by social media friends. “What’s really funny is that before this ‘social media’ stuff, I always said that I’m not the type of person who had a ton of friends” (Thompson-1).

In their own way, everyone in South Park becomes obsessed with Facebook. Even Stan, who despite wanting limited involvement finds himself with 845,823 friends, and a rogue profile that literally sucks him into his computer, and challenges him to a Tron/Yahtzee showdown for his continued existence in the real world. Another high point of mockery that the episode makes fun of is exposing the superficiality of people's profiles and status messages. Someone can put a quote up about love, get a couple likes on it, and all of a sudden they’re Shakespeare. A social networking hierarchy has erupted as people become more popular and companies start to market over

For years and years, the internet has progressed so much. So much that communication and our lifestyles have reached a whole new level. One of the many revolutionary inventions is called social networking sites or social media. Social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and many more, are where people gather on the internet, create a personalized profile about themselves, and interact with other people around the world. Social media can help contact friends, family, and other people long distance. However, our priorities have completely changed to “life isn’t measured by the number of breaths you take, but by how many likes you get on Instagram.” With social media, people seem to lose touch from reality. This whole “me, me , me”

It has come to the point with social media, that humans are not actually making friends to be close buddie, but to have a bunch of them so much that it has come to the fact that it is like they are “collecting” friends for the fun of it. This means that instead of connecting with each other and making new companions from all over the world, it is now such as a game to see who can collect or receive the most friends, which is making connecting as best friends harder to do these days and eventually associates will become so disconnected that they stop being peers. Also instead of using the word friends as a noun, like it should be used, it is now being used as a verb, thanks to many different social media platforms. Such as adding a friend on Facebook. This shows that using the word friend is not as meaningful because it is now used as a verb. An action that people can do, such as friend someone. It is not their actual friend, yet someone they have just added to a collection of other people, showing that human beings as a race are becoming increasingly more disconnected from each other at are not relating or socializing in a public area. Being called a friend is not as special as it use to be before technology companies made more

In the last few years, the television show South Park has grown in popularity becoming one of the most widely known series in the United States. The popularity of this show can be credited to its shock and black humor, which usually includes vulgar language and obscene illustrations. South Park is about to start its 17 season, and fans are anxious for the new season of this controversial show to start. One of the reasons that South Park is such a phenomena is the crude content often used, which most fans love, and many others criticize.

The term friend becomes a very stretched out thing because a lot of the people who you are friends with on social media you don’t talk to or associate with on a regular basis. His article also explains how oversharing can turn people into attention seekers. They want people to notice them but no one needs to know what each other are doing all of the time. When people do share more than they should there's a lack of privacy. Parrack also mentions how social media limits the characters allowed in posts causing people to become distracted when they have to read more than what they are used to. They also tend to become distracted and waste time by the other things the internet and social media offer like

We’ve all been trained to feel the need to let everyone know what we are doing all the time and make sure that we don’t look like we are boring people who don’t have anything to do with our lives. I think to be perfectly honest there has only been a couple times where I have been happy that someone posted something on their Snapchat story, but most of the time I just skip through them all because I hate to seeing the hundreds of stories. Going back to the concept of friends on social media if you think about it for long enough you start to realize that it is also a really weird concept, because I know that there’s plenty of people who I know went to Mexico or the Bahamas for March break because they posted something about it, but if I said hello to them in the hallway they would look at me like I was an alien who just came from another planet. There’s also all the unwritten rules of social media like not liking photos unless it was posted in the last 24 hour range and even after it’s been up for more than 15 hours it’s kind of risky, but if we are all being honest we have all been there when we are 138 weeks deep on someones Instagram praying that we won’t accidentally like

Instead of having people worrying about how many friends they have on Facebook or how many followers they have on twitter they need to worry about themselves. Having an internet addiction is not a good thing to have. It can cause you to lose your friends and family because you are so focused on your online life that it is your escape from reality. The problem is with the internet is that we can hide behind it and we don’t have to be our true selves. We can make up someone who were not and that is perfectly ok because you are on the internet. We need to have people remember that it is better to interact with your friends and family. Give the

The difference between the intended meaning of media texts and what the audience actually perceives can be shockingly different. Producers of media can do everything possible to force audiences to experience their work in the way they want them to, but in the end they still take away many different meanings even within the same audience. Stuart Hall outlines this in his encoding and decoding model. One of the most apparent examples of this is the television show South Park. The television show South Park is a media text with the producers’ preferred meaning of being decoded as joke or as being satire, but many audience members take an oppositional stance of taking it seriously. This is clear from the examples of controversy when South Park aired episodes focused on Scientology, red-headed people, and Islam. Through these examples it is demonstrated that the producers of media have less power compared to the audience in determining the meaning of media.

It is no secret that social media has taken over a lot of our time, and perception on society. It influences our day to day lives without us really knowing. Social media usually portrays one’s life to be perfect, or it makes us feel like one’s life needs to be perfect. For this reason being, social media can be a bad thing. In "The Social Networks" by Neal Gabler, he explains how media has taken away the meaning of friendship or anything 'real'. In the long run, social media makes things seem better than they actually are, it gives us unrealistic expectations for our friend and family interactions, which kills the chance of having actual friendships because our expectations are so high. So, here are the reasons elaborated on why social media

Facebook, a social networking website, has changed the way people communicate with each other. A social networking website is an online platform that allows users to create a public profile and interact with other users on the website. Facebook has even changed our most personal and private conversations and how they are conducted around the world. Since the internet’s birth in 1983, this trend of online communication has been growing. Created in 2004, now registered with more than one billion participants, Facebook’s user numbers surpass even the top four social networking websites combined. According to Wikipedia statistics, Instagram has 300 million registered users, LinkedIn has 200 million users, Classmates.com has 50 million users, and Flickr has 32 million registered users. To be further convinced of the claim that Facebook indeed changes the way we communicate, you would only need to create your own Facebook account and start participating in their social networking experience. Technology and internet usage is fused into every aspect of our society including the style of communication. The launch of Facebook in 2006 also enabled other devices such as touch phones, interactive tablets, and even advanced cars with their own networking capabilities starting in 2007. Facebook is a multibillion-dollar company and is highly recognized for connecting more people than other networks. Facebook’s long-term success can be attributed to providing entertainment, world news, and