Blog Post #2 - Constructing Ourselves Through Technology

The Washington Post article on Katherine provides an accurate snapshot of the technology and social media centered life of a “typical” North American teenager today. It is clear that a great deal of her life revolves around her smartphone and the online presence that she is constantly working on developing. The anxieties discussed in this article can be looked at through a Social Construction of Technology perspective as “Katherine wants to get better at her phone. To be one of the girls who knows what to post, how to caption it, when to like, what to comment”. It is apparent that Katherine is an agent of this change and that while she is dependent on her phone, she has the power to decide how she uses it. When discussing this perspective in her book, Baym says that humans are agents of change, not machines (44). In the article, Katherine is quotes saying: “I decide the pictures that look good”, which emphasizes this point further. This article also discusses the idea that Katherine’s phone is where all her friends are all the time and therefore the place that she needs to be. Katherine’s peers are influencing her decisions and vice versa. With new media, comes the anxiety of losing real relationships and face-to-face interaction.  If children are always on their phones, there is a fear that they will isolate themselves and only socialize in online settings. This becomes apparent in the article when Katherine spends her entire drive home from school mindlessly scrolling through her phone rather than talking to her nanny.

            Katherine explains commenting on pictures and the gratification that she feels when people say things like she is nice or pretty. She along with many others her age have turned Instagram into a space where your value or worth is determined strictly by likes, comments, and followers. We have seen in other readings from this course that there are people similar in age to Katherine who have chosen to boycott social media altogether. I feel that because our society has become so focused on our appearance online, we have encouraged these new platforms like Instagram to be invented. I can relate to Katherine in the sense that I have at some points, especially in high school cared about what people have thought about me on my Social Media accounts like Facebook and now Instagram however, this is because of societal pressures and my own choosing, not the technology itself forcing me to do so. This article makes it clear that Katherine and many others, specifically teenage girls face anxiety about their appearances and use social media as a way to appear pretty, social, and fun. There is a fear that these new media can bring harm to children and take away their innocence in some ways. Rather than playing with her friends, Katherine is focused on taking “good” pictures to post. Having a social media account at a young age can also open up children to the potential dangers of child predators and people with ill intentions as discussed in Chapter 2 of Baym’s novel.

            I chose this perspective because I feel that humans are the ones influencing technology and encouraging new apps, social media platforms and phone models to develop. We have the power to make technologies popular or to choose not to use them at all and we use these technologies to influence society as a whole. I strongly feel that people are becoming increasingly attached to their phones which leads to a domino effect where new media and technologies are being developed to further encourage this behaviour.