Peking University, Nov. 2, 2012: “I have a face and a thousand books, so I don’t need Facebook,” said professor Hsin-I Liu from University of the Incarnate Word. The topic of the panel session is “Innovation and Change in the age of social media”, but Professor Liu insisted, “I hardly use social media.”
Speaking at a social media forum, Professor Liu admitted the influences of social media on the younger generation, whose inter-personal communication mechanism has been revolutionized from lips to fingertips, from tongues to thumbs by social media, including Facebook. For the “two-thumbs-up” generation, Facebook is the first social-political entity, and “Freedom, Equality and Fraternity”, the ideals of French revolution, will be achieved by the virtual kingdom of Facebook by granting its subjects autonomy of message broadcasting, equal access to network, and universal sister-/brotherhood.
As is visualized by a classical Chinese poem, a bosom friend afar brings a distant land near (hai nei cun zhi ji, tian ya ruo bi lin), social media, which welcome their individual subjects to deliberate, disseminate, and participate any time, any place without requiring the presence of their bodies in the same place at the same time, has turned remote relationships into intimacy and distant places into neighborhoods. However, nobody can guarantee the existence of the utopia for sociability between self and others promised by Facebook, or social media in general.
“When this utopian communication between individuals in social media turns into a tool for marketable sociability and publicity rather than remain a dwelling for non-identical reciprocity and publicity, Facebook has no place for itself in this promised land of mediated communication it has prophesized,” said he.
“Stay connected” has become the catchphrase in this era of social communication, but a theoretical impact of the inter-subjective obligation to stay connected with people through social media, is not the advancement but the damage of interpersonal relationship. While social media may have promised free dissemination of information and connection of identity, it can never guarantee dialogical sharing of experiences and recognition of differences among selves. Facebook connection creates both communication and isolation among us, Professor Liu explained.
Reported by: Ji Fan
Edited by: Zhang Jiang
