Communication of the 21st Century

        Social networks control our lives in many ways. The way we communicate on these sites can dictate our everyday life and responses. Take for instance, when going for a job, the employer can simply look you up on Facebook or Twitter and find out what kind of person you are, or who you have portrayed to be before even calling you up for an interview. If you have said anything negative about the company or the industry, you are trying to get a job with or are currently employed by, bye-bye employment. We no longer need to write letters and wait a week to receive the mail, it is a click of a button and instantly you can talk to a loved one from a different city. Communication has changed forever with the rise of social media, are we authentically ourselves or do we become someone the virtual society wants us to be?

Social media changing the way we communicate. Willis, A. (2017)

      McNiell (2012) argues that social networks challenge the older notion of the humanist which is self as being singular making people more of a posthuman. Post humanism as stated by Kuttainen (2017) challenges the boundaries between human and nonhuman.  Although unlike Facebook, Flixster has a more Humanistic approach to the social network, communication is limited between individuals. We therefore, as the user are autonomous and self -determining and are only able to leave a review on a movie title. There is no comment section on someone’s review and there is no other way of communication between people. We can almost say that the narratives in this network are individual, the Flixster community does not fully determine who we are and our feelings towards different movies. We are able to exercise our own agency.

On the contrary, how much are we exercising our own agencies? By reading the reviews of other critics, do we in a sense take on their opinion of a movie and start to judge it the way the critics see it? This can potentially make this social network somewhat achieve the posthuman approach by encompassing the identity of the different critics. Moreover, when entering the site, depending on the posts made and the scores given for movies, the higher the movies rank on a category list. This can determine what movies are watched and what movies are completely missed. A movie that I may really enjoy could be at the bottom of the categories, because the Flixster society has communicated with the network pointing out that it was not good enough to reach a higher score.

In a nutshell, communication between people has changed dramatically, instead of heading to the movie store and hiring a movie without knowing much about it, we can go onto sites like Flixster, read reviews and determine whether we think it’s a movie worth watching. Gone are the days of the constant “I lost 2 hours of my life that I can never get back”, because of a poor movie choice.

By Cassandra Schwerin

Reference List

Kuttainen, V. (2017). BA1002: Our space: Networks, narratives and the making of place, lecture week 6: Networked Narratives. [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from http://learnjcu.edu.au

McNeill, L. (2012). There Is No “I” in Network: Social Networking Sites and Posthuman Auto/Biography. Project Muse, 35(1), 65-82. Retrieved from http://learnjcu.edu.au

Zurich Insurance Group. (2012, December 6). See how social media is changing the way we communicate [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wncZPE7NMVI

Willis, A. (2017). 6 Ways Social Media Change the Way We Communicate. Retrieved from http://circaedu.com/hemj/how-social-media-changed-the-way-we-communicate/