More and more of life is beginning to be seen through a screen or camera lens, but before we all rejoice with instantaneous notifications from all 1,082 of your closest Facebook friends let us consider how today’s obsession with social media is affecting us. While this topic at first appears to be a classic case fear of change normally in the form of nagging grandparents, the psychology behind it just might prove to worth more than a quick glance. Despite the fact that the big name sites like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter simply didn’t exist much more than a decade ago makes this debate a contemporary one with limited concrete evidence of its effects on youth, but a look at what we do know sets the stage for intriguing findings.
Since the Internet has grown into the go to source for instant media and connection, a varied array of issues has arisen with it. Over recent years, scientific research, along with a generally common agreement, has supported the case that with more time online focused on social media, mental well-being begins to deteriorate with a lack of face-to-face conversation. However, this by no means is an attempt to knock social media down for all its worth, but rather an examination at the dangers of completely replacing those across the table for those a click away. Nowadays, a Facebook friend can turn into an internship and a Twitter follower into a job opportunity, all from the lumbar support of an office chair, but just as our climate faces manmade altercations, our mind takes on a reevaluation at the hands of a social networking revolution.
As the generation that has lived through this revolution, it is our responsibility to acknowledge these effects before we unknowingly pass it down to our children and our children’s children. With a world of information at our fingertips, do most of us try learning a new language, try to grasp quantum mechanics, or do we watch videos of people attempting the cinnamon challenge? So, before we go ahead and have everyone work from bed on their MacBooks, psychologists have been digging up exactly what is going on in our brains when we post statuses and count our likes.
For one, heavy users of social media report experiencing more unhappy, negative affect namely in the shape of loneliness. As we log on to our networks this morning, what did we see? So-and-so just got a new job, so-and-so just got engaged, and so-and-so just posted pictures from their vacation in Paris; and while we look at all of them, we start to look at ourselves. But believe it or not, not everyone else in the world is happy, not everyone has life changing events to flaunt, and we are not alone.
In this same manner, one should take each self-promoting post with a grain of salt. Where a typical face-to-face conversation consists of about 30-40% of self-centered topics, approximately 80% of online communication is egocentric. Encouraged by a posse of “likes,” our generation has sprung an increase in rather unfavorable personality traits leading into narcissism. While, this is clearly overgeneralized, my point is that when we cut out our group of friends at the park with us in favor of a grouptext we begin a mental rewiring process. We want it to be clear, we want it to be easy, and we want it now, but as we share the iPad instead of stories, give a thought to what we want it to be like in the future. Will our children have scraped knees from the park or blisters on their thumbs from texting?
