I’m in a bunch of other media classes right now and the topics always seem to intertwine, so I’ve suddenly been thrown into constantly thinking about media and its place in our world. I’m interested in topics of surveillance and convenience – which is tied directly to our phones. I even think now about what I say out loud because “do I really want my phone to know that about me?”
Yet, going past our relationships with phones (and surveillance), I’ve also recently been very interested in the idea of social media and ‘likes’. In another media class of mine, we watched an episode of Black Mirror called “Nosedive” – if you haven’t seen it, you should. It shows a future where you rate the people around you (between 1 & 5 stars) and everyone is constantly trying to get a higher rating. Their rating affects their lifestyle – what jobs they can have, what neighborhoods they can live in, etc. We watched this in discussion of the idea of emotional labor. The characters in Nosedive were practicing their laughs and how to be charming to everyone because that would give them a better chance at being rated higher by their peers, but then no one is truly showing each other their true selves.
I bring this up because this could become our future (although, hopefully not now that there’s a visual of what could happen). It makes me wonder about how far our society will go since social media is so important to us and is manipulating us; could we reach this point or something similar in the future?
Beyond this idea, I’m also interested in the concept of emotional labor because I feel like this heavily applies to youtubers – and I watch a lot of youtubers (I watch much more youtube than TV). In fact, I watch a lot of the ‘bigger’ youtubers and will watch all of their content just because I’ve grown to like them over the years. But I think there’s this idea of people being genuine on youtube specifically because they can choose their own content and it’s not like a tv show or series that has an extra layer of professionalism to it. However, we all have to know that people aren’t always this cheery and their lives can’t always be this glamorous – these are human beings too.
So, my main interests are in surveillance, the future of social media manipulation, and emotional labor. Hopefully, I’ll have a chance to talk about all three in my project because they all tie in well together with the help of Nosedive (which I could use as a reference).
So, my working thesis for now will be this: How does emotional labor influence what and how we see each other online from the big social media influencers to our own friends and acquaintances?
(I may need to narrow that down a bit more – let me know what you think!)