the morality of social media-colleen burke

I think social media is turning people into a bunch of narcissists, people are losing their identity with this new technology, and often times their morals.  People are more concerned with documenting and sharing whatever they doing in the moment with the world, no matter how trivial and abhorrent.  In the chapter “What is an Avatar?”  Coleman mentions writer Kevin Kelly “the augmented self as a symbiotic relationship with technology.”  In his assessment, technology has domesticated us.  Kelly does not indicate that we are enslaved, but rather, that we are “co-evolving”.” I’m not sure I share their inherent optimism, I feel that we are devolving with social media, and the instant gratification that is the Internet.   Much of the info we feed and read via social media is useless, it not only clouds the brain, but also changes wiring.  Some people argue that this new technology allows us to multi-task, but in general human beings lack the ability to to do more than two things effectively.  So while we updating our status, sending tweets, emailing, and writing a research paper, we are usually doing a bad job at at-least one of those.  Younger generations seem to view the Internet like air, they cannot imagine not having it.  They use social media, but some do not understand social mores.  Take the case in Steubenville Ohio, a girl was passed out and abused, and instead of her peers intervening they took video, and pictures, then posted it online.  There were tweets, youtube videos, and facebook updates of her humiliation.  The only regret many of these kids seem to have is that they posted it online, and that was only because it was evidence of their horrible behavior.  It is true that the very social media they used to humiliate this girl, was turned against them by the hacktivist group Anonymous, but even they can’t be everywhere at once.  As we “co-evolve” with social media, we must be cautious of our own exploitation and the exploitation of others with this new form of technology.