Are we really being ourselves on social media? Can we benefit from connecting with people we barely know online? Why do some people overshare on social networking sites?
The Psychology of Social Media explores how so much of our everyday lives is played out online, and how this can impact our identity, wellbeing and relationships. It looks at how our online profiles, connections, status updates and sharing of photographs can be a way to express ourselves and form connections, but also highlights the pitfalls of social media including privacy issues.
From FOMO to fraping, and from subtweeting to selfies, The Psychology of Social Media shows how social media has developed a whole new world of communication, and for better or worse is likely to continue to be an essential part of how we understand our selves.
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This book is about the psychology of social media.1 It’s about trying to explain how so much of our everyday lives and modern culture came to be saturated with these incredibly popular and absorbing services. We’re going to answer such questions as these:
How do we express our identities in social media’s rigid profiles? Why does being ‘real’ on social media feel like hard work? Why do some people find fraping2 funny, but others don’t? Can we still be ourselves in anonymous environments?
Can we benefit from connecting with people we barely know? Which services are best for maintaining meaningful friendships? Is there a limit to the number of people we should connect with? How do we deal with being able to speak to so many people at once? And how can we avoid spreading FOMO3 among them?
Why do we say things in our status updates that we might not say in the ‘real world’? Why do we seem to understand privacy issues, yet continue to put lots of personal information in our status updates? Would it be better if our updates faded from view over time? What does it feel like to have all your past social media updates still present, years later?
What is the point of sharing images that disappear? Why do people share their location data with their photographs on social media? Why do people like to broadcast livestream videos of their personal lives? Can you make friends by putting lots of photographs of yourself online?
What does it mean when someone takes a long time to reply to a private message? When is subtweeting a good idea? Why do people sometimes write on your profile, but other times send a message? Why do some people prefer social messaging instead of social media?
One thing that psychology and social media have in common is that many people have opinions about them. Everyone has personal experience of psychology and we all speculate about the human behaviour we observe. The same goes for social media: anyone who uses it has a theory about what they experience. Perhaps you already have some ideas about the earlier questions. Obviously, in a short book like this, it won’t be possible to give comprehensive answers to them. But you are not going to read one-dimensional assessments either. Social media is simply too broad a phenomenon to be given a simplistic
verdict. Hence, The Psychology of Social Media will push back on your preconceptions and draw you further into the intricacies of studying these fascinating subjects – a concise and selective reading of the literature.
What is social media?
This book is structured across social media’s most recognisable features, namely, profiles, connections, updates, media and messaging. But while most people would know a social media service when they see it, that doesn’t mean it is easy to describe.
One misperception is that ‘social media’ is often used interchangeably with ‘social network’. In fact, a ‘social network’ is a concept that was around long before the advent of the internet. It refers to a group of people who know each other or are connected in some way. We all have our own social networks – our friends, families and colleagues – and these overlap and interact with other people’s social networks. Technology is not a requirement of a social network – even animals have social networks, and apparently some plants do too. This term has been used in the social sciences for many years, but it more popular through the 1990s as better statistical techniques for analysing them were developed.
During this period, the internet became publicly available in the United States, and soon throughout the rest of the world. Towards the end of the millennium, a revolution in user-generated content known as ‘Web 2.0’ took place, meaning that websites became more interactive and user-friendly. Many services emerged which began to resemble what we see today in social media. Bulletin boards, virtual communities and online dating heralded more ways for people to go online, develop their psychology and interact with each other.
But, in most of these cases, users were restricted to connecting with people they already knew. A crucial development came when SixDegrees.com allowed its users to connect with other users whose email address they didn’t have. They did this by allowing users to browse their friends’ ‘social networks’, pick out a profile and send them a connection request.
However, it seems that internet users were not quite ready for this yet. Perhaps the idea of connecting with strangers still felt risky, and SixDegrees failed after a few years. But later, this basic idea caught on and was mimicked in many other services like Friendster and Tribe. These were the original ‘social networking’ services: like at a business meeting, you could ‘network’ with new people you didn’t already know.
But by about 2010, as greater capacity for sharing photos and videos became available, the term ‘social media’ became more popular. Certain websites marketed themselves as being explicitly for sharing particular forms of digital media – Last.FM for sharing music online, YouTube for video and Flickr for photographs. Using the term ‘social media’ helped to distinguish them from websites like Friendster, Myspace and Bebo, which were mostly concerned with social networking.
However, this distinction isn’t really useful anymore. Almost every website which previously would have been classified as a social networking site now also gives its users the ability to share most forms of digital media. So nowadays, while the terms ‘social networking site’ or ‘social networking service’ are a little outdated, they essentially refer to the same actual services as ‘social media’.
But sometimes you hear Twitter or LinkedIn being called a ‘social network’. Why is this wrong? To put it concisely, it is incorrect because it confuses a sociological concept with a technological service. If Twitter covered the entire human social network, then it would be quite a service, wouldn’t it? More to the point, calling Facebook a social network implies that everyone with an account there has a meaningful connection with every other account there. Similar to when social media services call themselves a ‘community’, that also stretches the credibility of the concept too far – several hundred million users too far, actually.
Moreover, is there anyone in the world whose entire social network – everyone they interact with regularly, let’s say – is present on any given social media platform? I doubt that very much. As such, let’s be careful to avoid over-simplification: there are important differences between a social network and a social networking service.
Where did social media come from?
Many societies have had some kind of ‘self-technology’ which people use to try to put some kind of order on their lives. For example, in Roman times, the learned classes used books known as hypomneēmata to take notes, write mottos and contemplate their daily lives. These had no particular order or structure – the point was to help oneself remember things. This kind of self-technology lives on as the diary – a place where you can express your thoughts, feelings and experiences and reflect on them. But there are also more interactive and social examples of self-technology, including Roman Catholic confession and various methods of counselling and psychotherapy. All of these are forms of self-technology: techniques for ordinary people to put order in their lives in accordance with their beliefs, whatever they may be.
While social media certainly has ancestors in history, it has its own features, which are unique to its 21st-century context. One obvious difference is that it is so very public. That’s one of the most intriguing puzzles of social media: while it is very personal, like a diary or a self-help book, it is essentially a public transmission, like television or a newspaper. This makes its psychology fascinating – but it also gives us some insight into its core values. While mission statements vary across services, most are based on a very simple philosophy: let’s connect and share things with each other.
That’s why I use this psychological definition: social media are online services which encourage their users to digitise and publicly share previously private personal information. Related technologies like email, electronic mailing lists and instant messaging simply do not encourage users quite so much to make our own personal details public.
For example, if you create an account on any social media service but refuse to put any private information there or express any opinions, you won’t have much fun. Go ahead, see how long you last on Facebook without uploading a profile photo or Liking anything. All social media services broadcast a constant attempt to persuade users to reveal something of themselves. And given the ongoing popularity of these services, it would seem that, for a large part, we enjoy doing so. Social media services run on an engine whose fuel is human psychology.
What does social media look like across the world today?
Social media are an intrinsically American phenomenon. But that does not mean that they have not appeared across the world in various local shapes and sizes. Sites like SixDegrees, Ryze and Friendster are generally held to be the earliest websites which allowed social networking, and all originated in the United States. But before long, their appeal spread globally. FriendsReunited was developed in the United Kingdom, Mixi in Japan, CyWorld in South Korea, Grono.net in Poland, Taringa! in Argentina, StudiVZ in Germany, Qzone in China and many more besides. Yet the most famous services are still clearly American in origin: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Myspace, Snapchat and so on.
However, many local efforts are struggling to survive. Nearly every homegrown European social networking site is now out of business. Similarly, one wonders how well services like Sina Weibo would be doing if American services weren’t banned from the Chinese market. Notably, as a general rule, the further one travels from the United States, the more likely the local social media service will be integrated with other largely unrelated facilities. By which I mean not merely chatrooms or instant messaging, but also gaming and shopping. For example, the Russian service VK allows music sharing, and the Chinese service WeChat lets users pay bills. As such, many of the major non-US social media services try to function more as part of a ‘one-stop shop’ online platform, which might explain how they have endured.
Another feature of social media services is that almost all are owned by profit-making companies of one type or another. Unlike some traditional media companies, like the British Broadcasting Corporation, none are directly state owned. And unlike some of the internet’s most loved services, like Wikipedia, none are owned by non-profit or charitable organisations.
Finally, for a while in the early 2010s, it felt like a new social media site was launching every week. But that trend has faded away, and now we are largely left with the big beasts and little else. New services like Ello, Peach and Sararah burst onto the scene, but none made any lasting impact. There is a noticeable amount of sameness to social media these days.
How do we study social media?
As mentioned earlier, it is important to clarify what is meant by social media. But the other element of this book should be examined too. When we talk about psychology, we can mean a person’s mental attributes, their intelligence, emotions, attitudes and behaviour. For example, if I talk about the ‘psychology of aliens’ you’ll have rough idea what I’m getting at, even if they don’t exist.
But it can also mean the scientific study of those things. Psychology is a body of scholarly work, with scientific methodologies and clinical practices, carried out by people of various degrees of expertise.
The distinction between psychology as a topic and psychology as a science is important when discussing complex things like social media. For example, when I talk about the ‘psychology of social media’, am I referring to how we subjectively experience social media, or am I talking about how that experience is studied by scientific methods? The answers to the latter can naturally enlighten us about the former, but they can structure and influence it too. This is largely because of two factors – reflexivity and observability.
Unlike in chemistry, for example, the objects of psychological science can react to how they are described. A liquid doesn’t care if it is recorded as 50 mL or 60 mL, but a job applicant will care if they get an IQ score of 110 or 125. Additionally, while we can pour a liquid into a graduated cylinder, the topics of psychology are much trickier to contain.
Consequently, careful study is required, and a variety of methodologies must be used to ascertain the psychology of social media. The following chapters cite studies which use standard or traditional social science research methods and also newer, more technological and computational methods. The former include surveys, experiments and focus groups, whereas the latter involve machine learning, sentiment analysis and natural language processing.
There are advantages and disadvantages to both methodologies. Surveys, experiments and focus groups are time-consuming, as they generally require people to actively participate in the study. They also rely on participants being honest about their experiences – this is known as the problem of self-reported data. In contrast, the newer methods are faster, as they use already existing social media data. To do this, they rely on connecting with the social media services using what is known as an application programming interface. Such interfaces are constructed and controlled by the social media service owners, but they do allow scholars to include vastly more participants than could ever be imagined using traditional methods.
Crucially, traditional social science research methods are supplemented with long-standing ethical practices. In contrast, in technological studies, ethical issues are still under heated debate. Issues like informed consent are particularly challenging, as users of social media seldom realise when they are participating in computational research projects.
Hence, controversies erupt frequently, which also revolve around both reflexivity and observability. It is understandable that people feel that a controversial social media study directly affects if they are regular users of the service in question. Additionally, it can be difficult to verify such controversial findings, because the most valuable data is carefully controlled by the social media services themselves.
Consequently, when we try to find reliable facts about either psychology or social media, we run into difficulties. While it might appear that there has been lots of research published on many psychological aspects of social media, this evidence basis is best characterised as broad, rather than deep. In other words, we don’t yet have many findings that have been repeatedly produced by different teams of scientists using open data and mixed methods over a significant period of time. Everything is still contested here.
For example, there are hundreds of survey studies of American university students on the psychology of Facebook. Hence, while it may seem like I am focussing too much on one particular social media service – and I have tried not to – that simply reflects the reality of the make-up of the existing scientific literature. It would be nice if we had more research on other services, but we don’t, so we have to extrapolate as prudently as possible.
This book
In the chapters that follow, we are going to look at the psychological aspects of social media by breaking down their most common features. Chapter 2 looks at the psychology of Profiles – which I like to call ‘our own private corner of the internet’. This involves discussing how we express our identities on social media and the amount of work we put into trying to appear authentic. Chapter 3 examines Connections – namely the friends, family and other interesting people whose accounts we link to on social m...
