Mead and Social Media

George Herbert Mead believed that people develop self-images through interactions with other people. He argued that the self, which is the part of a person's personality consisting of self-awareness and self-image, is a product of social experience. Growing up in the times of social media really booming, for instance, seeing myspace, Runescape, facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, times have really change. In the old times, people use to meet through connections and face to face conversation. Asking one for their numbers, trying to practice networking. In today's life, we meet and communicate through what is called social media. According to Google, social media is defined as Social media are interactive Web 2.0 Internet-based applications. User-generated content, such as text posts or comments, digital photos or videos, and data generated through all online interactions, is the lifeblood of social media.  Now social media can be used in many platforms. They can be used for good and they can be used for evil. Today what we put on social media can really affect our lives in a good way and in a bad way. Today you are viewed on what you post or like. This can affect your job, career and dating life. The most popular apps today are, snapchat, facebook, Instagram,  twitter, and tinder surprisingly.  George Herbert Mead developed a theory of social behaviorism to explain how social experience develops an individual’s personality. Mead’s central concept is the self: the part of an individual’s personality composed of self-awareness and self-image. Mead claimed that the self is not there at birth, rather, it is developed with social experience.
Celebrities today are always on social media. This is how people can see what is popular in the world and what is happening in today's times. 
Now with social media, it can be a blessing and a curse.  Social media can be superficial and sometimes really fake. As in fake I mean scripted. As you the user can post whatever the hell you please. You can choose the audience that views your life. You can set your profile on public or private regardless you are in control. 

For instance, someone can post pictures of themselves smiling or going shopping. Showing off all of their expensive items. You may think that they are living their best life.; but in reality, they can be fucking miserable but you would never know that.  This is why people such as celebrities will look happy on youtube and everything looks grand but they are in a deep depression. Social media is a scripted way to live your life. 

The most recent example I can give is about the young incoming rapper little Tay.  Little Tay was a young girl of the age 9 who would make these viral videos. In these viral videos, she would go around a large house for about a minutes flaunting her money calling the audience "Broke Bitches." 
"costs more than your momma’s rent. So does her wardrobe, her bed, her jewelry — really anything in her vicinity. Her kitchen is bigger than your entire living room. She wears Gucci belts across her chest like sashes and Louis Vuitton belts draped around her waist. She’s almost exclusively seen holding a stack of cash. “And I’m only 9 years old!” 
Now with all this hot talk, of course, this came with bad terms. With over 1.7 million followers, of course, this came with backlash. People hated the shit out of her. She began to be bullied in person and receive death threats in social media. Last April, FInally, the world would know the truth. 
It turned out that she did not have all of that money, in fact, the house and mansions she filmed at were, in fact, her mom's real estate houses that she owned and were trying to sell. In one video Lil Tay was driving around in very expensive car. That car would be her mother's bosses and the boss would see this. Her mother would then lose her job and the fall of lil tay would soon folllow. Her account would later be shutdown, videos of her brother filiming her saying the lines where she looked nervous and didn't know what to say.  n mid-October, the Lil Tay account returned, supposedly the result of a hack, with a series of stories that portrayed Chris as a neglectful absent father. There were screenshots of documents with claims that Chris refused to take Lil Tay to ballet lessons, that his new wife cursed at her and locked her in a closet, that he forced her to watch scary movies and was behind on his child-support payments. The documents were presented as court papers, but they referred to Claire Hope only as Lil Tay, which isn’t exactly standard legal form.

Whoever was behind the posts also released the phone number of Chris’s law firm and his email address with instructions to get in touch. That prompted tens of thousands of calls, FaceTimes, and WhatsApp messages, plus hundreds of emails. “I was bullied, cyberbullied, whatever phrase you want to use, by the millions of people that follow those posts,” Chris says. Still, he hasn’t changed his mind. He remains firm in his determination to shape his daughter’s career in the way he thinks best. Lil Tay is homeschooled now because, even though she had 2 million followers for only two months, she’s too famous. All the kids recognize her. She can barely leave the house. Basically, we could see the whole thing was fabricated and affected everyone's life in a negative way.; but it gave us the idea that it was true.