The impact of social media can be seen from every Vantage
Point. Online people use their various site accounts to Garner followers,
receive support, learn, vent, and much more. The web has also become a platform
for the touchier points of life such as humanitarianism and politics. Tumblr
has become a site that aids such causes.
The "public sphere" a phrase coined by Jürgen Habermas, was
described as a "theatre in modern societies in which political
participation is enacted through the medium of talk." coffee houses were a
good example of such spaces. People would sit and have a beverage, meanwhile
discussing things of political importance and trying to reach common agreement.
In the modern world we witnessed this "public sphere" has moved
location and audience. People now have access to such discussion and ideas
online, speak to a broader further reaching audience. This can be seen with the
site Tumblr.
Many political and humanitarian blogs have been created and
become quite prominent through the sites reblogging option. These pages game
more and more power as their posts are shared.
" power is not a thing it is relational"
(Kuttainen 2017).
One can see the power these blogs have simply by observing
the effects on the material world that have come about. Mental awareness blogs
for example, a popular on Tumblr. But beyond their posts these blogs have given
support to people by contact through personal messages. They also raise
material support via fundraisers and by inspiring people to act. One blog that
I found named "Our Angel Olivia" holds fundraisers that raise money
for different mental health organisations every few months, and this is just
one example.
Picture of “Our angel Olivia” Homepage
There is one obvious difference between the coffee shops of
Old and the new online public sphere. Online, much easier to ignore opinions
contrary to your own. Instead of being confronted by living people who have
different opinions and views to you these people are instead behind screens and
can be silence and edited out by the push of a button. In this way we edit out
reality.
Humanism is explained as being a "philosophical and
ethical stance; value and agency of human beings individually and
collectively" by editing these parts we are in a way becoming posthuman.
No longer are things real and genuine but filtered by our own view and the view
of people we follow. In a sense the web both dismantles and sustains the
humanist subject (McNeill). They do this by providing a place to discuss
concepts and problems but making tools that we then use to remove anything not
concurrent with our own view.
Ysabel Lancaster
References:
2) Jürgen Habermas on society and politics: a
reader/ edited by Steven Seidman (1989) Beacon Press books, Boston.
3) Kuttainen, V. (2017). BA1002: Our Space:
Networks, narratives and the making of place, lecture 6: Networked Narratives.
[PowerPoint Slides]. Retrieved from http://learnjcu.edu.
4) auMcNeill,
L. (2012). There is no “I” in network: Social networking sites and posthuman
auto/biography. Biography, 35(1), 64-82.https://doi.org/10.1353/bio.2012.0009
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