Social Media Gives Us All An Audience, Or Does It?

One element of social media is its ability to communicate information instantaneously creating unprecedented global awareness. When dealing with foreign uprisings or domestic protests this immediacy is priceless, but as mentioned in this NYTimes.com piece, that accelerated pace when applied to a celebrity death or something like “Linsanity” can cause things to flame out pretty fast. It is definitely worth exploring a bit of the psychology behind peoples motivations for using social media–particularly as a mouth piece to share commentary on the death of a celebrity or the exceptional performance of an athlete. As stated in the NYTimes.com piece, “Facebook and Twitter Posts on Whitney Houston Overran Sites Early On,”

This compulsion to weigh in on a news event, even one with only a tangential relationship to one’s own life, is endemic among people who use social media, according to Jonathan Taplin, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California who has studied sentiment on Twitter.

I find our obsession with social media paralleling Warhol’s famous excerpt, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”  Over the past decade the idea of average people having a platform to share their views was absurd and might only be achieved by going on a low-brow reality show intent on exploiting their story. With social media platforms anyone can have a voice and feel important, even if their perception of who’s actually paying attention is likely a little off.

Facebook and Twitter Posts on Whitney Houston Overran Sites Early On – NYTimes.com.