How Social Media Affects Our Everyday Culture?

Communication is the substance of any culture. If there is communication in any place that means there is a culture as well. Since humans express their lifestyle, desires, and values of life through communication. In modern society, people find their expressions in various social media networks which also provides people to come together, especially for people who are from different backgrounds and cultures. In today’s digital world, social media have become one of the inevitable elements of our everyday lives that extensively structure our identity, language, culture, understandings, and view of reality. Obviously, today social media is a place where people spent most of their time in everyday life which exactly occurs the term “culture”. According to John Fiske, the term “culture” is precisely what people produce and reproduce in daily life. Besides, “culture” is a sort of metaphor for the cultivation. People cultivate the place, their self, or institutions cultivate the people so that people can adapt the society more easily which we can also say that social media is an open place to cultivation. As Raymond Williams states, even if culture transforms into an industrial place, we might see a bad culture, however with the rise of bad culture, we might see a good culture as well. In that case, we might see two colors of culture in social media, which can create both advantages and disadvantages for the people and institutions.

In today’s globalizing society, social media institutions function like Michel Foucault’s “panopticon” system. In Foucault’s panopticon system, “observer” is the key function in this mechanism. The officer who is responsible for the observation post, collect pieces of information by observing inmates so that the officer can manage the inmates with these information. Furthermore, the observers exercise their power over others by instructing people to regulate their own behavior. Later on, discipline was so extended. Inmates could not understand whether they observed or not, it became their normal and everyday life. Social media networks function in the same way as well. Social media institutions give you free space in the server world which they can track your every movement. In this case, they collect your whole information such as your birthday, gender, who you follow and like, how frequently you visit the application, etc. and which they generate “data”. In Fact, as Michel de Certau says, “these facts are no longer the data of our calculations, bu rather the lexicon of users’ practices.” So that, by having those informations, they have the power to control and practice on users, change the way of user behaviors that’s why they want their users to spend more time on their platforms. For example; If you behave inappropriately on social media such as sharing improper content or making trick, they can punish you as removing from the social media. Moreover, those institutions can guess what you are going to click and buy in your next movement by analyzing your data. Later on, this system was enlarged. Users of social media could not understand whether they observed or not, which become their normal and everyday life. Even before social media institutions observe users, now users observe each other; people follow each other’s contents, and if someone shares something wrong, one can report about this content easily and that become usual for people.

Social media become our everyday and normal life which we cannot deny. Since becoming our everyday life, it has also become the place that constructs and reflects our culture. The free industrial market gives each individual to access these platforms. In every public area, restaurants, streets, schools, we can see that instead of discussing with verbal conversation, people prefer to create conversation through digital tweets, WhatsApp messages, Instagram stories, and posts. Moreover, millions of social media applications change our perspective on our families, friends, colleagues, and distant people. It is clear that social media creates new types of culture. For example, we can find cultivated people through the environment of social media; the people that they see and follow. Furthermore, If people do not adapt to their self to this new digital culture, they might become invisible and lost in the digital world. They should show their culture and understanding of life so that people can stay in touch and survive in the new understanding of the world. However, people follow the people which they like, after a while, those people act like the people that they follow, they copy and paste cultures from each other without really question the opposite culture. In this case, that creates “popular culture” and everyone becomes the same.

To exemplify “popular culture”, we can benefit from the studies of John Fiske. As a matter of fact, he summarizes his primary argument by saying “The term culture, as used in the phrase ‘cultural studies’, is neither aesthetic nor humanist in emphasis, but political.” What we conclude from this sentence is that, as humans, we use “culture” as an elitist sort of notion, and Fiske completely denies this understanding. For Fiske, culture is exactly what people produce in daily life, and that can be anything in life such as popular culture, social media, or art. Additionally, he suggests that those who use the products of “mass culture”, also will face the consequences of “popular culture”. As he says those that “concentrate almost exclusively on the power of dominant groups to maintain the system that advantages them” (16) are the ones who mainly benefit from the system. Furthermore, we can relate this approach to the Marxist traditional idea of base and superstructure. As the Marxist theory states, the way culture is produced based on the economy. Basically, in this idea, the base structure is determined by the upper class. Therefore, the superstructure represents their own ideas, the way they live, and lower classes are made to watch those upper-class people. For instance, people who have so many followers on Instagram such as rich and famous people or influencers share their everyday life, what they eat, and how they live through sharing stories and posts on Instagram. So, lower-class people just follow and watch these stories. Moreover, as lower-class people follow these upper-class people on social media, they gain some kind of awareness about that kind of lifestyles in life, and they just start to like certain things. As a result of that, lower-class people try to transform into that upper-class people.

As John Fiske is aware of this situation, he argues something different in his work of art. In this system, people all try to be powerful, and they all want to speak and show their abilities. As Fiske indicates; culture is a site of struggle. There is always gain and loss in this system whereas it is just from to bottom to top, therefore it is rigid whereas it is always on the move, sometimes in a certain period of history a certain group might be powerful but then in a hundred years the group may lose its power and become less powerful. For instance, social media platforms provide their products to all people in an equal way. So, in this system, everyone has the same rights. Even though, users of social media and the system itself create class discrimination inside the network. To exemplify, while someone has a large number of followers and likes, and another person has a very low number of followers and likes. While someone’s lifestyle is very luxurious, the other person has a low-class lifestyle. Furthermore, they are all on the same platform, and they all share their everyday life on social media. However, after a while, they all want to have a large number of followers and likes. Even those differences may occur psychological problems when they cannot achieve those desires. Therefore, some of the people find their solution as making tricks on social media such as buying non-organic followers and likes. This is the basic difference in Fiske’s understanding of social classes which shows us how society is divided and a non-organic whole. For example, on LinkedIn, people who are usually from the working class, share what they do in their companies, what they learn in the events, they share their career journeys because of being able to work in better companies. Since companies check their LinkedIn profile when they hire someone to company. So they are all in the power of struggle which represents the non-organic culture.

On the other hand, social media might be beneficial for people. We can say that communication is easier and faster now than before ever. Even people find their childhood friends on Facebook after long years. In that way, people keep in touch with each other. Moreover, they can know new people from other countries and even they can create a new partnership for their brands. We can say that social media connects businesses from one country to another country. Even, some people are able to earn money by just selling products and services just through using social media. Furthermore, if there is an issue somewhere in the world, and people can know about this problem at that moment. To illustrate, when someone commits femicide, and people hear this problem on social media, and they try to change the mindset by gathering on social media networks. Simply, they raise their voice against crime and bad acts on social media.

As Raymond Williams says, “Culture was the way of people, as well as the vital and indispensable contributions of specially gifted and identifiable persons.” As we see social media networks have transformed into industrial places and that has also become our everyday culture. However, with the born of bad sides in industrial culture, we are able to observe some good happenings as well. In a way, both cultures equalize each other.