The most important element of today's culture is perhaps technology – the takeover of social media in particular – and its frightening ability to exploit us in what we do, think, what we “like”, what we believe in. Social media was created as a way for adults, teenagers, and now even children to truly reposition themselves, to move from themselves to some sort of social celebrity. We can certainly blame “culture” for this exploitation, but as regular users of media like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, we are ultimately exploiting ourselves. We have accepted a very welcoming invitation into a dangerous world, or on a computer screen, of brutal honesty. As we are encouraged, we make our private lives public every day. And we often struggle to regain our long-lost privacy later on, if we haven't lost any sense of it yet. With the rapidly advancing powers of technology, a simple photo, a “tweet,” a video, can haunt us forever. From university administrators to future employers to websites themselves, the latest advances in culture constantly exploit us. And in an effort to get ahead, or even just keep up, we abuse technology in return. After all, who is to blame? Are we innocently following the rigid trends of modern society? Or have we narcissistically become our own paparazzi? Facebook remains one of today's paradigms in the world of technology, where users can produce and consume simultaneously. A person is provided with instant access to a variety of information: profiles, photos, frequent status updates, "likes", wall-to-wall conversations, almost live videos, etc. Whether or not users perceive it as such, Facebook and its social media peers have become a commodity. We may not pay the world of paper, we are constantly exploited: by computers, friends, employers, administrators, advertising and so on. But the unhealthiest part of the process is the vicious cycle it takes us around, leaving our main exploit to be none other than ourselves. Works Cited Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. "Enlightenment as mass deception". Culture Industry (1993): 405-15. Print.Hooks, Bell and Amalia Messa-Bains. "Public Culture". nostrano (2006): 61-73. Print.Kracuer, Benjamin. "The work of art in the era of its technological reproducibility". Production, Reproduction and Reception (1936): 19-42. Print.Rey, P.J. “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. Press.