Does Social Media Really Connect?: On the Psychological Effects of Social Media

Joice Chen

Throughout the course of evolutionary history, we have relied on social networking to survive both as individuals and as a species. These relationships are based on trust and cooperation, which is built when people disclose personal information about themselves and are responsive to others. Network connections and mobile devices, such as Smartphones, make it easier than ever for people to disclose personal information and respond to others in their social networks. People use multiple mediums such as text, audio, and video to keep communication, and they make the social network much larger and more far-flung than those of their ancestors. The concept of social media thus emerges, which refers to the forms of electronic communication through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content. Because of its wide impact, social media has since its popularization become a marketing tool to attract users to its platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkIn, Weibo, Tumblr, and Instagram. Most people understand social media as networking platforms allowing one to connect with people worldwide. However, the term “social media” does bring up the question of whether these medias actually facilitate social interactions.

Today, social media has significant impacts on people’s lives, but like most other social phenomena, social media has its two sides. On one hand, it can help family, friends and even strangers to stay connected across geographic boundaries, comfort the social anxiety when people are eager to communicate with their loved ones, and also enable professionals, such as doctors and teachers, to better serve their clients and audiences. On the other hand, social media may isolate people by reducing their physical interaction. It may also generate bias among individuals and social groups by distributing large amounts of unverified information. In some extreme cases, social media may promote virtual and even physical violence. The relationship between social media and people is a paradoxical one, and while some views hold social media as an advancement that strengthens interpersonal relationships and social networks, I support the argument that media detached people from the diverse social phenomenon around. In addition, although one may reach social media users from the opposite side of the globe, the conversations among these social media users may become superficial and less effective. Thus, in this essay I will explain how social media undermines people’s ability to engage in strong social connections through its facilitation of group-think, inhibition of social interactions in real life, and provocation of anxiety, although if mindfully used social media could allow opportunities to reach a broader social network.

Social media using web-based connections is a comparably new phenomenon, only having a history of a few decades. However, advancement of technology and the commercial system have enabled social media to generate influence through almost all aspects in human society and transformed the way people communicate with one another. 3.5 billion people, which accounts for 45% of the total human population on Earth, are active social media users. People spend an average of 3 hours per day on social networks and messaging, and up to 90.4% of millennials and 77.5% of generation X are social media users. This widespread use of social media magnifies its impact throughout the world. Social media was first developed as a digital platform for communication not confined by time or space, however, with its speeding development, social media had increased a great number of different functions, including short videos, public posts such as moments, and a variety of emojis. Such development can be traced back to the roots of the social media commercial system. Part of the reason why social media is attractive is because the media itself is made to attract attention. As Azak Raskin said in the new Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, for social media companies the “advertisers are the customers, and the users are the product that is advertised to.” This is the driving factor behind social media companies. They will keep people’s attention drawn through algorithms that recommend content to the user based on his or her engagement time and user relevancy, so they can give their customers, the advertisers, the platform for their product to be displayed. Such attractions then pull people away from other types of social interactions, such as face-to-face communication with body languages and other physical interaction with family members and friends, and thinking and reading without screen time.

People’s addiction to social media also lies in our own psychological and biological needs. When human beings evolved to live in a community, they rely on communication to maintain both physical and cultural survival. They learned to use various forms of media to facilitate the exchange of information in a community, which is the early form of social media. Social media has existed in human history for at least a couple of millennia. In the Roman Republic, people leave notes on the wall to exchange political news and gossip. In the 14th and 15th century, the development of the printing press allowed theological and scholarly arguments to take place in public and to be discussed back and forth throughout Europe. The 17th and 18th century coffee-houses were also centers of socialization as people from all different classes joined together to discuss politics, religion and literature.

Compared with these social media in history, the digitized social media leaves less room for open communication, confrontation, and reflection. That is, those social media in history did not involve individuals being confined to only what he or she sees on a screen, which is manipulated for commercial purposes. Today’s technological advancement allows people to be connected with users on social media at any time and any place, and its convenience allows people to live and communicate in isolated conditions. With such isolation, social media becomes the main, perhaps even the sole route for an individual to reach out to the world. As previously stated, social media is commercially programmed to attract user’s attention, and it does so through deciphering the individual users’ preferences and recommending news, posts, or even users based on those preferences. All this information will eventually form a bubble around the user, surrounding him or her with not only a specific set of information, but also a specific type of people. The pitching algorithm, keeping detailed records on the user’s search engine, links the user click into, and even the time the user spend on any specific activity, will recommend people who have similar interests and characteristics to one’s social media circles, therefore increasing the probability of similar people interacting with each other through social media. As more similar people are grouped together, their beliefs tend to get amplified or reinforced in this enclosed in-group system, lacking any voices in rebuttal. The stronger the in-group cohesion, the harder for external ideas to be integrated. This effect is called the “echo chamber effect” and apart from its dangerous potential in forming political polarization or extremism, it hinders in depth debates and discussions on topics. It is these psychological forces of echo-chamber and group-think, magnified by the media environment, that led to the formation of online communities waging “verbal wars” at each other. John Dewey, an American philosopher, defined a public as a community of “all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for.” In a single and unified public, every individual’s actions affect strangers, which provokes an obligation in every individual to think about the consequences of their actions. On the contrary, a fragmented society with smaller publics results in people who are less attuned to the effects of their behavior. As German philosopher Jurgen Habermas studied, public spheres are maintained through having a space to discuss social problems, discuss solutions and form agreements about collective ideals. He argued that a public sphere exists on the basis of inclusivity, a collective willingness to cooperate in the search for meaningful agreement on how the world is and should be. Similarly, valuable social relations are those formed through debating, discussing, and reflecting on different or conflicting ideas that result in the gains, whether in knowledge or experience, of the conversation’s participants. However, those conflicting ideas will not be present in the situation of group-think when people only reinforce each other’s ideas, resulting in only superficial relationships.

The other main factor that results is the lack of physical interactions from great amounts of online communication. Social media allows people to virtually interact without being confined to their geographic location, and long-term usage of social media will form a comfort zone for the individual that is so efficient, so appealing, and so useful that they develop an addiction to the screen. People retreat behind their screens, hiding behind their virtual profile to engage in conversations that cause them to miss out on real-life experiences. Thus, even in normal, physical social occasions such as at a reunion or party, people will stay in their portable technological comfort zone, and once they open their screen, they once more diverge themselves in the technological world that drowns out all the voices around them. Long time engaging in screen communication will reduce people’s social interaction using body languages such as eye-sight, movement, use of space, and smell, thus reducing people’s social experience. Digital natives are losing real life communication skills by forming online relationships with robots and learning these skills from them rather than living with older generations. According to a survey done by Common Sense Media, 44 percent of surveyed teens agree at least “somewhat” that using social media often distracts them from the people they’re with when they get together in person. Furthermore, nearly half of all teens say they sometimes get frustrated with their friends for texting on social media while they’re hanging out together. As one 13-year-old boy from the survey said, “It’s boring to talk to someone that has to check Facebook every 5 minutes.” This attachment to social media does not only disrupt bonding between friends, but also interactions among family members. A January 2012 Center for the Digital Future at USC Annenberg school study found that the percentage of people reporting less face-to-face time with family in their homes rose from 8% in 2000 to 34% in 2011 , while 28 percent of teens whose parents have a mobile device say they consider their parents “addicted” to their devices, and 21 percent of all teens say they wish their parents spent less time with their cell phones and other devices. Attachment to such digital devices inflict negative impacts on personal relationships. According to Spenser Christensen in her study on social media emotional associations at Brigham University uncovered that the more time an individual spends on social media, the more likely they are to experience an overall negative impact on emotional wellbeing and relationships. Majid Zorofi, professor of psychology at an Islamic university, concluded in her study that many teenagers claimed it is much easier to talk via text message than in face-to-face conversations. Social media emerges as a means of isolation to users and inhibits their physical communication skills, and as social media are becoming an increasingly important part of an individual's personal and professional lives, people dedicate their efforts and emotions on social media to constantly channel their experiences, or their private sphere, through social media. Although 90% of users report that social media made it possible for them to join with their old friends and make new friends, the consumption of such easily acquainted friendships is also fast. Users are forced to text and post constantly in order to retain these friendships and engage with new friends, and this obligation of continuing interaction online, adding on to the consumerist attractions by social media algorithms, brings people away from their social environment in reality.

Therefore, although social media provides convenience and enhances people’s communication frequencies, people cannot engage in high quality emotional and social bonding. Even worse, people who become addicted to social media will have less emotional experience. They will develop less empathy to other people, especially those who are different from them, and for the reasons mentioned above, people who are different will have less chance to be referred into their in-group social network. The lack of empathy between different groups will eventually lead to mis-trust, polarization, and even on-line or off-line violence. With the growing use of media, there are more and more findings of negative physical and psychological impact of social media. According to a study done by the University of Georgia, the hours of time spent online has a direct link with predicted cyberbullying in adolescents, especially in males. Not only detachment, social media can also invoke anxiety in its users. It is unsettling that social media, a virtual world, can easily manipulate responses in the real world. A social psychology experiment led by data scientist Adam Kramer found that emotions on social media are almost contagious. When people are presented with more depressing posts on Facebook, such as despondent status updates or failing to live up new year’s resolutions, users reported they felt more depressed than usual. Emotional influences do not end there. With social media, people have access to an overwhelming pool of information about the lives of others. Meanwhile, because social media is a virtual platform, people are able to display whatever they want with their virtual identities. The nature of anonymity or hidden identity will encourage people to break the social norm and use extreme behavior and languages that they may not dare to use in the real world. Just as a penetrating observation made by a teen in an interview, “People think other people are impressed by voice cynicism in the public square,” he added. “But in private we’re all really nice and anxious.” Furthermore, the information posted is also available for a wide range of audiences, which means one’s post is susceptible to other people’s judgments, which in turn influences an individual's sense of self-worth and identity. Around 60 percent of teens admit they feel pressured to look “perfect” on social media, and there has been an increase in the number of teen plastic surgery in the last decade. We are not evolved to be aware about what millions of people think about us, or to accept social approval every five minutes, and such external pressures are what cause anxiety in the social media users. There has been a gigantic increase in depression, especially for the new generation of young adults. Studies have shown that between 2011 and 2013, which is when Gen Z in middle and high school first had contact with social media, 62 percent of older teen girls were admitted to the hospital because they cut or harmed themselves, while it is up to 189 percent for preteen girls. Horrifyingly, the same pattern also applies to suicide rates, which had a 70 percent increase compared to the first decade of this century. The risks might be related to how much social media teens use. A 2019 study of more than 12,000 13 to 16-year-olds in England found that using social media more than three times a day predicted poor mental health and well-being in teens, and similarly, a 2016 study of more than 450 teens found that emotional investment in social media were linked with worse sleep quality and higher rate of depression. It is the “exposure to carefully curated images from other peers’ lives that lead to negative comparisons”, researcher Holly Shakya and Nicholas Christakis concluded, and it is this self-comparison that adds upon the sheer quantity of social media that detracts people from more meaningful real-life relationships and experiences.

This is not to say that social media does not have its benefits. Other than the more common reasons people use social media, which is staying connected with family members and friends, social media even offer potential to improve the state of the world through open discussions. There are over 3.6 billion people using social media, and because of the wide scope of the audience, social media has great potential to generate valuable social and economic outcomes through people’s collective innovation and rich discussions. These benefits, however, can only be created if the user engaging in the conversations is mindful of their online presence and knows their purpose in the media. Instead of only flipping through millions of web-pages, users should constantly reflect upon their intentions and ground themselves in limiting social media to a support of real-world relationships, according to Ravi Chandra, a psychiatrist and writer for the Greater Good Science Center.

With the advancement of technology and mobile devices, our society will inevitably have more incorporation of social media, but we need to build awareness and decrease our addiction to enrich life experiences outside of the screen. Here are a few recommendations. First, social media companies must regulate their platforms to better secure conditions in this virtual public sphere through managing inclusivity, fast-checking and safety from violence. These may not be enough to produce Habermas’s utopia of a public sphere, but without them, no public can survive. The government can control social media companies through legislation that holds these companies liable to any financial or social consequences. Second, people should regulate their daily time of social media use, ideally to within 30 minutes. Research from the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology found that bringing social media use to 30 minutes per day can lead to significantly less experience of depression or loneliness. Third, and more generally, social media should be treated as a social good. In our developing world people are inevitably going to be online, and such permanent transformation should be addressed through liberal management, creating “digital equivalents of parks, community centers, local waterholes,” and similar social centers for people to coexist, with the purpose of supporting real-life socialization.

To conclude, although social media provides more convenience and allows one to build a larger social network, it may hinder the establishment of more valuable relationships and generate multiple negative social outcomes because of its reinforcement of group-think, which restrains the debate and reflection of different ideas. Social media also reduces people’s social interaction in the physical world, thus harming their emotional ability and social experience. In addition, social media may also increase social detachment, emotional anxiety and virtual violence. By developing awareness of these pros and cons of using social media, we need to take action to help ourselves and others around us to enjoy the positive features of social media while reflecting the potential risks of using social media. Instead of looking at the world through our computer screens, we need to take more time to experience the world and interact with people, using all types of media, especially face to face interactions.