- What is subculture? how people are finding their identities through subcultures? and how a subculture forms? ...This is the new topic of the essay. yes, we have to define a popular subculture through a real subculture that is currently exist. To answer these questions I first looked around my self, where I am living, people around me, family, friend, school friends,... few minutes later, I found I belong to many subcultures without noticing their existence in my life. Because I did not know the meaning of subculture. Truly, living without subcultures is impossible today. For this essay I found maybe I should stop being embarrassed of being a Facebook Addict and It's better to use my experience to define popular subculture.
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Follow and like me!
In 2008 Google search engine helped me find one of
my old friends. I found her brief information and photo on the website called
“Facebook”. I tried to get more information, but Facebook did not let me know
more about her unless I registered at its website. Facebook connected me to all
of my old and new friends at the same place. In 2010 I realized that spending
time on Facebook had taken priority over spending time with friends in the
physical world; I had become a member a group of “Facebook addict”. The
subculture of Facebook addicts is defined by constant desire to stay connected,
and by giving individuals the power of constructing their desired identity,
which gives them power of controlling what others find about them and what they
find about others without their knowledge.
The Facebook Addict creates a subculture in which
people love to stay connected to the world, consequently gives a sense of
belonging. Through Facebook I was able to see daily life of my friends on the
other side of the world and expanding my imagination about living in their
fashion. Facebook as an artifact is very similar to definition of “unreality” by
Kalle Lasn, the author of Culture Jam, “…so womblike and seductive”,
“…it’s a nice place to be.” I remember my feeling after the initial
subscription and setting up my Facebook page, it was like “…easy to forget
you’re a citizen and the actual world is an interactive place” as Lasn describes
the world of unreality. As I was able to search through this website and find
most of my lost friends, I was able to add them on my friends’ circle and keep
them forever. We as a huge group with different interests and different circles
of friends were able to live together indirectly through Facebook.
In an endless chain of social and cultural
communication, identities are shaped, integrated or changed. It means that an
identity expresses itself through a subculture. For Facebook addict it is
matter of choosing identity at any time. The citizens of the Facebook have the
opportunity to change their personal information, as they desire. A Facebook
user’s identity is best described as “transformative” as Lasn defines, “in the
way they let the user determine the outcome.” I can make infinite number of
Facebook pages with different names and personal information. I can show myself
in my desire character, photos, sentences etc. For example, I always like to
post pictures of my travels rather my daily photos, because I like people to see
me as travelling all the time. A traveler is one of the characters that I want
to be identified with. Connecting through Facebook helped me to know my friends’
ideals and myself better. Sometimes I meet strangers with real or unreal
identities in my “comment boxes” under my public posts on my Facebook page, but
when it comes to a discussion of a topic I feel they are almost like my
friends. At this point, their real identity is not important to me, in fact
their words and sentences identifies them. The formation of subcultural
identities starts from the moment the subculture actors make their differences
visible. Maybe we Facebook addict people do not color our hair or tattoo our
body or smoke weeds, but our activities in the Facebook are visible to our
Facebook followers.
Through Facebook, I had power of controlling what
others find about me and what I find about others without their
knowledge. I was able to see lots more details about their
personal lives that during my physical friendship I would have ever known.
Friends of my friends were my friends too, so I had all the supervisions over my
circles of friends, as parents like to have it over their children. I liked to
check my “News and Feeds” posted by my friends and follow their lives, because I
did not like to miss an interesting thread. Very soon I found I am able to
block individuals in order not to let them see my information, photos, or any
other of my activities without alerting them. To spy, is one of the features
that Facebook as a main artifact provides for addicted members to increase the
sense of pleasure and power. As a result, this social interaction
causes envy especially when users compare how many likes or comments were made
on their photos and postings. For this reason, still I am very conservative
when I am thinking about posting a new photo on my Facebook page, or choosing to
“Like” a certain post. Everybody is watching me, that is my feeling before
tapping on the “Like” bottom.
Facebook addiction has become so huge and still
growing that it is no longer just a subculture of our global society. Within it
many subculture of addicts have developed and they have functions similar to
subcultures in more conventional societies. Even though it has benefits in
allowing us to remain connected in ways that were not imaginable to most people
a generation ago. Perhaps through such technological advances we can overcome
cultural misunderstandings and prejudices that have plagued the human society
for generations. Today, expanding my social life is easier than five years ago.
“We face more and more opportunities and incentive to spent more time in
cyberspace or let the TV do thinking.” Lasn says. Currently, I am not a Facebook
addict anymore, because I found Facebook addicts’ life similar to what Lasn
realized about life of individuals in the cyberspace “ …trapped inside their
living rooms, roaming the thousand-channel universe and exercising the one
freedom they still have left: to be the voyeurs of their own demise.” And I do
not feel good to see myself in this situation any more. Now, I would like to
join subcultures more about health and physical fitness to find my lost
self-confidence, pure mind and happiness again.
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