Our Space and Place in Social Media

Our Space and Place in Social Media

Elliette Harrison

Space and Place can be two vastly different things but when looking at them through a social media aspect they might not seem so different. You can have your own space in the world of social media, where you are able to share your own thoughts, ideas, and opinions. While also having your place in social media where you belong and have set for yourself. When the internet first launched the idea of the “world wide web” was a daunting thought but now most of the world’s population has a place in it. We make our relationships with places, these can be in intimate ways, while space can give us that openness feeling.

The world wide web connecting the world. Retrieved from: https://www.msn.com/en-za/news/techandscience/how-the-world-wide-web-was-born/ar-BBUF3LO

Everyone likes to have their own personal space but as the use of Social media grows so does the personal space you might have on your profiles. Personal space can be both physical and also online, the chance to be able to post or share whatever you want online may no longer be an option. With many people having family on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc you have to be more cautious with what you post. The same goes with potential employers searching your social media accounts, to see what kind of person you might be, this can be a breach of your personal space.

We all look at our place in the world and try to define our place, in real life and also in social media, and we are not the only ones that have a sense of place, with animals also having a sense of place and territory with spaces marked off and defended (Tuan 1977, p. 4).

Many people make their place in Social media as their career and spend ages trying to make it big. While the lives they live seem to be fun, full of free things and things they get paid to promote and making a lot of money, many of them are just showing you the good parts of their lives. They don’t want you to see how they may really be. They set their place in the social media influencer world and work to keep that place or to get higher in the rankings.

While today we may show our place in the world differently than we used to before the help of the internet and social media, we still try to show our place. Thanks to the internet and social media we are even able to make our place somewhere new that we might never have thought about previously. Some may exaggerate their place for the sake of paid promotions, free things, likes and even money, we still all have our place, it might be a small place compared to the celebrities and influencers we see in the media all the time but it is still our place.

Reference:

Ainsworth, S., & Harley, B. (2019). Personal space: where social media natives draw the line. Retrieved 9 September 2019, from https://fbe.unimelb.edu.au/exchange/edition2/personal-space-where-social-media-natives-draw-the-line

Harrington, J. (2019). How the World Wide Web Was Born. Retrieved 9 September 2019, from https://www.msn.com/en-za/news/techandscience/how-the-world-wide-web-was-born/ar-BBUF3LO

Kuttainen, V. (2019). BA1002: Our space: Networks, narratives and the making of place; week 6 lecture notes [PowerPoint file]. Retrieved from: https://learn.jcu.edu.au/ultra/courses/_97532_1/outline/edit/document/_4076338_1?courseId=_97532_1

Marie, A. (2019). What No One Knows About Being a Social Media Influencer. Retrieved 9 September 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8edtoB5svY

Tian, Y-F (1977). Part of Space and place: The perspective of experience. London, UK: Arnold