Here’s the video of my presentation at the Psychological Society of Ireland’s Annual Conference in Limerick, Ireland, on November 11th, 2017. The full title of the talk is ’10 years of psychology and social media: Watch out for these apps, for they come to take your jobs’.
The abstract is below, and a fully referenced paper will follow. Overall, the presentation is about the complex relationship between the study of psychology and social media.
As I have said before, the relationship between human psychology and our self-technologies, like social media, is a complex one, which deserves careful study. I feel that it is of great importance that research on psychological topics – which necessarily means social media – should be carried out with a strong focus on participant dignity and respect. Comments/queries welcome!
Abstract:
At the 2010 PSI Conference, I presented on what was an increasingly popular but then largely trivial pastime: Facebook. Today, I return with a more sobering message. In these uncertain times, social media is bound up with multiple crises of a psychological nature, be it cyberbullying, fake news, or radicalisation. Reviewing a decade of social media studies, and interpreting them in the light of Foucault, Danziger, Rose and other philosophers of the human sciences, I have three findings. Firstly, social media has profoundly changed the way we relate to ourselves and to each other: norms are shifting in developmental, interpersonal, clinical and many other psychological contexts. Secondly, social media studies are rapidly evolving and new methodologies threaten to render several areas of psychological research obsolete. Big data analysis of social media usage is moving into sensitive topics – including personality analysis and prediction of suicidal ideation. Finally, while we may struggle to keep pace with complex technological changes, I propose a number of clear strategies for navigating these volatile times. In a word, ethics.