This semester in BCM 206 (Future Networks) we’ve been talking about many topics such as Hacktivism, Cryptocurrencies and many other topics but today I’m going to talk about something I am heavily involved in which is Social Media.
I currently work as a social media manager and channel editor for a YouTuber with over 800k subscribers and before then been freelancing for other creators long before then and I have learnt a lot in the sphere. The two major things that make the social media world go round and keep it longevity are memes and creators creating content for the social media space.
What I’ve learnt from being in the social media space is that being a “social media star” is incredibly brutal. There’s a constant environment that to be the best you must adapt and constantly be aware of your statistics and when you see those numbers go down, your brain and emotions react in a similar way that really impacts your perception on your self-worth. The stress of trying to keep numbers up and interact with so many people at once is inhuman and really is a phenomenon that will take a while to obtain a true understanding about.
On a lighter note, like I stated I’ve learnt a lot in the social media sphere and the constant flow of memes and trends forever rotating through all these different social networks is insane, it seems like I wake up and there is a new meme or trend everyone is posting about. TikTok is a huge part of this, where the whole platform seems to follow a trend that they find entertaining and it’s the big thing for about a week until the next big thing comes along. A great example is people putting certain terms in the Google trends and seeing weird terms being “used” in olden times (check gif for reference).
But as harmless as this can seem, some bad can come from it…
Companies and Political parties have a tendency to use these trends and memes to their advantage to try pull the upper hand on their opponents and try to gain the trust from other people on the platform because in some people’s minds fi they see a certain party involving themselves in a trend they will get some “props” from people on that social media and in the long run build up their social media standing and in turn further increasing their chance es of pushing their agendas.
Back in late 2016 something along those lines happened. The U.S. election was coming up and a politically incorrect themed 4chan forum began to spark up talk about their concern with Hillary Clinton’s relationship with Russia and in retaliation to that they devised a strategy to begin a hashtag and create “memes” intended to trick people voting into thinking that Clinton had intentions of drafting women for a war with Russia. Thankfully people caught on and weren’t buying into the ads, but the damage was done, and it became the headlines of many news outlets for a crucial time in the U.S election. I don’t personally know how much it affected the Hillary campaign but in the end her name and politics were dragged by a forum online because they decided, “that’s something we could do”.
We can see here that with the use of memes and a toxic behaviour behind these actions can possibly cause an effect to a nation, with the right amount of people and the use of media and memes there are possibilities to begin controversies that impact real lives and even create certain revolutions in extreme cases but you can also look at it from the other side where without memes internet culture would most likely subside and online content wouldn’t be as common as it is today. Memes truly have an important role in the online sphere and we would’ve never know until we dug deep and really looked at what was possible
Resources Used:
#DraftOurDaughters: https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/8290/7202
James Mackay - Portfolio 