A virtual Life: How Social Media Changes Our Perceptions

A Virtual Life: How Social Media Changes Our Perceptions
Social media offers connectivity, but it is important to find a balance. Learn about how it is changing our perceptions of ourselves, others, and the world.
In social psychologist Kenneth Gergen’s 1991 book, The Saturated Self, he warned of an Orwellian world where technology might saturate human beings to the point of “multiphrenia,” a fragmented version of the self that is pulled in so many directions the individual would be lost. “I am linked, therefore I am,” he famously said, playing on Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am.” Little did Gergen know how dead-on his prediction would be.
Because as our society sits here more than 20 years later with our tablets and cell phones and electronic gadgets—seduced by the lure of the blue light glow—we have never been more linked, more connected, and more bound to a virtual reality that many of us can no longer live without.
“Tethered to technology, we are shaken when that world ‘unplugged’ does not signify, does not satisfy. We build a following on Facebook or MySpace and wonder to what degree our followers are friends. We re-create ourselves as online personae and give ourselves new bodies, homes, jobs, and romances.
A virtual life is shiny and bright. It’s where you post your prettiest pictures and tell all your best news.
Yet, suddenly, in the half-light of virtual community, we may feel utterly alone,” writes licensed clinical psychologist and MIT professor Sherry Turkle in her best-selling tome, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other. Founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, the book is the third in a series on the effects of technology on society and culminates 15 years of research on the digital terrain.
The long-term psychological impact of social media on individuals and their individual sense of “self” remains to be seen. But there is one thing we do know. Our daily lives have been digitized, tracked, and tied up in metrics. Our real selves have split into online avatars and profile pictures and status updates. And while social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are powerful tools that have the potential to build communities, connect relatives in far-flung places, leverage careers, and even elect presidents of the United States, they are also unleashing a myriad of complex psychological issues that have altered our collective sense of reality.
A virtual life is shiny and bright. It’s where you post your prettiest pictures and tell all your best news. “In games where we expect to play an avatar, we end up being ourselves in the most revealing ways; on social networking sites such as Facebook, we think we will be presenting ourselves, but our profile ends up as somebody else—often the fantasy of who we want to be,” Turkle writes. But is it real? More importantly, is it healthy?
The Unreal World
Dr. Ali Jazayeri, associate professor of clinical psychology at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology’s L.A. Campus, thinks there are clear and present dangers that can’t be ignored.
“I definitely think that social media has had a very deep impact on our lives. The world that we see on Facebook and other social media sites is not a true and real world. It’s a creation of people,” Jazayeri explains. “Among other dangers that Facebook might possibly pose in our lives, such as lack of privacy, is this habit of always comparing ourselves to others. People, when they are happy, post a lot of happy things. But when I’m not happy I will consciously, or unconsciously, compare myself to others. As a result, I create a world that is not a true world because I imagine that everybody is happy in that world, except me.”
While each social media site has its own personality and purpose, the wildly popular Facebook and its estimated one billion active monthly users has gained the most attention from psychologists for the potential to distort an individual’s sense of self and sense of other people.
What concerns Jazayeri most, from a psychologist’s perspective, is the danger of slipping too far into a virtual world and losing a sense of real life, real self, and real priorities.
A 2011 clinical report on “The Impact of Social Media on Children, Adolescents and Families,” published in Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, was one of the first to raise the issue of “Facebook depression” among young people worried that they weren’t accumulating enough “friends” or “likes” to their status updates.
Around the same time, Dr. Cecilie Andraessen and her colleagues at the University of Bergen (UiB) in Norway published a piece about their work with the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale the journal Psychological Reports. And this all came on the heels of somewhat controversial news that the American Psychiatric Association was considering the addition of “Internet addiction” in an appendix to the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), slated for release later this year.
What concerns Jazayeri most, from a psychologist’s perspective, is the danger of slipping too far into a virtual world and losing a sense of real life, real self, and real priorities.
“Some people use this social media to create something that they are not,” he says, explaining that the virtual world can distract people so much from their real lives that they either forget who they are or become so involved in the reality they’ve created that they don’t want to work on their own issues.
“Instead of me trying to deal with things I don’t like about myself, I will go online and present myself in the way I’d like to be seen, without any changes to me. It’s dangerous, and very deceptive. If you look at the history of psychology, we’ve spent the last 100 years trying to help people know themselves better, deal with their shortcomings, deal with things they don’t want to have, so we have a very reality oriented atmosphere in our Western psychology.”
Jazayeri worries that an overreliance on this virtual world that we create online is undermining all the progress human beings have made in addressing real-life problems.
“As psychologists, we have theories based on the reality of patient’s lives. Our goal is to help people try to see themselves for the reality of what they are,” he continues. “But if we perceive that everyone else is perfect, then we push ourselves to become someone that we are not, and then we get frustrated, and then we get depressed.”
Like Turkle, and other experts, he is careful to also note the value of such sites for helping people do everything from reconnect with old friends and family members to rallying community members during times of national tragedy or disaster. However, he believes we need limits—that as a society we need to be vigilant about taking time to unplug, to disconnect, and to reconnect with ourselves and our real lives.
In a statement that echoes Gergen’s words from 1991, Jazayeri concludes by saying, “Someday, I hope we will appreciate that the computer is not a substitute for a real human being.”
Consciousness, Collected
Dr. Eleazar Eusebio, an assistant professor in the department of school psychology at TCSPP’s Chicago Campus, has been fascinated with the concept of virtual worlds and social media since the early chat rooms of the 1990s.
“Something I like to talk about a lot in psychotherapy are the various dimensions of consciousness,” he says. “It can get really psychoanalytical if you’re going to look at what kind of behavior people are putting out there. I have been studying Jungian analysis, and I do find it interesting, especially when you look at personality types.”
Whether your inner nature tends toward paranoia, narcissism, manic, depressive, or even melodramatic behaviors, Eusebio says these things unconsciously manifest themselves, rather publicly, in an online setting.
As any Facebook user knows, there are “types” among almost anyone’s collection of “friends.”
“I don’t want to psychopathologize everybody who’s online, but I think it’s possible to take a quasi-diagnostic look at it when you examine what people write or how they interact online.”
Of all the social media sites, Facebook is a place where he says almost every personality type can be found, and analyzed. “This is the best modern example I’ve come across of what I’ve been calling the collective unconscious personified. How do we choose to present ourselves to this world? In addition, at what point do we stop?”
As any Facebook user knows, there are “types” among almost anyone’s collection of “friends.” Some use the site solely to promote their business or career. Others take the opportunity to share political opinions, while others post several status updates per day about events as banal as what they had for breakfast, or what’s on the dinner table. Some are a series of “check ins” at restaurants, clubs, museums, and airports. There are braggarts and complainers; cheerleaders and naysayers.
“Online groups tend to triangulate people. This environment will provide you the tool to display any kind of psycho-pathology,” Eusebio adds. “Cyberspace alone is a psychological extension of our own intrapsychic world. We all have various dimensions of our unconscious. And with social media, you can really dive into people’s lives. The danger is we throw our reputations out there, and we put avatars attached to who we are.”
While he says most adults have the foresight to screen their online behavior, to think twice about who’s viewing their status updates, photo albums and “check-ins,” the more compulsive types often do not—especially if the posts are made in the heat of the moment, late at night.
“One notion we might overlook is whether we would be saying the same things or sending the same messages if we were face-to-face in a coffee shop?” Eusebio wonders.
Or, even scarier, a job interview.