+/- 1000 of what I feel about this project.

Social media has been both a blessing and a curse to our society. In many ways, it has helped publicize certain aspects of personalities and opinions that were really hard to get people to understand. If an eccentric person wanted to express themselves before social media on the internet, they could only do it on the streets or in person, and people look at that person as a weirdo because that was the only way to express themselves before. Now, the internet and social media have made it easier to express oneself in another way that people can understand a little bit easier. Now, people can use words, tag themselves in pictures that they feel express their personality, and even post videos of themselves doing what they feel is part of their regular life and personality on the web and on social media websites so the whole can get to “know” them.
Now, one might wonder how on earth this ties into the final project. One way I saw social media affect the way reality shows get their characters was through social media sites. For instance, Snooki was a celebrity on Youtube before she became the recent fixation of pop culture fame. She would have probably continued being just a mere Youtube sensation, but since most reality shows use social media sites to recruit cast members, this helps the reality show find people easier. Before the age of social media, casting calls set up all around the country helped recruit characters for those kind of shows. Now, social media has allowed creators not only to choose characters, but also, many sites allow users to vote for the character they’d like to see. In many ways, social media has created access to viewers or potential viewers to pick who they want to see on tv, which is like a feedback loop. This interaction with social media allows the creators of shows to put what they feel viewers want to see, and with this, a specific niche of people will watch these shows and ultimately decide who and what goes on each show.
Due to this look, reality television can become more dangerous than what one feels. Some shows, like “Flavor of Love,” “Rock of Love,” and “The Real World” rely on these methods to pick their potential characters for the show, and consequently, the viewer can easily forget that the shows are not being designed solely by the creators but also, but the viewers who vote on social media sites. As a result, certain shows will reflect the values and interests of the viewer, even such things like misogyny, promiscuity, alcohol abuse, and insensitivity towards infidelity. This can make the viewers just as guilty as the creators of the shows when it comes to keeping the cycles of inequality for people active.
For this project, I really saw that reality shows take up many of the aspects of social media and the effects it can have in today’s society that is part of a very strong “instant gratification” era where everything is just a google search away. When we needed an answer or an inspiration for something, we could just youtube it or facebook it to see if it was popular. It was kind of scary how fast an answer could be found simply by having a ton of people like it and design a website where followers post information. I saw that one doesn’t necessarily need to have anything more than an interest in something that someone else in the world likes, and you can have a tv show. We all liked shows like 16 & pregnant, Jersey Shore, and The Real World. But we found this out in the classroom. Whenever I was on facebook typing something about these shows on the search bar, it kept suggesting the fan page for the shows for me, with each group filled with at least 300,000+ members. It was ridiculous.

The dangers that I feel come out from social media and reality show interacting with our daily lives is that there is no doubt these two factors affect us in ways we wouldn’t imagine. Reality shows like Jersey shore glamorize superficiality and hard partying with lots of sex, and just speaking with some underclassmen about the show and what “profound” lessons they learned from the cast on the shows really scared me. A lot of them started liking the show after they were asked to join a fanpage on facebook that linked them to clips of the show. Some of the kids never saw the show before clicking the link, so it was scary how they just devoured the show after a simple click on the “like” button.
If this project has taught me something, it has taught me that reality shows and social media have blurred the lines for people when it comes to what they want to show the world. Reality shows show how people do a lot of things (even mistakes) and the entire world just needs to tune in and watch, while social media and networking sites allow anything about a person to be posted whenever and wherever. It’s scary, but without it, we wouldn’t really be able to share certain aspects of ourselves to the world as fast as we’d like to.