Pride or excessive exposure of oneself
François Saltiel, producer and presenter
Brave new world (French culture), author
The tea seller who changed the world with a hashtag AND
contactless society (Flammarion)
“The mechanism of social networks is not a revolution, it is an amplification of existing phenomena. Take cyberbullying, it is just a temporal and spatial amplification of school bullying that has always happened. But it makes it tangible 24 hours a day, everywhere. Even the shelter of the house no longer exists, the executioner chases his victim straight to bed.
This is how it happens on Instagram, Xu and society: day and night we face the lives of others, share ours with them. But our story is manufactured, it gives an enhanced vision of ourselves, with custom tools that allow us to beautify it, like filters, subjecting us to a form of constant search for performance. Social networks work on metrics: they quantify friends, comments, views… which creates challenges, expectations that lead to some form of pride: how much am I worth? Posting a picture is the same as saying: “Like”, “Approve me”; or in any case: “Show me that I exist”. There’s nothing worse than posting content that doesn’t generate engagement. When it comes to pride, it will hurt less to receive a negative reaction than to receive only indifference, which equates to feeling invisible.