Imagine yourself, sitting at your desk alone. Your computer is staring at you impatient to see what’s new in the virtual world.
Every day, our virtual life, made of network relations becomes more and more dominant, creating a parallel life.
Probably the reason can be tied to the fact that facing reality is far too difficult, far too demanding, far too frustrating, therefore the best way to avoid it is through the social media, a comfort zone, where everything and everyone is under control. This virtual life can appear magnificent!
This is what is happening nowadays in our societies, to the younger generations and not only them. This artificial life is creating a lonely generation that tends to escape from reality by investing in a safer and less troublesome virtual life, made of artificial relations, that transforms these generations into groups of idiots.
Through the social medias we share only those special moments, captured by our smartphone camera with the goal to give a bright and colourful image of our lives. The goal is to describe a perfect, happy interesting life that can be highly appreciated by our social friends and followers.
Researching on Electronic Human Resources Management
Umberto Eco writes, “Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community. Then they were quickly silenced, but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It’s the invasion of the idiots.” (Trans. T. Bolin).
Umberto Eco is certainly right, social media truly are the easiest and fastest means of communication that give to anyone the possibility to speak out changing radically the whole information system. In any case, each one of us has the free will to decide whether to welcome nonsense and fake news or to go in-depth on the different issues in order to have a more faithful picture of the state of things.
The true strength of social media yet is that they are utilized by millions of people all over the world allowing them to share experiences, information and also knowledge. In a few years, social media reached a rapid diffusion, moving from a media to socialize to an important communication tool utilized also by important business and social communities to inform, on lifestyles, trends, and above all social and humanitarian issues.
What is certainly true is that the Social Media today have a strong impact on both young generations and adults and are becoming vital in each ones ordinary life.
Social media has also become an instrument to achieve information sources for investigation on any topic. In general, when looking for information on a certain product or subject, people prefer to communicate directly with the different users and their experience with that particular argument through the socials. News on social media, instead, despite being a great opportunity for independent journalism, is still not fully recognized by the civil society and the political community that question social media as not being a reliable source of information.
On the other hand, social media can become a real threat impacting on the lives of the users that arrive to build an online parallel life completely detached from reality. Today through our smartphone we are constantly connected to multiple media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Spotify, and others.
Within these online platforms it is possible to create one’s own identity by sharing with friends and followers different life moments or personal views, through a photo or an animation, an article or a quote, in order to receive the highest rating of appreciation through likes and shares that are vital and rewarding in the virtual life.
The ability to start a chain-sharing throughout the social networks of a personal creative moment, thought or idea can make the message become viral, turning perfect strangers into the most influential people on the net becoming celebrities in an instant.
For the most part, surfing in the social medias for these kind of users is not necessarily related to knowing what others are doing or what is happening in the world, it is more about filling the downtimes of their existence; on the tube, waiting for the hairdresser, in the cue at the supermarket, at a dinner, at the beach.
Getting your smartphone, placing yourself on the homepage of your favourite social and stopping there while the real life is moving around, has become a natural behaviour that totally absorbs the users attention just like children when watching cartoons, or fathers watching a soccer game. You can try to communicate with them but they will not answer because completely absorbed by the screen arriving to develop a real addiction.
This compulsive need to control one’s own profile leads to the isolation from the real world that will eventually bring to depression; the presence of signs that indicate an excessive and wrong use of social networks are creating what Umberto Eco defined a “legions of idiots”.
The correct use of social media in order to share knowledge and experience on the various aspects of the social, political, and cultural life on a worldwide scale is undoubtedly an important innovation in today’s modern society and represents only the dawn of the future global and digital era.
Since Social media are within reach on a worldwide scale, it is impossible to censor idiots. But the wise knowledgeable people also utilize Social media; therefore, idiots will follow idiots as it has always been while the rest will follow the smart cultured people.
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