Chocolate, Sex, and Social Media Metrics
Just like all the greatest things on this earth — chocolate, sex, pizza — social media metrics activate special neurochemicals in our brain that leave us wanting more. According to a recent Gallup poll, 52% of American smartphone owners check their phones a few times an hour or more, with an additional 20% claiming to check their phones about once an hour. This data is not hard to believe. In fact, most of us in the younger generations check our phone notifications far more often than this.
This obsessive relationship with social media comes from what psychologists call intermittent reinforcement. We keep checking our lock screens because sometimes there will be notifications and sometimes there won’t, meaning we never know when the reward of a notification will come, thus reinforcing the habit of checking. (Inc.com)
These notifications are a form of social interaction, whether through snapchats, tweets, facebook messages, etc. Social interaction is often very healthy and is crucial to developing a person’s sense of self-worth. We create our sense of self-worth through a combination of self-enhancement and self-verification. Generally, self-enhancement boosts self-esteem and self-verification is a more realistic assessment of self-worth. According to Dr. Charles Stangor, “Self-verification seems to be less important to us in more distant relationships, as in those cases we often tend to prefer self-enhancing feedback”. Since social media communities are usually dominated by distant relationships, our analysis of the feedback we get creates an imbalance of enhancement and verification, causing both low self esteem and overly high self esteem which leads to narcissism.
Also considered by Stangor, scores on measures of narcissistic personality traits have been steadily increasing in recent decades, namely due to “increasingly child-centered parenting styles, the cult of celebrity, the role of social media in promoting self-enhancement, and the wider availability of easy credit, which has lead to more people being able to acquire status-related goods, in turn further fueling a sense of entitlement.” While high self-esteem can be healthy and is a common aspiration in our society, research shows that it’s link to higher achievement and satisfaction is likely as a result of such achievement rather than the cause.
Narcissism and low self-esteem have existed for as long, if not longer, than society and civilization. Is it fair to blame these problems on social media? I believe these issues are a result of the social part of social media more than the media part, and they would still exist independently of social media. The problem that social media are causing in our society is the way that they polarize these two self-esteem issues. Where once we had the majority of people somewhat balanced between the two, we now have more and more people sliding to either extreme.
The effects of social media have become so detrimental and extreme because they have evolved from their original purpose which was to connect users and enhance their lives. Now social media have become excessively manipulative in order to profit. Social media exist within an attention economy within which every company’s main goal is to make sure you keep using their product as much as possible. It has become a persuasive technology that — just like the chocolate, porn, or junk food industry — is all about maximizing consumption. By constantly updating features, social media companies can use tools such as Snapchat streaks or read receipts to make users feel as though they owe other users responses. (Tristan Harris) Not-so-slowly and surely, the companies goals become are goals and we put immense value on social media metrics such as likes and views. Not all of the social media companies want to engage in this behaviour, but it is the only way to be successful when attention is the currency of success.
What our society needs is a more flexible exchange rate policy when it comes to social media metrics. We tried this attention is king stuff, it’s not working. In order to escape the doomsday prophecies of the research being conducted, we need to return to the currency of user benefit. Fortunately for us, there are some companies that have already anticipated this.
Facebook has recently made a commitment to making their services “good for people’s well-being”. In an announcement, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said “I’m changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions.” With this controversial algorithm change, he even went as far as to say “by making these changes, I expect the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down. But I also expect the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable. And if we do the right thing, I believe that will be good for our community and our business over the long term too.” While it may seem like a minor update, this caused major panic in the world of marketing. Panic for marketers often means hope for society.
Now let’s not get too excited, this might go badly for Facebook. This might be the last words of a dying company. But hopefully, it will be successful, and that hope is more than we had a year ago. When other social media follow suit as they usually do, our society will be one step further in our evaluation of social media and the effect it has on us. Social media are not inherently a cause of exaggerated self-worth issues. All we need is a change in not only the way we value their metrics, but also the way companies value their metrics.
