Facebook, social perception, exploitation of Identity Crisis and depression.

Tags

deppression, Facebook, identity

 

 

 

 

 

There aren’t many studies in sociology on using the social media, and those that have been done, are not very exhaustive.  

In social psychology, there is a concept called “Looking glass self” and it states that a person’s self develops out of interpersonal interactions and the perception of other. The concept was created by sociologist Charles Horton Cooley in 1902.

 

Lisa  McIntyre in her book The Practical Skeptic: Core Concepts in Sociology, identifies, three components of this concept :

1. Our perception of how we appear to others

2. Our imagination and reaction towards their apparent perceived judgement

3. We develop ourselves through others judgement.

 

A person sees him/herself in a way, he imagines how his/her friend perceives her, how her family perceives her and so on. Based on those imagined perceptions, they draw conclusion and make judgement.

 

Also this concept was created and developed and studied, when Internet didn’t even exists, it applies to all areas of our social life and especially in our daily interactions in the social media environment. This concept is very important in studying teenagers and young adults interaction in the social media environment.

A users , say a teenager or a young adult will create an account on social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc) with various intentions and it may not even include his self perception, although nowadays, “esse est percipi”, to be, means to be perceived.  Most users reveal their identity on social media ( name, location, age, sex, occupation) but will leave out the major components of an identity. A name is a tag, is not a real identity. It can be easily changed. 

 

An identity is also made from beliefs, convictions, opinions, values, norms, preferences, stereotypes, prejudices and perceptions adopted and integrated as reality. 

A user will first connect to the friends he already knows , and that he will connect to friends of his friends, so many of his FB/HI5 friends will be users.  whom he is acquainted to. A study made on Facebook users shows that that the median friend count on Facebook is 100, that only 10% of people have less than 10 friends, 20% have less than 25 friends, while 50% (the median) have over 100 friends( J. Ugander, B. Karrer, L. Backstrom, C. Marlow.The Anatomy of the Facebook Social Graph)

http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.4503

 The same study found that 84% of all connections are between users in the same country.

 

The results tell us that users look to interaction based on proximity and common interests. As interactions take place between new users, new perceptions appear. Users will be less and less desiring to reveal their identity. With a growing number of friends, users will tend to express what is socially accepted, expected and desirable. As the number of friends increase, the diversity of interests, values, opinions grows forcing users to rethink their behavior.

 

If a user had a negative perception of a group of people, country, religion, culture he will be more willing to hide those views. 

 

Users will be increasingly aware that expressing certain views or opinions may be troublesome and it might make them lose friends. Thus, not only they hide their views and opinions they consider changing them, and consider embracing the more “mainstream” views and opinions.  Marginalization can occur in social media and can lead to depression according to a study done by Media Effects Research Laboratory. The study also shows the users with high self esteem spend more time adding information and those whit low self esteem continually monitor the wall and are concerned with what other posts.

The director of the Laboratory stated that the actions took by a user and the information they are adding are a reflection of their identity, “you are your Facebook”. 

 

What the director failed to say is that the identity reflected may not be the users true identity but his “socially desirable identity”. If a users holds views that are not accepted by his/her friends that he will show a false identity. 

 

The social Desirability effects, shown that in a survey, a subject will give an answer that is social desirable. This can also be extrapolated to Social Media. 

 

A cause of depression related to use of social media, as Facebook, is the perception one has and the fact that his social desirable identity does not fit with his real identity. The perception, imaged by the user, or the real perception will make him build a new identity that will conflict with his real identity. But isn’t identity social constructed?

 

It is, but when a identity is replaced, rather than built upon it will conflict, because a individual’s identity is build upon experience, interactions, socialization, rather than perceptions of others. What eventually social media does is build an identity based on perception, imagined or imagined, a identity that will always conflict with the initial one that is not developed in the social media environment.

This conflict is a great risk for children, teenagers and young adults that want to be accepted but also do not want to give up their own values, embracing what the group holds as “socially desirable”. this leads to a low self esteem and addiction to online social media.

A user will constantly look for a way to solve this inner conflict trying to reconcile their own values, views and beliefs with the socially desirable views, values and beliefs. Permanently checking statuses, posts and trying to find out the real perception that the others have on them.  Facebook options such as block, report, unfriend, are a cause of worry for teenage and young users. The greater the conflict the greater the addictions. I am not saying, However that addiction is influenced solely by this, but that such conflicts cause addiction for users with a low self esteem.

 

Social media companies know that a lot of our actions and interactions are based on social perception so they exploited that in their own interest, addiction does not constitute a problem for them, au contraire is a benefit. 

So, in the end, what is the solution that I propose? Age limit. The current age limit for Facebook users is 13. I am not even discussing the greater risk Facebook poss for children, like cyber stalkers, sexual predators and molesters, but the identity crisis and conflict that social media creates for teenagers is also of paramount importance and must be taken into consideration. The age limit must be raised higher. A child’s identity should be modeled by his experience, his family, his school. 

If you think my solution is too extreme, well ask yourself this: who should raise your children? Yourselves, the parents, or..Facebook?