Microtheme Draft #2

Joshua O’Keefe

Dr. Kyburz

College Writing 2

26 September 2015

Microtheme

            For followers of social media on sites such as Facebook and Twitter, seeing posts to promote causes such as feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, and helping refugees are a daily occurence. This had me thinking a lot about whether people actually feel a sense of accomplishment or a connection to others or a cause when they share or like posts such as these. In general, does online media dehumanize the causes and movements it promotes?

            One current example of this is the Syrian refugee crisis. Posts of Syrian children and families in distress are making their rounds on social media. I feel as though when people see these posts, they know it is a disgrace to mankind to let these atrocities take place, but do they actually see these photos are of real people, or another topic to make a status about? There are rarely updates as to what happens after these posts are made, and social media just tends to move onto the next injustice. We never find out if liking, sharing, and spreading these posts makes a difference, which leads me to believe that these posts dehumanize the people in them because we believe the amount of likes we get is making a change, but likes hardly ever correlate to change.

            This brings me to the conclusion that people, when they see these posts, they should put themselves in the shoes of the children and families in distress, or think about if their family was suffering as much as people in third world countries do. If they did, maybe we would get more done than just hitting the like button and moving onto the next crisis while forgetting the last and start to undo the dehumanization these posts cause.