Stromae takes on Twitter with Carmen

In this video clip, the superstar Stromae is taking on Twitter. He depicts a world where Human beings are too much focused on their social media. Ring a bell? Yes, it is a world that looks a lot like ours. It reproduces with exactitude how social media are affecting our lives and their consequences on our relationships with other people.

The Carmen’s bird embodies blue fowl, familiar to Human beings and the further we go in the video clip, the bigger and the more threatening Carmen’s bird gets.Laying on the character’s head, it scares everyone away making every physical contact impossible. What is even more striking is that Stromae represented people from everyday life and celebrities, such as Queen Elizabeth II and Barack Obama. By the end of the video clip, the bird is consuming everyone before expelling them out of its body. The only that comes out is a phone.

Through this video clip, Stromae warns people against social media’s duplicity: “Watch yourself / All those who ‘like’ you out there, those fake smiles cut like hashtag” (“Prends garde à toi / Et à tout ceux qui vous like, les sourires en plastique sont souvent des coups d’hashtag”). He denounces consumer’s consumption of social media. The more time you spend on social media, the more you isolate yourself from others.  Hence your friends are getting fewer but the number of followers are increasing. Being popular does not mean having friends and followers do not mean friends: “Network friends or followers? / No, no, you’re just popular” (“Les amis, les potes ou les ‘followers’ / Vous faites erreur vous avez juste la cote”). We are only able to love ourselves through buying and using social media. The more followers we have, the more important and loved we feel, but it is all fake for it is online.

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On some level, I agree with Stromae. There are different reasons to why we put pictures or videos online:

1. It is memories we want to share with people


2. But it is also a way of showing off sometimes


3. We can pretend to be someone we are not or live a life that is not our own


4. Celebrity is attractive, especially to young people

(...)

But if you control yourself, social media are a way of reconnecting or meeting with people and hence improve our social interaction. But it seems like he forgets that social media are also a way to communicate across the world and to give us an easier access to information. Everything lies in your self-control over social media.