I Did It For The Likes!

I recently read a post by author Matt Haig where he hit on some good points about the negative affects of social media. He did mention some positives, but the overall purpose of the post was as a means of explaining why he was reducing his time spent using social media. I have touched on this in a previous blog, at a point when I was embracing social media a lot more.

I work in a job involved with preventing the illegal online conduct of fraudsters and tricksters. For ten years, I have spent a great amount of time using the internet and social media, but as a means of investigation rather than personal usage. Without realising it, I became quite skeptical of society, in particular online. In my mind, I had to have a guard up, be wary of who was on the other side of a computer screen and ended up acquiring a certain skepticism.

When I reacquainted myself with a past love of art, I was having to understand what it meant to create art and enjoy the process, without the end result needing to have a purpose. In my mind, a work of art equated to validation, it needed to be shared, provide a sense of achievement and time used productively, to have someone to show it to, or give to. As I accumulated my portfolio, I felt comfortable finding an outlet by which to share it and a good way to do so was through social media. Since then, I have had first hand experience of how social media works, but also how its users work.

Social media users are of course people. The people we live next door to, interact with face to face on a daily basis, family, friends, acquaintances. However, unlike day to day in person interaction with a small number of people, we are able to access the worldwide population.

Once upon a time, the world worked slower, more confined and in close proximity to small communities. Travel to nearby towns could take days, to different counties weeks and to travel abroad was restricted to months at sea. As humans evolved, so did ideas and means of travel became innovative to make it easier and quicker. Eventually, you could travel commercially for leisure, visit different countries and cultures, immersing yourself with others and sharing ideas, which you would take with you back home and spread among your social groups.

Then came the internet, a means of connecting people on a monumental scale. How exciting, how efficient in this fast paced world, how ... wonderful.

Yet as quickly as our lives were moving with the emerging, increased work hours, the elevated pressure, 24/7 news cycles and demand through ecommerce, humans now had to try and keep up without any real preparation at all.

Social media began in many different forms, from chat rooms, webcams, fansites, message boards, to Friends Reunited, a means of repairing those broken ties with people you used to know from a completely different stage in your life. People you were thrown together with at school, who you had just a little more option in choosing than you did your own family. From there, Facebook usurped a system that merely allowed you to catch up and perhaps organise a school reunion. This time though, you could extend your friendship groups by association, catching posts of things you perhaps liked from others you didn't know, but who bore similarities to you with shared nostalgia and likes. Soon you had affiliated sites, such as Instagram and Twitter, similar in their basic use of coding and purpose, but offering slightly different means of sharing information. They also differed in demographic of users and primary functions: textual and visual postings; musings and information sharing; tone and feedback.

For instance, if you spend time on Instagram, your primary reason is for socialising and entertainment by means of looking at pictures. If you spend time on Twitter, your primary reason is by socialising and entertainment by means of textual vocality and interaction. Facebook combines both, but serves more as a means of keeping people up to date with your lives (announcements, checking in the places you visit).

With this though, comes the clash of being social, whilst dealing with vastly more people than you would in a face to face social interaction. Ever experienced being at a wedding, where so many people have been invited, but depending on your position in the hierarchy to either bride, or groom, you may find you don't even speak a word to either the whole day? Attending a big event with a lot of people needn't require that you interact with everybody, but you might at least find a gaggle of people to crowd among and banter with. If you apply this to social media, your expectation may be to get feedback like you would in a face to face situation: someone says something, others reply, respond, laugh, nod, agree, feed back, and within an instance, not with minutes, hours, or even days of delay. There's a reason the term 'ghosting' became so prevalent.

This means of being social is perhaps exactly what prompted Matt Haig's post about social media. With such a vast number of people trying to reach one another and garner certain people's attention, for feedback, for validation, for rapport, for pure, simple friendship, can humans ever really square this innate need for being social on such a large scale? Is it any wonder in the age of being social online that mental health woes increasingly afflict more and more people?

My understanding of being sociable, or interacting with another person, is that if you say something, ask a question, offer an outlet for feedback, that you are met with a response. If you don't get a response, you are being ignored. That is either rudeness, or indication that the person you are talking with doesn't care for you (assuming they heard you). Facial expression is also an important giveaway in sussing out a reaction. Anyone that hates using the telephone will know it is partly because you can't gauge what the other person is perhaps thinking after you said something you might have regretted for sounding stupid, or misinterpreted.

With social media, leaving people hanging ratchets up this anxiety: why didn't they like my post, comment, opinion, compliment? Did I say something wrong? Did I post something offensive? Was I misinterpreted. What's taking them so long to respond? Do they hate me now? Were they even a real person to begin with? Can I get any standard back and forth from another person using technology?

Not only is the mechanism of social interaction between people in different spaces cause for this gap in human connectedness, but you also have to be aware of the people behind the systems of use. Big tech giants, puppet masters of populations, money makers, marketers and sellers. You don't pay money for using social media (at least at the bare minimum, you don't have to), but when you signed up you did pay with your data, which those companies then farmed to try and understand human behaviours so much better in order to know how, where and to who to sell stuff and make more money. It isn't in their interest that you have a healthy, happy, fulfilling social life with various people reaching far and wide. What matters to them is that you use their product and they choose what you get out of it. If they don't want your boring post, that does nothing for their gain, getting seen, algorithms can just thrust it down to the bottom of the pile. If they don't see key words, or images in your posts that could be categorised as controversial, to stir up some publicity for the site being used, or the hot topic of the moment gaining more momentum, then into the ether of virtual filing it goes.

So unless humans harness the internet for true social connections found in person, by focusing on healthy relationships, minds and the burgeoning epidemic that is loneliness over an obsession with money and power, maybe the internet never really will hold a candle to in-person sociability.