Life is a Popularity Contest

Nicole and Tara both wrote insightful blog posts about the culture of social media and the thought-processes behind users on the networks.  While reading the posts, I kept thinking about how everything that they were saying was true. Nicole suggests that Instagram is a game with each participant aware of their highest number of likes, constantly striving to achieve a "higher score."  We are all guilty of playing the game!  My amount of likes: 149.  

Whether we admit it or not, we post things to win the approval of others, and it is hard to disagree with this simple facet of social media usage.

However, I do not necessarily see any points that they are trying to make as negative.  As Tara suggest, maybe we should have a "who cares?" attitude.  But, in most situations in life, this outlook simply does not exist - whether we pretend to care or not.

I feel that this discussion could easily relate back to a post that I wrote a few weeks ago about online identity management.  The idea behind it is that we shape ourselves online to win the applause of others, and therefore we don't share everything that we may want to.  We may want to post something  despite the fact that we may not get more than five likes, and show that "we don't care" about this so-called popularity contest.  But the truth is that we probably want.

Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and other networks are all public social media platforms.  Everything we post is public.  Just as in any public situation, we filter what we share, because as humans, we seek the approval of others.  I wouldn't tell a joke, if I didn't think that others would laugh.  I wouldnt present an opinionated thought to my peers, if I didn't think that others would agree or that it would cause them to think.  And I surely wouldn't show my friend a picture on my camera from today, if I didn't think that she would care about it at all.

So no, I don't think it is "crazy and ridiculous" to always post as if social media is a popularity contest.  On the contrary, I think it is logical and parallels most real-world networks. We are human.  We want what we share to be admired and appreciated, whether it is online or not.  If we did not, would we share it?