The Social Media Paradox
The narratives that are portrayed on social media are often positive, inspiring and celebratory posts. However it has been linked to “higher levels of loneliness, envy, anxiety, depression, narcissism, and decreased social skills. What is the cause of this social media paradox? The answer is social metrics.
Social media metrics are datas and statistics that give you insight into your social media marketing performance. While this often is associated with businesses and social media influencers as of late it has also started associating itself with personal accounts where everyone manages their own personal brands.
While the interconnection of the world is something unlike ever before calls for amazement there is a negative outcome to such connectivity. We have a constant flow of information and opportunities for attention from others, and the need for such attention has often become a dominant thought in many minds. By having access to and the ability to track the data of who is checking our profiles, what percentage of people are of a certain age, sex, or location, can have negative affects on an individual’s sense of self-worth.
Social comparison has existed well before social media but it has greatly surpassed a time where it was only limited to people we met in person, our circle of friends, and neighbours. In today’s digital age, we are able to make detailed judgements about people miles away from a simple photo. We are shown “the highlight reels” of their lives and wonder why our own are not as exciting and happy. As stated by Forbes, “we fall into into the trap of comparing ourselves to others as we scroll through our feeds, and make judgements about how we measure up”.
Consistently checking the percentage of people who visited your profile page recently in comparison to last month or pondering why more people like a certain selfie as opposed to your most recent one is another form of comparison that social media and metrics put us through. While we compare ourselves to other individuals, we are also consistently comparing ourselves to our own online personalities. As Clarissa Silva of HuffPost calls it we are victims of “Vanity Validation” — by interacting digitally more than physically it becomes easier to emotionally manipulate others. The you that is portrayed onto your social media platforms and the true you can create a double consciousness.
This leads to vicious cycle of envy and jealousy as we try to chase the online personas in order to conform our real lives to match. By being envious one tries to make their own life like look better, post jealousy-inducing content of their own, resulting in an endless cycle of feeling jealous and one-upping another. Authors from Facebook, as quoted by Forbes, go on to say:
“This magnitude of envy incidents taking place on FB alone is astounding, providing evidence that FB offers a breeding ground for invidious feelings.”
The impact on self-worth and self-esteem by extension also impacts the overall understanding of value. Social media platforms are run by numbers from the basic coding of the platforms to the amount of viewers a livestream can garner. As our posts are defined by the number of likes we get, and our page interactions by graphs, charts and even more numbers it seems as if the understanding of value is shifting to being defined by numbers.
Our perception of value has skewed from “how much something is worth?” to “how many likes is this worth?” By tracking social media metrics, the value of a person and more frankly, how we view our own value, is defined by the amount of people who are interested in our social media personas. We believe that those who are able to garner thousands of followers, likes, and interactions on their pages must be important. If someone is perceived as important then our minds immediately perceive them as valuable as well.
The potential societal consequences of valuing social media metrics above all else can be found in Black Mirror’s acclaimed-episode “Nosedive”. The episode depicts a society in which it turns social platforms’ self-curation and validation-seeking into the backbone of a future society. There is also the issue that the “combination of an on-demand economy and a new class of ratings-dependant employees is turning people into entitled, hypersensitive critics” as stated by Tasha Robinson. While “Nosedive” is an extremity of what could possibly happen with such dependence on social media metrics, it is not an issue to take lightly.
The amount of social media users is ever growing with 2.46 billion users in 2017, and projected 3.02 billion by 2021 as per Statista. This leaves an obviously large number of people using social media and metrics in order to dictate their lives. Our society has not yet been fully consumed by social media it seems as if everyday we are getting closer to that point. While social media and the use of metrics is not all bad as it is often portrayed, it should be — like everything — used in moderation. Only then will we be able to lift the pressure of attaining perfection from our shoulders and become more and more happy with the little details in life.
