Is social media enhancing materialism?
How many social media accounts do you have? If your answer is zero, ARE YOU EVEN HUMAN? Like OMG how are you going to know all the cool brands I have? How will you know how many friends I have? When we go out to dinner, I won’t be able to tag you! How will people know that we are together at this restaurant? How will people envy what we are doing?
The contemporary society is amongst an age where social media is heavily entwined into their everyday lives. Businesses use it to advertise, individuals use it to share their life and some have a large group of followers, following every post they make. Users are obsessed with posting photos containing what they bought at shopping that day, what mountain they hiked kitted out in their newest Nike and LJ gear, or even how ‘on fleek’ their eyebrows are for ‘tonight’s girls night out’.
These materialistic posts have an underlying meaning, to make viewers feel envious. How does this impact obsessive materialistic social media users? Ultimately, does a social medium influence or add to the ideology of materialism?
Social media is an additional platform to the unlimited array of accessible advertising avenues. Everybody’s daily life is heavily engulfed with advertising, whether it is the car sitting in front of you on your way to work, the watch that the bus driver is wearing or even the more traditional advertising like posters on buses and billboards. You may not even realise, but almost everywhere you look there is some form of advertising whether you mean to take it in or not.
Ewald Berkers explains that “companies use advertising to inform people of what they have to offer” it is how their products are displayed and portrayed, is what influences consumers. Advertising aims to portray messages in a way that will influence consumers. Advertisers tend to hide the manipulative side of the message. This is because if viewers noticed the manipulation, they would be less likely to accept it. Social media replicates this by users sharing their content in order to obtain popularity and likes from other viewers.
Professor of psychology at Knox College in Galsbury, Tim Kasser describes what being materialistic means “to have values that put a relatively high priority on making a lot of money and having many possessions, as well as on image and popularity, which are almost always expressed via money and possessions”.
Kasser shares that the more that people watch television the more materialistic their views are, this is because of all of the advertisments that are flashed on the screen in-between programs. The more that someone sees an advert showing someone happy with their product, viewers begin to want the same satisfaction being presented in the ad. Due to the messages that ads send relating happiness with success advertising is somewhat leading viewers to their materialistic views.
A number of studies have been undertaken to understand the health and happiness behind these people’s lives and the materialism they are displaying. The messages that users are presenting indicate that they are living a happy and glamorous life however, this can be far from the truth.
A meta-analysis of the association between materialism and people’s well-being was published from the University of Sussex and showed that “negative relationship between materialism and well-being was consistent across all kinds of measures of materialism, types of people and cultures. It was found that the more highly people endorsed materialistic values, the more they experienced unpleasant emotions, depression and anxiety, the more they reported physical health problems and the less they experienced pleasant emotions and felt satisfied with their lives”.
If you host a social media page, you would understand how easy it is to find someone that you may or may not know who religiously shows off items that they own often hash tagging the brand from which they are from. Many of these people are often portraying a completely different personality to the person that they are in real life. These users even include famous people of the world. If you follow celebrities online, you will be sure to have many photos of them endorsing products pop up in your news feed.
A local example is Gabby Epstein, with 593,000 followers (as at 21 August 2015) her regular materialistic posts are always presenting her life to be somewhat ‘glamorous’. Her updates often show her on vacation, endorsing the latest teeth whitener or featuring what she is wearing. This example is only one prime example out of thousands available.
An American and Arab study conducted found that materialism increased as social media use increased. Thus, linking the idea that materialism is influenced by social media.
If social media continues to be a part of people’s everyday to-do- list, people’s views will continue to have a materialistic priority which is not always good for the heart deep-down. It will continue being a case of users thinking that our material status will raise our self-esteem, which in fact it reduces it. The Guardian perfectly sums up this issue “It is case of people believing that by having more money and buying things our wellbeing will increase and we will be someone that others will envy. As our material status raises our self-esteem reduces”.
