Arthur Asa Berger
Social Media
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Social Media
There are numerous definitions of social media available. I will understand it to
mean those sites, such as Facebook, My Space, YouTube and Twitter that provide people
with ways of sending messages, images and videos on the Internet and being able to
interact with them. I will explore the way different disciplines might analyze them, but
first a discussion of their popularity and how they are classified
CATEGORIES OF SOCIAL MEDIA
I ran searches on Google for social media on April 19, 2101 and got the following results:
Social Media
155,000,000
Facebook
2,470,000,000
Twitter
1,340,000,000
YouTube
768,000,000
These statistics show that there is an enormous amount of interest in social media, with
some of these social media being mentioned in more than two billion sites. The social
media have also increased in popularity in recent years.
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If you go to “Social Media” on Google, you will find an entry that deals with
images of social media. In essence, these images have graphic displays that classify
social media. The most important classifications are as follows:
Category
Examples
Personal Social Networking
Facebook, MySpace
Microblogging
Twitter
Video Sharing
YouTube
Image Sharing
Flickr
What this list suggests is that social networks allow us to do any number of things,
sometimes in combination. For example, it is possible to write something on Facebook
and also attach photographs to that message.
On Twitter, you can only write 140 letters but you can list a site where people can
see videos or find information on some subject, so it functions as a powerful facilitator,
often directing viewers to other sites. Every day something like fifty-five million people
send messages on Twitter and it was recently announced that the Library of Congress will
archive all Twitter blogs since they are part of what it describes as “the universal body of
human knowledge.” After being ad since it was created in 2007, Twitter is now
monetizing its services, selling advertising in the form of “Promoted Tweets.” To
understand how phenomenal the growth of Twitter has been, consider that it had 524,000
visitors in March of 2009 and 22.3 million in March of 2010. (Data from article by Clair
Cain Miller, “Advertising Enters Flow on Twitter” The New York Times April 13, 2010.)
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STATISTICS ON SOCIAL MEDIA
Much of this information comes from a PowerPoint presentation, offering a social
networking overview by Karen Philips of the T3 agency found on the Advertising
Education Foundation. The statistics are quite remarkable.
25% of all Internet views go to social networking sites
400 million Facebook users
133 million blogs indexed since 2002
9 billion Tweets to date
50 million Tweetes per day
1 trillion unique URLs in Google’s Index
1 billion Video Views on You Tube per day
54% of all Internet Views are on Facebook
60 million status updates in more than 65 languages on Facebook per day
Philips suggests that the “Old Media (television, radio, magazines, newspapers,
catalogues, direct mail, billboards) are being eclipsed by the “New Media” (social
networking sites, including geo-social networking sites such as Bright Kite, FourSquare,
and Gowalta). She notes the following:
70% increased advertising budgets for social media
28% shift from traditional to digital media
41% decrease in print and radio advertising
We can see the impact of the New Media has hit print advertising very hard and many
newspapers and magazines are now struggling to survive and are looking for new
business models to enable them to do so.
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SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE PSYCHE
When you have a phenomenon such as the explosive growth of social media, you
have to wonder why it has occurred. Let me offer a few hypotheses on the matter from a
psychoanalytic perspective. People who use social media are not necessarily aware of
these matters, and that is because we do not have access to the unconscious realms of our
psyches, as my diagram in my chapter on psychoanalytic perspective shows.
Social Media and Narcissism
In the myth, Narcissus dies because he sees his reflection in a river and can’t take his
eyes off the image and so he starves to death. We can substitute our “tweets” and smart
comments on Facebook and MySace for reflections of ourselves in the water, which leaves us
with the conclusion that these social media sites feed upon an unrecognized and diffused kind of
narcissism in people who use these sites.
We all need some degree of narcissism so we can develop adequate self-esteem
and accomplish things in our lives. Pyschologists have suggests that many dancers,
musicians and other kinds of artists are narcissists, who have channeled their narcissism
in what can be considered constructive ways. In some cases, however, narcissism
dominates people’s lives. Then, a number of characteristics commonly connected to
narcissism start becoming evident. We find in these narcissistic individuals a great deal
of self-centeredness, too much self interest and a constant need for adulation.
It may be that one of the reasons these social welfare sites are so popular is that
they cater to narcissistic elements in people, who find them so irresistible because they
see these sites as, in curious ways, projections of themselves and their personalities.
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Social Media and the Problems of Anonymity and Loneliness
My first hypothesis is that the social media enable us to escape from the radical
anonymity and estrangement from others that we feel in modern societies. Facebook
argues that it “helps you connect and share with the people in your life” and MySpace
writes that it is “the place to connect with friends.” These two quotations both mention
connection as important and stress that they will help you connect with friends and have
the possibility of making new ones. But the way we connect is virtual in nature,
mediated by the sites we use. Thus we have the ironic situation in which I have many
“friends” on sites whom I’ve never seen and don’t know. Why they want to be my
friends or “followers” (does have followers make someone a leader?) is hard to say.
Some people may collect friends or become followers in an effort to accumulate as many
people as they can to make them feel, somehow, more connected with the world. Or they
may work hard to follow many people or to obtain large numbers of followers as a kind
of game.
Connected to feeling anonymous is the matter of loneliness that afflicts large
numbers of people—a consequence of living in fast-paced, modern societies where we
now “bowl alone” rather than being attached to various groups. We have developed
many ways of countering this such as membership in religious and fraternal
organizations, but as children move away from their home towns to work where they can
find opportunities, as small towns empty out as people move to cities in search of
excitement and work, people become more and more isolated. Into this void have come
the social media, which help us “connect” with one another—but in a virtual manner.
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Adolescents and the Social Media
Adolescents are heavy users of social media, due, in part, to the need young
people have for affiliation. Erik H. Erikson deals with this matter in many of his
writings. Part of growing up involves “separation and individuation,” but this process
also generates loneliness, distancing from parents and siblings, and alienation. One of the
main problems young people face, Erikson suggests, is identity and role confusion, which
is aggravated by changes in young people’s bodies, by new roles that are assigned to
them by society, and by the problem of settling on or finding an occupational identity.
He writes in Identity: Youth and Crisis (1968):
To keep themselves together they temporarily overidentify with the hoeroes of cliques and crowds
to the point of an apparently complete loss of individuality. Young people can become
remarkably clannish, intolerant and cruel in their exclusion of others who are “different,” in skin
color or cultural background, in tastes and gifts, and often in entirely petty aspects of dress and
gesture arbitrarily selected as the signs of an in-grouper or out-grouper. It is important to
understand in principle…that such intolerance may be, for a while, a necessary defense against
identity loss. (p. 132)
What social media do is help young people consolidate their identities and find groups of
like-minded and sympathetic (but generally virtual) friends. The negative aspects of
these social media is that many adolescents who use them, do so in the privacy of their
bedrooms, and further the distantiation between themselves and their parents and
siblings.
Erikson also offers an interesting insight into adolescent love in his book
Childhood and Society. As he explains (262):
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To a considerable extent, adolescent love is an attempt to arrive at a definition of one’s identity by
projecting one’s diffused ego-image on another and by seeing it thus reflected and gradually
clarified. This is why so much of young love is conversation.
Here, these social media sites play an important role, for they allow people to find others
and have mediated relationships with them when they live far away. There are dating
sites to help people find others who are like minded and with similar interests (or
religions) and there are numerous ways of making friends on social media sites like
Facebook. In many cases, people correspond with one another using false names and
identities, and there are numerous problems with sexual predators who use sites to find
victims.
Id, Ego and Superego Functions and Social Media
Social media, as I see things, are connected to the Ego, Id and Superego functions.
The Ego focuses upon our relations to our environment and can use social media to learn
about the world and thus arm itself for its battle with Id and Superego forces in our
psyches. Much of what one reads on Facebook or Twitter is about social and political
matters, though my Facebook also has a lot of pictures of babies and comments about
raising children. That is the result of the people I’ve chosen to follow putting this
material on the site.
I once clicked on a site mentioned on Twitter and found it was one by a
photographer, with many erotic photographs, that had an obvious Id function. The
photographic site was not pornographic in nature, though there are many pornographic or
semi-pornographic sites on the Internet, but its photographs of nude women were
sexually arousing.
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Social media also facilitate Id elements in our psyches. Because they can offer
anonymity, some disturbed people place material on sites that are hateful, racist, antiSemitic and so on. Some adolescents and older people offer comments that are mean and
vicious, bullying people they don’t lie. There are occasional news reports about
adolescents who have committed suicide because they’ve been bullied digitally on social
networking sites. Social media can also carry messages from the superego elements in
our psyches, dealing with matters over which we have guilt. People who are religious
can communicate their beliefs and form groups that have a religious dimension to them.
Addictive Nature of Social Media
In their Psychiatric Dictionary, Leland H. Hinsie and Robert Jean Campbell
describe drug addictions as follows (1970):
Strong dependence, both physiologic and emotional, upon alcohol or some other drug. True
addiction is characterized by the appearance of an abstinence syndrome of organic origin when the
drug is withdrawn….An addict, in other words, is a person who, has become physically and
emotionally dependent upon a drug. Often, in addition, the craving for the substance has a
compulsive, overpowering quality, and there is often the tendency to use the substance in everincreasing amounts. (Page 15).
If we substitute “involvement with social media” for drugs, it seems reasonable to
suggest that there is an addictive nature to social media usage.
Some of the components found in video games that make them so addictive can
be found in participating in social media. I have dealt with video games in the preceding
chapter, but let me reprise some of the more important points that are relative to this
discussion. Janet H. Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997) maintains that are
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Social Media
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immersive, in that being transported to “an elaborately simulated place is pleasurable in
itself, regardless of the fantasy content.” (p. 98)
She also suggests that video games allow for agency, which she defines as “the
satisfying power to take meaningful action, and see the results of our decisions and
choices.” (p. 126). The third important aspect of video games involves transformation.
She writes “The third characteristic pleasure of digital environments is the pleasure of
transformation…The transformative power of the computer is particularly seductive in
narrative environments. It makes us eager for masquerade….” (p. 154)
We can see, then, that there are reasons to suggest that participating in social media has
addictive qualities, in part because the social media can be seen as having addictive
elements of video games about them. Social networks are, in a sense, video games whose
narratives we keep creating as we use them.
A SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE ON SOCIAL MEDIA
We can use the sociological concepts of uses and gratifications, demographics,
and of functional analysis to help us make sense of the social media. The uses and
gratifications approach asks of anything how people use it and what gratifications they
obtain from it. I will list a few of would list the following as some of the more important
uses and gratifications people make of social media:
First, to share experiences with others. This is probably the dominant use people
make of these social networks. We can share them by sending messages from Facebook,
by telling others what you are doing on Twitter, or sending videos to YouTube.
In some
cases, a video sent to YouTube goes “viral” and is seen by millions of people. I have
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some videos on YouTube about Japan and a video maker has placed two videos about my
work as a writer on YouTube that can be found in you type in secret000agent or my
name, Arthur Asa Berger.
Another important use is to satisfy curiosity and become more informed. This can
be done by clicking on any of the numerous sites listed on Facebook or on Twitter. You
can move to sites that deal with social media, as a matter of fact. Howard Rheingold, a
futurist and writer on new technologies, often lists sites on Twitter that are very
informative and are of great interest to anyone interested in the new media and related
topics. We also use social media to participate in politics in various ways. Thus, people
use the social media to assemble groups of people (flash mobs) to protest political
decisions or to champion them.
Finally, let me suggest that one of the more important uses people make of the
social media is to find distraction and diversion—to escape from their problems and find
amusing and entertaining “tweets” or matters discussed on various sites. In many cases
we use social media to satisfy our curiosity about what our contacts are thinking or doing
and to kill time.
In addition to the uses we make of social media and the gratifications they offer,
we can look at them from a functionalist perspective. In the chart below I list the various
functions and suggest how they relate to social media.
Functions
Social Media
Manifest functions
Connect with others. Communicate
Latent functions
Escape from loneliness. Seek affiliation
Functionality
Maintains contact with friends. Finds friends.
Disfunctional Aspects
Addictive. Can spread hate messages. Bullying.
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Destroying newspapers, magazines.
Functional Alternative
To print media, letter writing, phone conversations.
Face to Face Relationships .
We can see, then, that the social media have their good points and their bad ones.
Whatever the case, they are playing an increasingly important role in our lives and have a
global impact. The main problem we face is finding out how to use them in the most
positive ways and avoid spending too much time in the digital world to the neglect of our
friends and loved ones in the real world.
A MARXIST PERSPECTIVE ON SOCIAL MEDIA
For Marxists, our passionate involvement with social media can be seen as a
reflection of the alienation one finds in bourgeois capitalist countries and the fact that
these social media are global only shows that alienation is now worldwide, affecting
people in areas such as the United States, Europe, South America, and Asia. The Chinese
are avid users of social media and are very digital—a matter that is causing problems to
the officials who control the Chinese government, since the social media can be used to
spread information that fosters a freer and more open society. For this reason, China,
though nominally a Communist country, controls the Internet as tightly as it can.
Data Mining on Social Network Sites
Marxists would also point out that corporations and media organizations “data
mine” blogs and other social media to obtain information that can be used by advertising
agencies and other organizations. Marketers use information they obtain from the social
media about various brands and products to fashion advertisements that will appeal to
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narrowly targeted groups. In a sense, this means that what we write in the social media is
used “against” us, since our contributions to various sites provides marketers, advertisers
and other organizations with information about our true feelings and opinions. The other
side of this equation is that individuals who don’t like a product can do a great deal of
damage to it on the Internet just as people who like the product, brand advocates or
“brand apostles,” can do a lot of good for a brand.
Materialism and Social Networks: Girls and Their “Hauls.”
Finally, we have the matter of materialism that affects capitalist countries and
which is used, Marxists argue, by the ruling classes to divert our attention from the
inequities in the distribution of income found in bourgeois societies. A classic example
of this is found in the videotapes “hauls” that are available on YouTube. In these
“hauls,” young women (for the most part) say something like “This is my haul,” and then
show you various clothes and other things that they have purchased recently. They often
say something about each object and sometimes even tell you what they cost. In one haul
I watched, the young women—most of them seem to be teenagers or women in their
early twenties—held up the tags so we could see for ourselves what she paid for various
items.
There is a kind of innocence to the women who describe their “hauls,” but their
videos reflect the degree to which buying things plays an important role in their lives.
I’ve seen articles that say that shopping is the most popular activity for young women,
and shopping for clothes is the most important element of shopping. Young men also
like to shop, though I haven’t seen any men making videos about their “hauls.” This
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emphasis on shopping is connected to the fact that people are subjected from their earliest
years to advertising on television programs they watch. And because they believe that
what they buy will be “transformative.”
Paco Underhill explains that advertising now tends to focus on children and
teenagers. He writes, in Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping (2009):
The older we get, the more we recognize that the ownership of any product, no matter what it is,
isn’t transformative. That dress, that lipstick, that iPod nano is not going to change you or
anyone’s opinion of you. The aging consumer is also better at ignoring pop-up ads online and
TiVo-ing their favorite programs so they don’t have to watch five annoying commercials in a row.
Thus, the twenty-first century marketer is focused on kids and teens. It’s no surprise to note that
the average four-year old American child can identify more than one hundred brands.
We are taught by our culture to consume and we develop a great deal of product
knowledge (information about brands and products) as we grow up. The problem, from a
Marxist perspective, is that there is too much private consumption and not enough public
expenditures for health care, education and other public needs.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
Facebook was started by Harvard students in 2004 and Twitter was created in
2006. They have, we might say, exploded onto the scene and now attract millions of
people all over the world. The social media have only been with us for a short period of
time and in that period that have had an incredible impact on our societies and cultures
and upon our lives. We can’t tell whether the social media will lead to the destruction of
most of our newspapers and magazines, but they have had a devastating effect on many
newspapers and some major newspapers have gone out of business. The Christian
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Science Monitor is now mostly online and other newspapers are trying to figure out how
to survive.
I hope that this investigation of the social media will provide with insights into
the reasons for their appeal and offer you new ways of thinking about them. They offer
us incredible possibilities for both good and bad. There are many wonderful things we
can do with these sites (Twitter was used in Iran by democratic groups trying to get their
rights) so we must hope that the positive aspects of social media will be the dominant
ones and that in using them we will generate positive changes in the social and political
order.
STUDY QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. What social media do you use? How much time do you spend on each site and
what do you use the sites for? What gratifications do you get from each of them?
2.
What were the most important points made in the psychoanalytic interpretation of
social media? Which ones do you agree with and which ones do you think are not
correct? Explain your answers.
3. Define “narcissism” and describe how it was applied to the social media.
4. Discuss some of the positive and negative aspects of social media?
5. What impact do you think the social media will have on American society and
culture in coming years? On American politics? On your life?
6. What points were made in the discussion of social media as being like video
games? Do you agree with this notion? Explain your answer.
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7. What do you think of the Marxist perspective on social media? Are social media
a cause of alienation or a symptom of it? Or neither. Explain your answer.