Reckoning With Social Media

Reckoning with Social Media

"Reckoning allows us to see things about ourselves and others that we may not be able to in our own lived experiences" (Humphreys 2326). 

We use the internet and social media to find out and learn new things about people. It is an alternate way of learning about people other than actually sitting down and talking to that person. Like when we come across someone on Facebook or Twitter and “stalk” their account to out who they are. We are limited to seeing what that person wants us to see. Our perception of that person revolves around what they post. Whether it be pictures, posts/statuses, or reposts/shares. This allows the author of these posts to change and possibly to deceive their viewers’ perception of them.

Humphreys writes that “sometimes the hopes and dreams and desires that we put forth in our media accounting are actually a more accurate picture of who we are and the world we live in rather than what me might have done that day” (2405).

However, this is not always the case as we see in a police brutality narrative on the Wikipedia page of the New York Police Department.

In the pictures above, the NYPD edited their Wikipedia page to make some events of their department seem less negative. They try to make the situations go in their favor by changing the words and sentence structure to remove some negativity. While in the end, trying to rewrite the truth ultimately makes the situation worse.

In the first picture, the edits are less drastic, but still pretty bad. The actual event isn’t actually changed, but there are changes made to kind of “cover their a—es”. This could cause someone who is unfamiliar with the situation, to read it and be on the side of the police, and not really think much of it.

Now, with the second picture, the entire situation is changed. The “unarmed man” is changed to “armed man”. This is a huge and drastic change that was made. It makes it seem like the shooting was actually justified.

This also makes me think of “Catfish: the TV Show”. People pretend to be someone else on social media, and trick other people online into believing it. Every victim on this show gets strong feelings for the “Catfish”, and ends up getting hurt over this false perception/identity.

These are perfect examples of how social media can be used to get the perception of the reader that you want. Whether or not what is being said on social media is true or not, what we get from viewing peoples social media profile is always just a perception. We never 100% know who that person is or how they are until we meet them in person. This is when reckoning involves reflection of what we are seeing.

Such as in photo or video memories that we may come across. We reflect on how we may have been acting or what we were doing at that specific point in time. Today, these memories are brought to us by social media and allow us to see some of the differences that may have happened since then.