Fishing on Facebook

Sometimes being on Facebook is just like being back at high school. My news feed feels like a school ground. Through everyone’s posts and photos, you could see everyone’s cliques, groups and connections. And just like high school, everyone is self-conscious of their appearance. Marshall (2010) “would call the ‘specular economy’ where collectively we are becoming more conscious of how we present ourselves and how others perceive us and this change is migrating to the epicentre of our knowledge economy.” People need their walls to represent how they want to be viewed by their peers, an image which is popular among their online ‘friends’. Such popularity is like specular economy, in that social media gives users a sense of celebrity, with your persona being broadcast to all of your friends.

My social media life revolves around a chain of jokes among me and my friends. Like most normal people, we try to paint ourselves in the best light for those who ‘stalk’ our pages. We try to get the coolest display pictures, the funniest statuses and to get as many ‘likes’ for both as possible. Initially my friends and I made jokes about who got the most likes for their statuses or display pictures, but our competitiveness took over. These days it’s all about the likes. The display picture doesn’t have to make us look cool, our statuses don’t have to make sense and we even created a fake persona online, to collectively collect likes. We call the attempt for obtaining more likes ‘fishing’. Basically one would put out some bait, such as a status about how ‘gangsta’ we are or a cover photo about some classic 90’s movie or celebrity in order to catch as many ‘fish’ or ‘likes’ as possible. Facebook has now become the most serious joke my friends and I have ever had.

Marshal, P.C 2010, ‘The Specular Economy’, Society, vol. 47, no.6, pp. 498-502