This book is about the psychology of social media. It’s about trying to explain how so much of our everyday lives and modern culture came to be saturated with these incredibly popular and absorbing services. Chapter 1 opens with these… Read More »Introducing ‘The Psychology of Social Media’
What are the values of social media? The last chapter of The Psychology of Social Media begins by repeating the book’s psychological definition of social media. In other words, the idea that these online services encourage us to digitise previously private personal information.
Fundamentally, Chapter 7 is concerned with two meanings of the word ‘values’ and how this relates to understanding social media. Values can mean numbers and digits, but it can also mean morals and ethics. I argue that to understand the psychology of social media, it is essential to realise that social media’s principles are essentially quantitative.
To illustrate this point, discussion moves to a historic tragedy on the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, and how the idea of commodifying our selves helps understand social media. This brings us to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and the psychometric personality research behind it.
However, this kind of research assumes that social media accurately reflects human behaviour. I question this by exploring censorship, fake accounts and black markets for upvotes and comments. This also highlights how little users understand about how social media services operate.
While it might seem a long way off at present, I hope that in the future we will develop not only better methods of managing social media, but better understanding of our selves as a result. We need to clarify our own values, and for social media to better help us to do so.
Read More »ValuesWhile social media is largely concerned with publicity, nearly every service also includes the ability to communicate in private – messaging . As such, Chapter 6 of The Psychology of Social Media is about direct messages or private messages.
It begins with the failed attempt to send a lewd Twitter direct message that became known as the ‘Weinergate’ controversy. This is discussed in relation to the hyperpersonal model of communication, which explains how social media users try to exploit features like being able to edit messages to achieve communication goals that they cannot in face-to-face conversation.
But messages also include timestamps, which are shown to be crucial in understanding Facebook Pokes. Additionally, users’ motivations are explored in this chapter, noting how social media relationships are maintained by disclosing personal information within private messages. While sharing such information publicly does not seem to have the same effect, this chapter also examines indirect messages or subtweets, and the varied impressions that they create of their senders.
Furthermore, the appeal of social media is compared to social messaging services, where it is shown that users prefer the former for informational reasons, and the latter for social satisfaction. However, occasionally social messaging services are used for informational purposes, and the moral dilemmas created by rumour-spreading on WhatsApp during a security emergency is discussed.
Read More »MessagingFor many of us, sharing photos and videos online is the main appeal of social media. Hence, Chapter 5 of The Psychology of Social Media focusses on why we like to do this, and what we gain from doing so.
Beginning with the Snappening incident, where Snapchat photos and videos, far from disappearing once viewed, were leaked on the internet. This is interpreted in relation to the concept of presence, or the illusion whereby a mediated experience does not feel mediated. Hence understanding shared media as a kind of psychological travel, this chapter next reports on Instagram users sharing location data with their holiday photographs.
Additionally, this chapter considers how users of two live video streaming services attempted to authentically develop their identities by providing their audiences with unedited access to their lives. However, this shown to be a precarious practice, as Meerkat was abruptly discontinued when Periscope was bought by Twitter.
Other hazards of building social capital on social media discussed include sharing self-portrait photographs – or selfies – and the onerous amount of labour involved, which seems prohibitive, even for the highly attractive.
Finally, Chapter 5 examines the collective labour of the Harlem Shake videos, and the commercial aspects of these kind of memes that most of us know nothing about.
Read More »MediaEvery social media service gives us the power to write updates – tweets, notes, blog posts – public texts where we are free to express ourselves in anyway we like. And so Chapter 4 of The Psychology of Social Media begins with the Twitter Joke Trial – a classic case of online disinhibition, where people say things online they might not say in the ‘real world’.
A sense of invisibility when posting is noted, which led to a discussion of the Facebook News Feed outcry, and a re-examination of the privacy paradox. Users’ frustration over losing control of their updates’ publicity, yet continuing to post personal information publicly, is interpreted with regard to the ‘Facebook iceberg’.
Algorithmic timelines threaten us with obsolescence unless we post popular updates, and as a result our attention is focussed on the visible tip of social media activity. Furthermore, while social media prefers current content, it nevertheless has a permanent quality: even when updates are out-of-date, they are still indefinitely searchable.
Hence, Chapter 4 concludes by examining how we deal with the temporality of our updates. While we don’t want them to fade from view over time, having a lifetime archive publicly available forever can be an unpleasant experience: the past collapsed onto the present.
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