The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/social-media/)
Coming into college, we are conditioned to curate our profiles to provide a solid first impression to the friends we make in the first weeks. However, as the months pass and the rest of our lives come into focus, those old memories are replaced with new ones, and the only thing that actually seems to matter becomes our core relationships and times spent with others — not superficial perceptions.
BeReal walks a middle road between throwing your phone into Beebe Lake and spending your vacation obsessively taking selfies. It’s what I like to call dumb social media — apps whose entire appeal is their limitations. BeReal does not allow users to see follower counts, filter their pictures or post more than once a day. The app exists more or less as an elaborate inside joke between its users, a meme turned to reality. And it’s not alone in the dumb social media category.
A year and a half filled with uncertainty has left Cornellians and Americans nationwide grasping at the straws of capricious public health advisory in search of information to protect their communities from COVID-19. Cornell Tech experts note that social media has played an irrevocable role in allowing avenues for disputing the science surrounding COVID-19, straining pandemic response globally.
Many students bought and sold surplus tickets for the 2021 commencement, slipping the University rules designating two guests per graduate.
My friend was ecstatic when he thought he found his professor’s profile on Snapchat. We’d soon learn that the discovery was too good to be true; the account was not the professor’s, who quickly disappointed inquisitive students in a Piazza post. The greater irony is that as students, our communication with professors outside the classroom is indeed limited to Piazza, aside from email and now Zoom. However, as younger generations increasingly link themselves to the social media phenomenon, it begs the question how much longer this “distance” between professors and students will remain.
Against this backdrop of the illusion of meritocracy, contrary to what Best said in the interview, I argue that Substack does not free journalists from the need to game the social media algorithms. Instead, Substack primarily serves those who have already successfully “gamed” the algorithms — those that have already been rewarded with attention, fame and popularity on existing social media platforms, particularly Twitter.
At its best, LinkedIn succeeds in its mission of, well, linking us in with professional contacts who can prove to be valuable sources of information or mentorship. At its worst, LinkedIn is a kind of professional cult composed of one part autofill inspirational stories, one part humble bragging, and one part career FOMO.
Though populist politics are by no means a novel concept, populist movements and leaders have grown immensely since social networks took off in the late 90s.
With social interaction stalled, an app to connect classmates, “Amigo,” launched on campus in early December to connect students.
Online, we treat ourselves as free actors despite corporate interests, which create hyper-personalized content that is in no way randomly disseminated.