SOCIAL MEDIA MAKES ME SICK, BUT I STILL DO IT

Nardwuar interviews Lil B 

Recently I have come to conclusion that I feel like a junkie when I am using social media. I want more, I need to use it regularly. I get satisfaction from it, but it does not last long. I notice that a lot of people are "on" it and don't question it enough. It feels like a river, once you're in the water it is hard to go against the flow. Further on I will be raising some questions, bringing up some comparisons and sharing some conclusions.

You always need to scroll it through to the place you left before. You just can’t risk it, what will happen if you will miss something that you might have liked? Internet is so big, there probably will not be a second lucky time for you to spot that one perfect photo. You can’t get lucky twice. The photo you just liked is special. Doesn’t matter that you will not look at it again. Now it is there. It’s a part of your special collection and you feel satisfied.

What is this void that I am trying to fill? Why do I feel like it is important to be updated all the time? Do others feel that they want to “delete themselves” from everywhere as well? And why do I feel this satisfaction from being online?

From the moment when almost everyone had access to the internet the life that we knew before was gone. Nowadays, we all have all the necessary tools to create, whether it is uploading a video in Youtube or writing a comment under a post in Facebook. Each of us have become our own publicity machine. We upload images, we add descriptions, we create stories, we create our own dream self for people to see. It is just a click away.

Social media gives you the feeling of power, you can pretty easily create, reorder, collect, organise, find, explore, travel, so on.
Also it allows, or more accurately, it insists that you create a personality. It is all about expressing oneself, being unique, having a voice, even better - having an opinion. Social media goes hand in hand with that. Customize this, choose this, import that and so on. We have a frame in which we have a freedom. We tend to do everything how we want, how we think we should. Today we can really get to know what humans are like in just a second. More content, more freedom, less time, less long-term.

When it comes to Instagram it gets interesting. I find it easy to analyze, because of the limited options. Section of your posts, timeline to see posts of people you follow, explore section to see posts of people you don't follow, section of notifications about likes that you received & activity section of people you follow.
The idea about Instagram is not completely new in itself. It is a summary, improvement and addition of all the old things. Publicity, photography, self expression.
A lot of people don't look anymore what others have likes. They don't even look at posts that were liked by themselves. If we some accounts, the count of the likes on their post can tell us if it is a trend or not, how much people was moved by the photo, how much people want to be the person in the photo or have the same life.

This movement, this idea behind the photo seemed binding, relatable to 584,371 accounts (people, companies).

This movement, this idea behind the photo seemed binding, relatable to 30,186 accounts.

This movement, this idea behind the photo seemed binding, relatable to 137,458 accounts.

This movement, this idea behind the photo seemed binding, relatable to 4,251 accounts.

This movement, this idea behind the photo seemed binding, relatable to 240,193 accounts.

When we like the photos of close persons such as friends or relatives, we are supporting them, agreeing to them, we are delightful about them.

If we don't look or use our special collection of liked posts, why do we keep upgrading it? Is it just a momentary reminder that we are, that we relate? Is it a manifestation of our position?

If we keep being active for ourselves, keeping in mind that nobody really pay attention to what we are thinking, doing, is there a reason to continue? If a photo is posted on Instagram and no one noticed it, does it make a difference?
Supporting. I believe that this worth the attention. I took part. I am worth it. I am significant. Does having your own values, opinion define you or expressing it define you? I pressed “like”, therefore I am. We create evidences of our existence by being on social sites. As Roland Barthes says in his book Camera Lucida: “Photography authenticates the existence of a certain being.”
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Some safety regulations for using Instagram:
Be careful with the count of people you follow.You don’t want to be stuck on your phone 24/7. Of course there has been some days like that, but you have some other things to do too.

If you stalk someone, never like an old photo, because you don’t want them to know that you are more interested in them as you like them to think.

Try not to get depressed if you don’t have a lot of likes on your last amazing, super cool, creative, unique photo.
You know that amount of likes doesn’t mean anything, especially the fact that the boring person from school who is not even funny or smart, there is really nothing interesting about her, got twice as much likes on one photo than you, you don’t care about that at all, because Instagram is a joke actually (50/50 sarcasm).
Don't press “like” to all the memes you find funny.Everyone is shitposting (all their content consists of memes). You think it makes them look unprofessional, the way that all their life is actually one big joke. You don't want others to think about you that. “Like” only really funny jokes, that goes along with the impression you want to make about yourself. Doesn't matter that the joke about drinking was really funny, you don't want others to know that you can relate to it. You joke with your friends about dumb stuff, not in the public space a.k.a. the internet. 
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Deleting social media apps from your phone for a certain time and watching “The Ways of Seeing” by John Berger is a good therapy.

MY SOCIAL MEDIA HISTORY LESSON

First time I sat down by the computer and actually did something with it was in 2001 when I was 5 years old at my mother's work. I played a game called “Lines'98”. As time passed by my interests changed – not only games interested me from now on. In 2004 when I was 8 we already had a computer at home so when my cousin came over and showed me a social internet platform called one.lv. Back then it was the most popular site for russian speakers in Latvia to socialise and it was also my first experience with creating social identity. The fact that I did not speak any russian makes it all seem quite absurd today, but there were also some Latvians registered.

The same year Latvians came up with their own social site called draugiem.lv so I registered there and started to use it regularly.

From 2011 till now I am a registered user of Twitter.

I guess somewhere from 2011 till 2013 I used Tumblr as well.

In 2013 as I like to say I “deleted myself” (instead of “deleted my profile” since social media plays such a big role in our life today, of course if we let it) from draugiem.lv and switched only to Facebook. I'm still using it.

From 2013 till now I am a registered user of Instagram.

Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are my main social media platforms that I use today.

Main reasons:

Facebook for me is to get in touch, network, get new information from my groups of interest.

Instagram to see how my friends are doing, get inspired from visual material.

Twitter to get satisfaction from smart, genius, laconic thoughts about any subject.

Poorly Drawn Lines

SITUATION "XXXTENTACION" FROM MY POINT OF VIEW

Lately I have been positively surprised about how much of new albums and music in general has been released in a month or so. When I listen to a good, new (new to me not necessarily it needs to be on the freshest sounds top 20 list) song I can feel energy and satisfaction running through my whole body, that is why I take it seriously and usually spend a lot of time digging through Spotify, Soundcloud, Youtube and the internet in general.

Since there is a lot of albums that I need to listen to, this time I wrote them down in a list. Album “17” by only 19 years old american rapper XXXTentacion was one of them. Album was released on 25th of August, 2017. It has 11 songs on it.

Album Artwork

I listened to it on Spotify and added some songs that I liked to my playlist so they don't get lost. If the song seem interesting to me I almost always look up for the lyrics in genius.com and read them to myself as the song is playing in the background to get a better insight of the song's message.

XXXTentacion

After that I looked up XXXTentacion since I did not know much about him. The first thing that I found was an article in XXL magazines website (XXL is an American hip hop magazine) that said “New Details Emerge in XXXTentacion’s Domestic Battery Case”. It was about XXXTentacion being seued for abusing (hitting, threatening) his ex-girlfriend. You can read excerpts from the alleged victim's testimony in the article here. After reading the article I started questioning if I still want to listen to his music.

Later that day in one post's comment section in Facebook about good music to listen to one guy wrote “XXXTentacion” to which he got a reply – see the screenshots below:

That made me get again interested in this topic, because I still wasn't sure if I wanted to listen to his music, support him or not. So I looked up in google “XXXTentacion fighting” and got this. From the video you can tell that XXXTentacion is fighting someone. In my opinion it is always very important to be critical and to try to raise and answer some questions, for example, in this case – Why the fight is happening in the first place?; Why is nobody getting involved or stopping the fight?; Why are everyone filming it?; Are the fight out of hate?; How did it started and ended?; etc. I couldn't answer to all of those questions, that's why I didn't jump to any conclusions. Nothing in the world is black and white.

The next day I talked to my friends about this and asked their opinion about this situation – music is good, reputation is bad and if I like the music should I take unsure information into my account or should I not, keeping in mind that every time I play his song I am supporting him (artists get money from Spotify).

After the conversation I came to some conclusions about this situation:

1. Music to me don't have a race, country, gender, sexuality and so on.
2. Bad reputation is also a good commercial.
3. It is very important to today artists to create not only music, but also appealing self-image to their main auditory and it is easy to do so since everyone can follow artist's every move on social media.
4. Artist's created self-image should not be taken as the truth about the artist's personality.
5. People usually mix created self-image and the person's real personality and after that jump to conclusions, get disappointed.
6. Good music is good music and I am supporting the music not the actions. In a way of course the money from my pocket is putting the bread in artist's mouth, but it is not possible to know everything, every artist's action and thought about anything.
7. I am not the center of the world and it is okay to disagree with someone, have different beliefs etc. For example, XXXTentacion is fighting in the video, but I do not support fighting. It would be stupid, in my opinion, to judge music or art from that point of view.

In the end of the day, I think everyone just wants to be a better person. You can use your values scale to make your life better for yourself, but it is disrespectful to expect that others have the same values scale or will be willing to always agree to yours no matter how logical your facts are.

Later that day, my friend sent me a video “If You Hate XXXTentacion Watch This Video”. It is a compilation of all the good XXXTentacion's actions. You can make everything look how you want it to look. In reality nothing is just black and white.

In this case I don't think that facts from the internet or other medium can be fully trusted, because through the history everyone has always tried to manipulate and control people. But a lot of topics sure are worth a discussion. Eventually, you will need to choose what to trust or not to trust and why anyways.