Social Media and Barthes Cultural Myths Social

Social Media and Barthes Cultural Myths

Social Media and Barthes' Cultural Myths

While social media services undeniably bring individuals together, they also have created a new type of cultural understanding of words. They have created a subset of individuals, who, as users of social media, conceptualize words themselves differently than individuals who are not social media users. Using Barthes' definition, social media itself can be seen as the setting of a cultural myth. It is a vast network wherein signifiers, which outside the myth are associated with their own rich set of signifieds, are given new interpretations (Barthes 1957/1972). That is, these concepts, which outside the myth are imbued with connotative meanings, within the myth are set at a distance from those meanings and given a related, though slightly different, set of signified concepts. In particular, the concept of "friend" within the social media myth gains its own, new, mythic signified interpretations. These interpretations are then set up as normal, within the culture and the myth (Barthes 1957/1972). A Facebook "friend" is a very specific social construct, a construct that exists only within the culture of social media networks, and one that is very different from the "friend" that exists outside of those networks.

Outside the world of social media, the signifier "friend" brings to mind both a sign and a signified. Outside social media, when one refers to one's friend, one generally pictures a person, thus the signifier evokes a sign to which it is related. Within social media, however, one may not know one's friends physically (Orr, Sisic, Ross, Simmering, Arsenault, & Orr 2009). One may not have a sign to relate to. The words "Facebook friend" can simply be a signifier for another set of signifiers, such as the friend's screen name. Social relationships become relationships between sets of letters and numbers rather than between people. One associates the idea of one's friend not with the visual image of that individual, but with their screen presence, and the words with which they use to present themselves (Orr et al. 2009). There is, then, a culture created for which "friend" is a signifier representing other signifiers.

More important, though, are the signified meanings associated with the word "friend," both in and outside the social media sphere. Outside social media, a friend is one with whom one has a personal relationship, with whom one shares confidences due to established trust. Within social media, this is not the case. One can be "Facebook friends" with individuals one has never met. At the same time one can share deeply personal confidences with Twitter friends one has no personal trust with, due to the anonymity of the internet (Kujath 2011). Thus, "friend" takes on a completely different set of signified interpretations. A friend becomes both someone one has no relationship with, but has listed on one's friend's list, as well as someone one can speak intimately to without first establishing trust. Yet within the culture of social media, this dichotomy is considered normal. Both opposing concepts can be held at once, and both are considered "friends." The myth has created a new reality which defines the signifier "friend" in ways different than the definitions outside the construct of the myth.