Social Media Makes You Pee
I’m not about to list out how many screens you may use in a day, and how many of those machines have some sort of social media aspect to them. We are all aware of our uses of different platforms to some extent.
It’s like drinking water. You drink a sip water and don’t think about it later. You chug a half a bottle in one sitting and you feel refreshed. You chug the whole bottle and you feel a little sick to your stomach. You drink your goal amount of water everyday that a social media post told you to drink to be healthy and you end up needing to go to the bathroom every thirty minutes.
A little bit of social media usage isn’t harmful. A lot of it starts to take a noticeable affect on your life.
Why participate in social media? Well, one could argue that like water, we need it to survive.
But for the sake of not scaring anyone, we also drink water because it’s refreshing. Especially at three in the morning.
It’s refreshing because it satisfies a need.
In a psychological sense, I like to look at Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
Humans are social creatures. However, I believe that we are also too smart for our own good. When we can choose the easiest way, why not take it? If you had to choose between going and introducing yourself to a group of people and slowly work up to “belonging in a group” or going on Facebook, liking a meme page, and instantly being satisfied when you contribute your content and interact with strangers. We continue to stay connected and scroll through our phones because it’s an easy fix to connect and communicate.
Social Media is also really super satisfying.
Clay Shirky talks about this idea of satisfaction of participation in his book “Cognitive Surplus”. Shirky uses the example of Josh Gorban’s fan club ran charity page where a group of fans created the charity through lots of work. He questions in Chapter 3 on why this group would spend countless hours working for their charity, and Shirky explains its not about the work, it’s about the credit. The intrinsic motivation of “we did it” and “I did it” keeps satisfying them. The many thank yous and credit given to each individual is rewarding. This can be found through many forms aside from Gorban’s fans.
Forms such as memes. Shirky uses his first chapter to explain why lolcats were so successful, and why social media remains addictive. “You can play this game too.” is a large part of why social media continues to run. Everyone can contribute their voice and content (just like Gorban’s fan club). This is satisfying to be able to be seen and accepted in a world wide web of people who want to see, like, share, pin, retweet, heart, etc, etc, etc… It’s no wonder people stick around on different platforms, because so many new ways of “You can play this game too.” happen everyday. Truthfully, the only reason I haven’t deleted my Facebook because FOMO (fear of missing out).
What does this mean for face to face interaction? Nothing. Do not panic: we will never replace face to face communication entirely. We do, however, replace the need to catch up. Small talk is really hard to have anymore because we already know what’s going on in everyone’s lives.
We lose the need to ask when someone’s birthday is because Facebook will send us a notification. We lose the need to ask “who are you seeing?” because your Instagram profile is filled with pictures of your honeymoon phase. We lose the need to ask where you went on vacation because you tweeted “got sunburned on the beach :(“
Is it a bad thing that we’ve replaced “catching up” with social media feeds and timelines? For me, it’s going to be a no. It’s just how our era communicates. There’s a post that circuits around twitter with two images side by side: one with a group of young adults on their phones, and the other of a bunch of older adults with newspapers.
Social media is not a crisis — just our current “thing”.
