A little over a decade ago there was no such thing as social media. Now, it’s hard to imagine a world where our society, including myself, wasn’t constantly online. Since I was in middle school, I have made accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram. Besides being able to reveal the posts I like or the people I follow, these apps have essentially been able to encase who I am and my identity in a way that is 100% online. As Patrick White notes in his presentation, “The impact of Social Media and Identity Construction,” online mediums, like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have been able to grow in popularity since their creation. Because of their popularity, millions of people have created accounts which led to people also creating a “second self.” As White describes, “having an online ‘self’ or avatar enables people’s identities to be ‘entirely generated by what can be typed or posted in images and text.” However, White points out, having an online presence has enabled “users the power to create who themselves as someone that does not mirror who they are in reality. For instance, as white further states, “social networking in the 21st century has added an online dimension to the theory of social identity as people are given a chance to effectively portray themselves, what they do, and what they care about . . . inaccurately in order to receive recognition, gratification, or acceptance.”
From my own perspective, I believe White has a point behind what he is saying. From a young age, I have had a variety of social media accounts and I will mostly create more as other sites become more popular in the future. As a platform, I have used these sites to follow my friends, see what others are posting, see what images others are uploading, and to creep on people that I don’t know or am not friends with. But while I have created and still regularly use these sites to perform a multitude of specific actions, I can attest that these sites have created a second identity for myself. For instance, at a young age I was always told to watch and be careful of what I post online because it would always be out there for someone to see, even after I die. To that notion, I have kept my accounts pretty clean and basic. I won’t post certain things that I know are inappropriate or offensive, that I might actually look at and read in real life. Instead, the main thing I do online is follow new friends, like their pictures, and like their posts-texts and images I wouldn’t be ashamed of liking, even thirty years from now. So yes, I definitely agree that social media accounts and having a presence online, at least for me, has created a second identity for myself. While this second identity isn’t much different from who I am today, liking and posting the same things I normally would, I am more cautious to what I am liking or posting, so it doesn’t reflect me and who I am in a negative way.
Besides social media and our society’s presence online, another concept that is growing is artificial intelligence. As Wikipedia explains, “artificial intelligence is intelligence created by machines,” which has led to the theory of technological singularity, that states, “the invention of artificial superintelligence will abruptly trigger runaway technological growth, resulting in unfathomable changes to human civilization.” Basically what this means is that computers are surpassing and outperforming humans and will one day be more intelligent than we are. For instance, Ray Kurzweil, computer scientist, author, and futurists has made several predictions in the past about the capabilities of computers and their ability to surpass humans. Along with a list of predictions that came true, one prediction that Kurzweil correctly predicted was that a computer would defeat a world chess champion by 1998. “In 1997, IBM’s Deep-Blue defeated Garry Kasparov” a Russian chess grandmaster.
Along with Kurzweil, I do there is a such thing as artificial intelligence, that computers are able to outperform and surpass humans. But I don’t think that all intelligence is artificial. For instance, I believe there still is and always will be the idea of human intelligence. I believe humans will still be able to think for themselves and have their own belief systems and values, even though our society is regularly online and discovers ideas and concepts further online. Ultimately, even though we are gaining a variety of knowledge from the Internet and from sources online, I believe our own thoughts and reasoning and how we learn, understand, and apply the knowledge we have discovered, is what will always be able to claim as human intelligence and be able to surpass computers with, time after time.
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