The unwritten rule of Facebook is that if you don't have anything good to say, don't say it all. Is this like it should be or should we be able to take a little critique, too? One thing is for sure, the arenas of social media full of cute cat videos are a far cry from the idea of these public places being (virtual) stages for advocating democracy and intelligent conversation that Jurgen Habermas was harbouring in his mind. Quite simply: people just don't wanna know.
Instead, people, especially women, post selfies to receive that self-affirmation in the form of positive comments of admiration from their peers over and over again. According to an article from Huffington Post on a study published in an online journal Psychology of Popular Media Culture the peers do, however, prefer a person who portrays herself in a slightly less provocative way rating her "prettier, more likely to be a good friend, and more competent". To put it frankly: people lie.
From the point of view media research and theory, it's interesting note how the "subject" of media has changed over the course of time. Back in the days (1930s) of the sociological starting point of Karl Lazarsfeld and his fellow researchers was to assume that the media audience was at the receiving end of influences from the media content, then along came the Frankfurt School who claimed that we were (unjustly) formed in the media texts to the advantage of the scary Capitalist, but I claim that these days our selves live through the media. So it's not like the lefties say that we're predetermined by ideology or that we're just helpless receivers of intended messages, but that the human life has taken form through the media in that we live in the media nowadays. We can be more of whatever we want to be online than we can outside it. People know what we're doing through Facebook without even being there.
To conclude: Whilst the Habermassian ideal still hasn't realized itself and the narcissistic self is on a digital rampage, we now have two co-existing realities (material/electronic) to manage and that is a mine field of research topics to be discovered!
