CS 371-Social Media and Social Life

Fall 2015

Collaborative Class Blog Post Assignment #2

In Personal Connections in the Digital Age (page 24), Nancy Baym takes the position that the widespread diffusion and suffusion of digital media forms and practices throughout our everyday lives is often the source of individual and collective “anxiety”.  More specifically, she argues (page 24) that:

Most anxieties around both digital media and their historical precursors stem from the fact that these media are interactive. Especially in combination with sparse social cues, interactivity raises issues about authenticity and well-being of people, interactions, and relationships that use new media.

Yesterday, New York Magazine published a fascinating article on their website titled “The Prom Queen of Instagram” (http://nymag.com/thecut/2015/09/lilli-hymowitz-prom-queen-of-instagram.html?mid=facebook_nymag#). This article chronicles the social media fame and celebrity of the titular “prom queen of Instagram”—a rather privileged 16 year old New Yorker named Lilly Hymowitz— in considerable detail . At one point, the author writes:

Much of teenage life — the self-definition and posturing, the longing and experimentation — now happens online, such that the pursuit of friends and status and popularity no longer stops at the cafeteria door. Instagram and the like offer Hymowitz a scale of extracurricular notoriety that the popular girls of even ten years ago could never have comprehended. From a distance, that reality can seem disturbing; up close, it’s some combination of liberating and terrifying. “You can edit your life on Instagram,” Hymowitz says, before admitting, “I think people think I’m cooler than I am.”

In the second chapter of Personal Connections in the Digital Age, Baym discusses four theoretical perspectives on the causal relationship between technology and the social: technological determinism; social construction of technology;  social shaping of technology; and domestication of technology. In your post, chose one of these perspectives to discuss how the anxiety about the interactivity of new digital media is evidenced in the article about the “The Prom Queen of Instagram”. What kind of anxieties associated with new media are provoked when people think that ‘you are cooler than you are’ because of your social media presence and persona.   In your post, please also briefly state why you chose the theoretical framework that you did.

The due dates for this assignment are Wednesday, September 30, 6 PM for your original posts and Sunday, October 4, 6 PM for your responses

P.S. The link to the “The Prom Queen of Instagram” article can also be found on the MLS course site under “Resources for Unit I

P.P.S, If you are feeling particularly adventurous, feel free to bring the "Sociality Barbie" (https://instagram.com/socalitybarbie/) Instagram site into the mix