Update our life status online, or live for online updating?
Thursday, October 1, 2009 by Anonymous
Want to update your Facebook status, your Twitter, and your blogs but can't come up with anything interesting or witty to say? We are encouraged to draw inspiration from our offline everyday life. We are facilitated and motivated to chronicles every trivial details of our daily life through self-created media. We are offered a self-reflexive’ space to make sense of our life, given that we need to reflect on what we have done everyday and whether it is ‘worth’ sharing online. By written down our everyday experience, we are literally giving shape and meaning to the stage of our life at that point. We learn our lesson when we write in our blogs about a terrible mistake we have today. We realize we should stop parting when we post crazy night out photos and update our facebook status to ‘wasted and being behind for school works’. At this sense, the self-reflexive text we post online is something more than the perceived ‘content trivialization’ in the internet superhighway
But what if one finds he or she has nothing to report and at the same time being envious with their online contact who is showing off their ‘pleasant and eventful’ weekend in their every possible self-published media? The ‘update’ function in many of these online media implicitly works similar to common greeting such as ‘How’s your day?’ and ‘How’s your weekend?’ in our daily social encounters. It somewhat brings pressure to us to have eventful lives to report on and to impress other. From this perspective, does it mean that these self-published media have stamped our life with a peculiar pattern? It might not bring dramatic life-changing consequences to every online user. But for some, it encourages us to organize a busy, efficient day and engage ourselves in those events in a more ‘detailed’ way ( such as taking photos or even collecting relevant information brochure) that we know it will help us generate an interesting online narrative.
When we log into Facebook or other online application, the first page to come up is usually news feeds that only show up those online users who just update their status or blogpost. That means we have to update frequently to be a good online citizen whose regular contribution will be recognized by the system. In this sense, these online application, not as the only force, create expectation for individual to live fast and busy.
But what if one finds he or she has nothing to report and at the same time being envious with their online contact who is showing off their ‘pleasant and eventful’ weekend in their every possible self-published media? The ‘update’ function in many of these online media implicitly works similar to common greeting such as ‘How’s your day?’ and ‘How’s your weekend?’ in our daily social encounters. It somewhat brings pressure to us to have eventful lives to report on and to impress other. From this perspective, does it mean that these self-published media have stamped our life with a peculiar pattern? It might not bring dramatic life-changing consequences to every online user. But for some, it encourages us to organize a busy, efficient day and engage ourselves in those events in a more ‘detailed’ way ( such as taking photos or even collecting relevant information brochure) that we know it will help us generate an interesting online narrative.
When we log into Facebook or other online application, the first page to come up is usually news feeds that only show up those online users who just update their status or blogpost. That means we have to update frequently to be a good online citizen whose regular contribution will be recognized by the system. In this sense, these online application, not as the only force, create expectation for individual to live fast and busy.