"TWITTER IS BASICALLY A MUTUAL APPROVAL MACHINE"

Tonight while resting and watching TED talks I stumbled upon a talk "How one tweet can ruin your life" by Jon Ronson. Talk is about one sarcastic joke in Twitter by a women and how it turned her life upside down. I suggest you to really watch it. If only over your dead body then at least read the quotes from the talk below. 

"Twitter is basically a mutual approval machine. We surround ourselves with people who feel the same way we do, and we approve each-other, and that's a really good feeling. And if somebody gets in a way we screen them out. And do you know what that's the opposite of? It's the opposite of democracy." 

"Maybe there's two types of people in the world: those people who favour humans over ideology, and those people who favour ideology over humans. I favour humans over ideology, but right now the ideologues are winning, and they're creating a stage for constant artificial high dramas where everybody's either a magnificent hero or a sickening villain, even though we know that's not true about our fellow humans. What's true is that we are clever and stupid; what's true is that we are grey areas. The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people, but now we are creating a surveillance society, where the smartest way to survive is to go back being voiceless. Let's not do that."

"My friend Adam Curtis says that maybe the internet is like a John Carpenter movie from the 1980s, when eventually everyone will start screaming at each other and shooting each other, and then eventually everybody would flee to somewhere safer, and I am starting to think of that as a really nice option."

– Jon Ronson

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