While it may not be true that everyone who projects themselves on social media are fake, they may adopt differing personas in order to portray the best version of themselves to an audience, essentially masking their true attributes.
The idea of the “Social Media Mask,” can be applied to the life of social media personality, Essena O’Neill.
Essena O’Neill, an Instagram and YouTube star, recently caused a stir when she revealed that she was quitting social media, saying that the online world is “fake.”
When creating content and documenting her life, Essena donned a mask that hid her true feelings towards the world she was caught up in, claiming that she was actually miserable when she tried to come across as positive.
“Everything I was doing was edited, and contrived and to get more value. To get more views…” (Essena O’Neill, 2015)
We use social media to convey the best versions of ourselves to gain approval from friends, family and even strangers.
However, does this mean we’re all fake?
Or do these personas become a part of who we are in reality?
Due to citizen journalism, the channels in which we consume our news are multiplying. People are looking towards the internet and social media in order to stay up to date with current affairs, which eradicates company bias’s affecting the news that is presented to us, and may alternatively exposes us to other individual bias’s. We are looking to each other for content rather than looking to the ‘trusted’ media authorities, the ‘gatekeepers’ of content.
So what does this mean for traditional media platforms?
Does this mean we will lose media channels that have existed for decades? Probably. Newspaper companies are already struggling to keep up with today’s technological advances, which also has a spiralling effect on the millions of careers that exist in these traditional media fields.
The consistency of demand and supply of the internet is hard or competing media platforms to keep up with, and in turn can expose legacy media for providing false information, leaving audiences unsure of who to trust.
While citizen journalism can also contain false information, it is assisting audiences in questioning the reliability of the source, as well as allowing them to look at a story from various points of view.
Remix culture is a product of the rapid technological advancements that exist in our world today, and a part of this culture is the existence of mashups.
Mashups essentially combine multiple pre-existing songs with the same rhythm, or are slightly altered to create a similar rhythm, ultimately creating a new song all together.
Considering the abundance of copyright laws that exist in the present, mashups are difficult to create without permission from the original song artist, which can sometimes come at a price (literally).
However, the originality of this type of remix isn’t as ambiguous, as other original content is clearly being used, and is essential, to create this style.
“It is most likely that mashups and remixes will have to be interpreted on a case by case basis to determine whether any infringement of copyright has occurred. The issue of moral rights, particularly the moral right of integrity and the notion of reasonableness also need to be considered.” (O’Brien and Fitzgerald 2006)
So what does remix culture mean for the future of copyright?