Perhaps the most grandiose element of today's culture is technology – the takeover of social media in particular – and its frightening capacity to exploit in what we do, what we think, what we “like”, what we believe. Social media was created to allow adults, teenagers, and now even children to truly reposition themselves – to move from themselves to a sort of social celebrity. We can certainly blame “culture” for this exploitation, but as frequent users of media like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, we end up exploiting ourselves. We accepted a very welcoming invitation into a dangerous world, or a brutally honest computer screen. As we are encouraged, every day we make our private lives public. And we often find it difficult to regain our long-lost intimacy later, if we have not yet completely lost the meaning of it. With the rapid advancement of technology, a simple photo, a tweet, a video can haunt us forever. From university administrators to future employers to the websites themselves, the latest cultural advancements constantly exploit us. And in an attempt to move forward, or even just keep up, we abuse technology in return. Who is at fault after all? Are we innocently following the strict trends of modern society? Or have we narcissistically become our own paparazzi? Facebook remains one of the current paradigms of the technological world, where users can simultaneously produce and consume. A person has immediate access to various information: profiles, photos, frequent status updates, “likes”, wall-to-wall conversations, near-live videos, etc. Whether users perceive it as such or not, Facebook and its social media colleagues have become a commodity. We may not pay the middle of the paper world, we are constantly exploited: by computers, friends, employers, administrators, advertisements, etc. But the most unhealthy part of the process is the vicious cycle it leads us into, leaving our main achievement to be none other than ourselves. Works Cited Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. “Enlightenment as mass deception.” Cultural Industry (1993): 405-15. Print.Hooks, Bell and Amalia Messa-Bains. “Public culture”. Home Grown (2006): 61-73. Print. Kracauer, Benjamin. “The work of art in the era of its technological reproducibility.” Production, reproduction and reception (1936): 19-42. Print.Rey, PJ “Alienation, exploitation and social media”. American Behavioral Scientist (2012): 399-418. Print.Schlicht, Ekkehart. “Social evolution, corporate culture and exploitation.” IZA Discussion Paper Series (2002): 1-10. Print.