When one considers the definition of news as the act of
publicizing private affairs, the important role of the ever-expanding world of
social media in current social affairs becomes evident.
As an upper-middle class immigrant living in the United
States, I belong to the class of society called the bourgeoisie. I can afford
to go to school, I can afford my own place, I will soon have an undergraduate
degree, and every now and then I can afford to spend money on the little
pleasures of life like a movie, or a fancy dinner, or maybe sometimes even a
weekend getaway to Beacon, upstate New York.
All of these similarities between such members of the
bourgeoisie allow authoritative organizations such as banks and political
parties to address us as a whole. We are homogenized through our social and
economic statuses. Yet what happens when we try to form a collective opinion?
This is where social media has had most of its effect. With
a virtually endless array of publicity tools at our disposal (Facebook,
Twitter, Tumblr, Blogger, Wordpress just to name a few), it has become far
easier to uphold an opinion even of just a few people subscribe to it. There is
no filter, there is no fact checking, and everyone can publish information
quickly and generally for free online. News is slowly transforming from public
to personal opinions. To form a public opinion means to speak through a unified
voice — one that finds common points in individual opinions. Yet today it is
perhaps most difficult to do this.
And this is one of the major issues of our age: the fact
that we can be addressed as a whole, yet we can only retort individually.
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