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- When people disagree with us, their disagreement not only influences the validity of our beliefs, but it calls into question our personal identities—the kind of people we want to believe that we are.
- When people disagree with us, their disagreement not only influences the validity of our beliefs, but it calls into question our personal identities—the kind of people we want to believe that we are.
Seems everyone just can't get enough of Lady Gaga this week, but not just for her Oscar win for "Best Original Song" just a couple of days ago. Last night the pop culture icon appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live where the conversation with the show's host quickly turned to address the massive speculation across the Web that her relationship with, now multi-hyphenate, Bradley Cooper goes much deeper than just friends and professional collaborators. And her main response to this has the media buzzing today which has, naturally, has re-ignited the digital town hall yet further on the celebrated two-some.
For those who might have missed it, Gaga definitely gave a thumbs-down to any and all the social media pondering about her and Cooper by simply stating, "...social media... is the toilet of the Internet."
Whoa.
Gaga is quite dismissive of any speculation, stating that the two were simply acting on the Oscar stage during the performance Shallow from A Star Is Born. The interesting thing is, however, that the various video and still images of the two celebrities while very much off-stage anywhere these last few months seems to resemble just as much warmth as the alleged "acting" to which Gaga refers. So much that even Oprah's O magazine recently went as far as to obtain a body language expert to such important things as interpret photos from the Oscars evening. Such energy around deciphering, denying and decoding seems truly driven by a little thing called social media chatter.
So is this realm of the Web truly a "toilet"?
It strikes a cord because pretty much all of us are on social media at one point or another. Is Gaga above it all? Are we all base? Hmmm...
I tried to get "father of the Internet" Vint Cerf to provide a bit of insight but was told he was busy all day and, no doubt, focusing on matters other than Gaga. Yet the ripple effect that Gaga and Cooper's relationship, whatever it may be, and her response to it is demonstrative a larger cultural trend that does have some significance and weight.
When we disagree with nearly anything these days, there is a knee-jerk reaction to reject not only it but, in Gaga's particular case, the entire technology which supports it rather than attempt to even lightly analyze or inquire about such behavior and expression of it. We see this take place in an exponential manner these days with anything political, race-related and more.
Mark Alicke, Ph.D. explains in Psychology Today, "This is the crux of the problem. When people disagree with us, their disagreement not only influences the validity of our beliefs, but it calls into question our personal identities—the kind of people we want to believe that we are. This is why even ostensibly meaningless differences, such as which sports team a person favors, can rankle."
And social media is all about creating a virtual self that represents either one's true or aspiring identity, picking at the identity of others, envying identity. It's what we all have always done as humans, it's just that technology gives us the capability to do it on a much, much broader scale - and all day.
Naturally, no one wants to be thought of as something he or she is not, but we are, perhaps, not taking enough time to look at various perspectives or reasoning before not only shunning but moving to ridicule. Toilet? Sure social media has many crazy moving parts. But it also provides a platform for those without any hope of a voice to mobilize and drive change (like #OscarsSoWhite).
But no matter how Gaga might feel about social media, a mere finger wag of Mama Monster is not going to quell this phenomenon any time soon. The most recent Global Digital suite of reports from social media strategy agency We Are Social and Hootsuite, believed to be the most widely used social media tool for businesses today, showed that there are now more than four billion people around the world using the Internet, and the number of those using social media is nearly 3.2 billion, up 13 percent year-on-year. However, the amount of time is truly staggering with a U.S. user glued to social media on average of two hours a day (with the Philippines out posting and viewing us all at four hours a day).
With this confluence of identity, behavior and technology, we can be sure that we'll all need to continue to fasten our seatbelts as we watch what happens next as the constant shifting of yin and yang of social media plays out.
