WANTED: Social Acceptance
As humans, we have a natural desire to connect with one another and to share details about our lives through Tweets, Instagram posts, Snapchats and so on. But what happens when this desire turns to dependence?
This past summer I went to Greece with the Ryerson School of Performance as part of a travel abroad program. As young Millennials in a beautiful foreign country we obviously took advantage of any photo opportunity that we could. I remember laying on the beach one day with Tiffany* and Emily* (two of the other students who were on the trip) when Emily looked over at Tiffany and asked her to take some pictures of her for her Instagram. Tiffany immediately grabbed her phone and began shouting instructions as to where Emily should place certain parts of her body and where she should be looking. When Tiffany (finally) started taking the pictures, I remembered her saying, “Oh my god you are totally gonna get over 300 likes on this one”.
We live in a world where people boast about the amount of likes they receive on their photos or how many followers they have because it’s a measure of their social acceptance by their friends (and sometimes even strangers). Don’t believe me? Check out this video of David Beckham devaluing the number of Instagram followers his son, Brooklyn, has just reached by boasting that he has even more.
When people use social media platforms to upload personal content they’re hoping that people will approve of it and that they’ll show their acceptance of the posting via likes, “double taps”, subscriptions, retweets, follows, etc. These all act as confidence boosters because they are a straightforward measure of a person’s social acceptance by other social media users. Although these likes are seen as an confirmation of how popular that person is, the desire to continuously be socially accepted by others can be damaging to a person’s perception of their self worth. This is because the person can interpret the lack of likes or other affirmations of acceptance as a sign that they themselves are not accepted, which further leads them to think that they are less valuable since not as many people are expressing their approval of what that person has posted.
Do you ever notice that people who receive high levels of awareness on social media platforms always post flawless content? Well it’s not a fluke… There is a pressure to not only maintain but improve their social standing and so any content that does not match their carefully crafted aesthetic and won’t generate a lot of attention doesn’t make the cut. The problem with this is that by trying to create and post the “perfect” content that everyone will like you begin to live your life inauthentically. Everything you do is meticulously and purposely done to achieve the perfect photo or post, because again, the more attention you receive the higher you believe your self worth to be. This situation is parallel to the Black Mirror episode called Nosedive, where a person’s life literally depends on a high social standing. Although this episode is obviously an extremity of the situation, its basic concept isn’t so far fetched; we are desperate to be accepted by others and sometimes in order to do that we “fake it till we make it”.
An excellent example of this is past Instagram star Essena O’Neil. In 2015 the young social media star stopped using the social medium and exposed how the basis of the app is to build and support “contrived perfection”. She explained that she began to obsess about what to post and she became obsessed with her popularity and even began to suffer from low self-esteem. To really take a stand against the pressures of acceptance on social media platforms, Essena edited all of her pictures so that they revealed the truth behind the picture and that their isn’t anything genuine about pictures posted to social media.
So why do we do it? Why do we place such a high importance on getting likes on our pictures? In an interview with Cosmopolitan UK, psychologist Emma Kenny sheds some light on the subject.
“It’s a reward cycle, you get a squirt of dopamine every time you get a like or a positive response on social media. It’s like a hit, similar to the way you feel when you have a drink. The social media like triggers that reward cycle and the more you get it, the more you want it”.
This is further validation that a lack of attention on a person’s social media post can have a negative affect on how they see themselves. If society continues to treat social media metrics as the “be all and end all” of their measure of self value then there will be two groups of people: (1) those with high levels of anxiety, depression and low self esteem, and (2) those who gain so much attention that they develop narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). I think that society is so caught up in posting the perfect thing that they forget that there is actually more to life than social media. As Essena said, if you place too much importance on having the perfect Instagram aesthetic it will control your life and you’ll forget what it’s like to live freely and authentically. That’s why we as a society need to become more educated about the effects that social media can have on us, and how to not develop self-esteem issues or narcissistic personalities. If we don’t we’ll live our lives as two separate people: the real us and the social media manufactured us… and that’s pretty upsetting if you ask me.
*Names have been changed.
