Are you asserting your status?
Status updates are all the rage these days. The rise of social networking has meant that documenting our lives is no longer kept to the confines of our private diaries. Search for a topic on Twitter and every few seconds your chosen subject will be updated with new “tweets”. Refresh your news feed and find a constant stream of information regarding what your “friends” are doing. Just why do we bother asserting our status, and what are they really revealing?
This one got me. X - I won’t mention names - “is in the bath and sweating like crazy, think the water might be too hot, ventilation would be good.” One has to wonder whether anybody really cares that said person is in the bath, on the bus, making dinner – you get the idea. The mundane details of a person’s life seem irrelevant especially if it is someone we vaguely remember from school.
Despite this, recent trends show a move away from the routine, everyday status. We cannot underestimate the power of the status and as social networking develops further we are already starting to see it take a more professional angle with many real marketing opportunities opening up. Marketers now “know” what their target audience wants, needs, desires (and what they get up to) so a product can be tailored more efficiently and accurately.
It follows that businesses, celebrities and politicians are finding new ways to engage with their audiences. The press however can’t make up their minds and it seems the status update forms part of the love-hate relationship the media has with social networking. The crux of the matter is – love it or hate it, we’re all participating in one way or another.
And so, on a more personal everyday level, people are using social networking to assert their status in society. Western individualism is taken to a new level through this means of self-promotion. People can boast about their achievements via their status and when you’re branding yourself you can present that self in whatever form you desire. The voyeuristic side to our nature enables this to happen – we want a glimpse into people’s worlds to see how they compare to our own. Thus, statuses put a setting to our own life movies that we’re directing according to how we feel at a particular time.
Yet, we aren’t the lone star of our movie since we’re in direct competition with everyone else’s at the same time. Facebook acts as the ultimate form of peer pressure and with children getting younger and younger when they start their online identity building, this has worrying implications for their future – a future where real life interaction may take a back seat to the contrived “reality” they are creating.
People have lost jobs from their statuses. They’ve been beaten up, robbed and their relationships have broken up. They are now beginning to think of themselves in the third person. Yet they can connect on a global scale, maintain relationships with family and friends abroad and find out what people they know and genuinely care about are up to. The cynical side of me needs to maintain that element of mystery. The communicative side cries out for me to embrace the status and be carried along on the crest of this revolutionary wave. I just wonder though... Would I not rather get out there and experience things first hand than live my life through everyone else?