Douglas Rushkoff Generation Like Essay

In the documentary film, Generation Like, Douglas Rushkoff makes an argument that social media is used to market a person or brand. His theory is extremely useful because it sheds insight on the difficult problem of identity construction by social media. In the documentary produced and directed by Douglas Rushkoff, people feel accomplished and happy when their liked on social media. In Generation Like, a young boy changes his character online to be funnier so people will like him, a young girl posts provocative pictures of herself to be liked. To get the ‘likes,’ people market themselves. Another way of saying this: people advertise themselves whether it be posting a “hot” new photo, posting references to pop-culture on their news feed or timeline, …show more content…
Under this circumstance, identity construction mostly involves the manipulation of physical scenery, such as furniture and/or decoration, and “personal front” which includes appearance, dialect, and manner to make a desired impression on others (Goffman, 1959). Disembodied online meetings allow people to hide their undesired features, and concealment allows individuals to reconstruct their stories and character (Tennyson, Robert D., Paul Kirschner, Jen-Her Wu, and Yair Amichal-Hamburger, 3). To understand even further, the disembodied and anonymous online setting makes it likely for social media users to reinvent themselves. Online, a female can become a male, an overweight mailman to become a model, or a mother to be a young college student. Online “role-playing,” as the phenomenon has come to be known can be an empowering process. Studies have shown that the elimination of physical “gating features” such as stigmatized appearance, stuttering, shyness, etc. allows certain deprived people to avoid the usual obstacles that prevent them from creating desired face-to-face settings (McKenna, 11). Overall, social media plays a big role in identity