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Social Networking : Does the End still justify the Memes?
Many ‘motivational’ memes are repeatedly posted on social media sites these days to further self-promotion and outdated philosophies with little thought to their actual meaning, relevance, or adverse effect on the platform.
Let’s take a look at ‘No Pain No Gain’ as an example.
Does the End justify the Memes?
Social media networks have become conduits for meme propagation, far more so than personal updates or career advancement in the cases of Facebook and LinkedIn, for example. Scrolling through either produces a list of sponsored posts and memes that far outweigh those that relate to the original intended purpose of the platform.
My previous article ‘Influences and the Decay of Social Media’ touched upon how influencers may cause the implosion of a network through self-propagation, in this article I want to touch on how meme propagation is diluting actual information content and rendering it practically invisible as a result.
Let’s take LinkedIn as an example. Over time it has become more of a social network, more of a sales and marketing conduit, than that of a career advancement aid as seemingly originally intended.
“…it is mainly used for professional networking, including employers posting jobs and job seekers posting their CVs”
- Definition of LinkedIn from Wikipedia
Is Suffering Necessary to Achieve?
What spurred my thinking on this subject was a post describing how business advancement was based upon the old adage ‘No Pain, No Gain’ which got me to thinking about whether this was actually production or even useful at all.
My initial thought was that if something hurts then why should you be doing it? I thought of a painter, labouring away for weeks or months to produce their work of art — is it the act of creation that is the most satisfying or inspecting the end result?
For the painter or indeed, generalising for a moment, to any creator, is it not the actual process of creation…
