Why social media is killing democracy
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Our infatuation with celebrity is dumbing down us down.
We’ve become consumers of ‘newsertainment’ and followers of the instafamous.
Our addiction to social media and obsession with likes, follows and shares, plays right into that narcissistic, superficial millennial stereotype.
We’re constantly inundated with clickbait headlines, bite-size news and celebrity gossip. I get it, it’s not easy to escape.
Some say social media is a democratising force, which is true to some extent. You can’t deny the power it’s had for movements like the Arab Spring, the coup in Turkey or even independent organisations like GetUp.
But it’s also created the perfect conditions for celebrity culture to flourish into an endless mass of reality stars, micro-celebrities and Hollywood hotshots.
Take for example, the recent announcement of the new Kardashian spin-off, ‘The Life of Kylie.’ Every second post on my Facebook feed was teaming with likes and comments from fellow Gen-Y-ers.
I didn’t want to read about it but I couldn’t escape it. I opened Snapchat instead and what did I find? A feature story on Kylie’s new lip kit.
What has the world come to when we idolise and worship a person that’s catapulted to fame from her sister’s sex tape and a family of reality TV stars?
Social media is creating the perfect space for the cult of celebrity. It lets us follow them, talk about them, want to be like them. The more we do this, the more celebrity spreads.
And this means our generation is ill-informed.
Lost are the stories that don’t fit into ‘contemporary fame’. Lost is well-resourced content on society, politics, the economy.
When these stories are absent, how can we make informed decisions and exercise our democratic rights?
Let’s not forget the furore surrounding the failed Fyre festival. Promoted by who? A clique of hot supermodels; ‘social media influencers’. News of the epic bungle spread like wildfire online. Memes were created, thousands of articles detailed the chaos.
But when a story like this gets more coverage than the bus attack in Syria that killed 126 people, or the ISIS attack in the Philippines, or the fact that 2.7m of sea level rise this century is ‘plausible’, then I think we have a problem.
Generation Y is using social media for their daily digest more than any other medium.
We’re likely to fall into that trap of consuming news that feeds our celebrity infatuation.
And I’m not saying I’m perfect. I’ve been guilty of a reality TV binge, hours spent scrolling online, brushing up on celebrity feuds.
I’m playing the bad guy here because it’s time we got engaged with real world issues rather than googling the latest Kardashian nudes or following Pippa Middleton around Sydney Harbour.
Perhaps next time you scroll through your social media, click on an article about politics, the economy, local issues instead of that one about the latest reality show.
You may just learn a little more about the world and a little less about the Bachelor.