“And then the firework shot shot across the way into someone’s apartment!”
“What! Where were you?”
“Oh, this was something on Instagram.”
Hearing this, the bottom dropped out of the anecdote for me.
While this firework incident a was no less real for having been captured on video and posted to social media, it felt more real when I thought an actual real-life witness was describing it to me.
What gives?
It may have something to do with McLuhan’s famed the medium is the message, which I’ve been thinking a lot about in the weeks after reading Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death.
It goes without saying that social media content differs from conversation. But what about a conversation describing social media content? These are clearly different, but it’s tricky to say why.
One difference is that it shifts your regard of your conversation partner. Someone who happened to witness something crazy in person? Well, that says that they were somewhere at the right (or wrong!) time. Where were they? Who were they with? What went through their mind?
But a person telling you about something they saw on social media can’t answer those questions. They were somewhere, sure, and maybe they were with some friends, but none of that matters, because they were looking at their phone (or computer) when they watched the clip.
Taylor Coe 