Postmodern Age and Social Media: Panorama of Like Society

Abstract

In the current social sphere digitalization has become an integral part of people's lives and has shed light on the current state of society as a social phenomenon. The virtual world's structure plays a crucial role in shaping the image and character of contemporary society, influencing social relationships and daily life. The younger generation's identity is largely shaped by global and popular culture, and the ubiquitous like metaphor dominates. This has created a social and everyday life imagination centred around the concept of likes. Society's current balance reflects a hedonistic and narcissistic image driven by the live in the moment motto of global and capitalist consumption practices. To ease integration into the global capitalist consumption culture, tools such as brands, fashion, and shopping create a certain image. However, the like image, together with the steps of following, commenting and sharing, is positioned as the most important sign and condition of gaining the right to live in social media forms, having a strong identity (virtual account) and gaining followers. On the other hand, in the postmodern age, the perception, practice and imagination of the society on the sociological ground can be exposed to narcissistic and hedonic like-patterned social media content. This research aims to address this problematic and to reveal the current situation sociologically. The main problem of our research is to discuss how to make sociological sense of the content produced in social media environments in the postmodern age. In this context, the main claim of the study is that digital content identities produced on today's social media platforms can be understood or made sense of in an axis, perspective or framework that can be defined as like society in a relative aspect. The basic metaphor of the research, like society, is based on the concepts of show society, display society and transparency society in the literature as a different alternative. The research attempts to define a society with the concept of like society in response to the problematic of producing concepts in social sciences, which has long been a subject of debate in Turkey, and thus aims to contribute to the literature on sociology and sociology of religion to some extent. In this framework, the research attempts to understand, make sense of and analyse the panorama and praxis of the like society, which was put forward on the axis of social media in the postmodern age. In this article, the literature review method was used and the documents examined within this framework were analysed from an understanding and interpretative perspective.