People forgetting about my existence is what really gets to me. If I went to a party or on a vacation and didn’t document it on my Facebook, did it really happen? Does it just chip away at my presence as a human being and force me to wear an invisibility cloak?… I have almost 800 friends on Facebook, but only hang out with a handful of people in real life. Isn’t that bizarre? Who are these 790 friends of mine? When’s the last time we actually hung out? Do I even know them? If I don’t, why would I want them to know me? All of this rhetoric is making me want to simultaneously delete my Facebook and check to see if I have any new messages. Regardless of my decision, I think we can all agree that Facebook has messed with my generation’s lives in a very real way. It has dictated our day-to-day lives by creating new social rules and etiquette we must abide by. It’s basically turned us into paranoid neurotic messes who are afraid of a real human connection. Mark, why do you have such contempt for us?1
This is from Ryan O’Connell, writing in Thought Catalog back in May 2011. Although his words are spoken with tongue in cheek, this mindset might be vividly reflecting the colossal impact of social networking sites on our current way of life. If so, is it a sinister sign of a dysfunctional society to come, or does socializing online merely provide a more frequent and accessible version of what all of us have always done? Either way, there will be important implications for our lives and culture in the future. Never before have so many had the opportunity to share music, photos, videos, and opinions as they blog away with ease, and often with almost instant feedback.
While social networks have existed as far back as 1997, sites such as MySpace, Bebo, Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn remain the most used worldwide, with Facebook dominating the Western social networking market. Compared with other social networks, Facebook users are the most engaged: 52 percent visit Facebook daily, with other popular sites such as Twitter (33 percent), MySpace (7 percent) and LinkedIn (6 percent) trailing behind.2 The average smartphone Facebook user checks his or her profile fourteen times a day.3 Thus, while there are numerous social networking sites, much of the discussion here will focus specifically on Facebook, given the popularity of Facebook worldwide and the subsequent amount of research into Facebook use. The “Mark” rhetorically challenged by Ryan is, of course, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook and Time’s Person of the Year 2010. It’s hardly surprising that as far as he’s concerned, the horizons are unequivocally clear and bright:
There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. People sharing more even if just with their close friends or families creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. As people share more, they have access to more opinions from the people they trust about the products and services they use. This makes it easier to discover the best products and improve the quality and efficiency of their lives.4
I doubt if most people’s primary reason for going on Facebook, especially teenagers, will be, as Zuckerberg suggests, the earnest goal of improving the efficiency of their existence. More than a billion people in the world are signed up, and of these just over half visit the site daily.5 For social networking to be as popular as it is with individuals from such a vast range of cultures and backgrounds, it must be meeting a very basic human need and doing it really well.
The most common reason put forward to explain the immense popularity of sites such as Facebook is that they help us connect online with our offline (real-world) friends and make it easier to maintain long-distance friendships.6 However, alternative and still popular forms of computer-mediated communication, such as emails or Skype, are effective and easy for communication over long distances. So connecting with friends cannot, on its own, account for the appeal of cybersocializing. Additionally, recent research has found that those who use Facebook to collect a large network of virtual friends report more life satisfaction, compared to those who use it to maintain close and enduring real friendships.7 Alarmingly, this study found that Facebook users are more satisfied with their life when their Facebook friends are regarded as their own personal audience to whom they transmit unilaterally, rather than when they have mutually reciprocal exchanges or more offline relationships within their online networks.
Perhaps it all boils down to that most simple driver of all: the desire to feel good. In one survey, results suggested that the opportunity to develop and maintain social connectedness in the online environment is linked with less depression and anxiety as well as with greater satisfaction with life.8 Zuckerberg would presumably agree:
Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society. Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness.… We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate.9
Already, Zuckerberg is gesturing here at a new type of existence, one in which your identity is no longer so much internalized as externally constructed in close conjunction with others. His use of the word “rewiring” implies that we’re functioning together as nodes in some complex machine, that we were already all previously connected (“wired” in a different way), and that this new rewiring is superior. None of these three assumptions is valid. First, although the concept of a global network of thought (the noosphere) was developed, as we saw earlier, by the Jesuit monk Pierre Teilhard de Chardin almost a century ago, it has never been regarded by anyone else as the potential apotheosis of humanity.10 Second, we have never actually been constantly “wired” together, which is why this novel condition of connectedness is so popular. And third, why should we automatically assume that whatever Facebook offers is superior to all previous forms of communication? We need to look a bit more closely at what’s going on.
The antithetical state of being in some way connected to someone else is not to be connected at all, to be alone. In evolutionary terms, there would be survival value and hence a basic subjective pleasure in any behavior that combats solitude. And it turns out that loneliness is really bad for your health. For example, women with fewer social relationships experience strokes at twice the rate of those with more, after adjusting for all other possible factors.11 Moreover, DNA analysis has identified 209 genes relating to immune system function for combating illness, which are differentially expressed in subjects reporting high levels of social isolation.12 Evolutionarily ancient immune system defense cells appear to have evolved a sensitivity to socioenvironmental conditions that may allow them to shift basal gene expression profiles in order to counter the changing threats of infection associated with hostile social conditions. Moreover, changes in the expression of inducible genes relate more strongly to the subjective experience of loneliness than to objective social network size. And if that weren’t enough, loneliness can increase the incidence of cardiovascular disease through reduced levels of oxytocin, the naturally occurring hormone mentioned earlier, which normally reduces and stabilizes heart rate.13 Because oxytocin surges during close physical contact and is associated with well-being, clearly isolation will inactivate this natural defense mechanism.
The number of people living alone has doubled over the last twenty years; in the United Kingdom, an unprecedented one-third of all adults are in single-member households.14 This trend is particularly pronounced in the age group twenty-five to forty-four. More people living alone equates with a greater potential for loneliness, so the subsequent arrival of social networking sites will have met a clear demand among a growing group of immediately receptive customers. The subsequent shift in how adults socialize has fundamentally transformed social interaction over the two decades. In 1987, according to one estimate, we spent on average six hours per day in face-to-face social interaction, and four via electronic media.15 In 2007 the proportion had reversed, with almost eight hours a day spent socializing via electronic media, and only two and a half hours in face-to-face social interaction. The advent of social media not only met an existing need but did so more effectively than normal interpersonal communication. Neuroeconomist Paul Zak has even suggested that social networking itself will increase levels of oxytocin, a hormone normally produced as a result of physical closeness.16 Perhaps the cybersimulation of being close is the same as the real thing as far as the body is concerned. So what’s wrong with that? If we are boosting our oxytocin levels, feeling close to others, and fending off the health-threatening effects of loneliness, what’s not to like?
The data on the relationship between feeling lonely and social networking are surprisingly complex.17 Research shows that people who actively engage in Facebook via messaging friends and posting on friends’ walls report lower levels of loneliness than those who primarily engage in passive observation of friends’ profiles.18 People who report feeling lonely also apparently are more strongly emotionally attached to Facebook, which indicates that it is the more solitary who use the site to compensate for their lack of offline relationships: meanwhile those with healthy, already established real-life networks simply turn to Facebook as something additional that is nice to have.19 Interestingly, students with higher levels of loneliness also report having more Facebook friends than those who are in reality more sociable.20 Thus, while social networking might be used to deal with feelings of loneliness, it may not have the desired effect after all. For example, the futurologist Richard Watson has serious reservations:
I believe that one of the main reasons that Facebook and Twitter are so successful is that we are lonely.… Universal connectivity means that we tend to be alone even when we are together. You can see this when couples go out to dinner and spend most of their time texting or when kids get together for play-dates and end up sitting next to each other on separate gaming consoles for hours on end.21
Some researchers suggest that escaping online to avoid real-world problems may actually exacerbate them.22 One study examined Facebook use from the perspective of adult attachment theory, which emphasizes the role of the primary caregiver during infancy.23 Attachment theory was developed by psychiatrist John Bowlby in the mid-twentieth century, when he was treating emotionally disturbed children. Bowlby proposed that attachment could be defined as “lasting psychological connectedness between human beings,” and he showed that babies were either “secure,” “anxious,” or “avoidant” in their attachment styles.24 The secure baby might cry when the mother left the room but would start to play again as soon as she returned. In the case of anxious babies, however, when the mother came back, they would push her away and burst into tears. In contrast, the avoidant baby would act as if nothing had happened, despite a rise in heart rate and levels of the stress hormone cortisol.
Adults behave like babies too. While secure people feel comfortable with intimacy, avoidant individuals struggle to establish emotional connections. Avoidant individuals are more likely to be socially isolated and to attempt to shut down their emotional needs in relation to others. In contrast, anxious individuals worry about being alone; they fear rejection and will engage in behaviors that they believe will strengthen their relationships. The researchers found that individuals with high levels of anxious attachment used Facebook more frequently, were more likely to use it when feeling negative, and were more concerned about how others perceived them on Facebook.25 So it would seem that Facebook fills a need for those with maladaptive early experiences. However, it’s still unclear whether Facebook use could help those with high levels of anxious attachment by combating feelings of loneliness and reinforcing their relationships.
But it’s not just the lonely and the anxious who are drawn to social networking. Research has also shown that individuals with higher levels of openness spend more time on Facebook and have more friends there.26 Openness signifies an active imagination, a willingness to try new experiences, an attentiveness to inner feelings, a preference for variety, and having a curious mind. Thus, having a large number of Facebook friends is, paradoxically, associated both with higher openness levels and also with being more lonely. Although it might seem counterintuitive, openness and loneliness are not incompatible: openness is a personality trait, whereas loneliness is a state. A combination of the “pull” of wanting to be open and the “push” of loneliness is a potent factor in determining just how much you give away about yourself. It is this self-disclosure that is crucial to understanding the real appeal of social networking sites.
As a species, we seem to have such a craving for self-disclosure that it could be considered a very basic part of the human psyche. Harvard scientists have actually demonstrated that sharing personal information about oneself, as on social networking sites, activates the reward systems in the brain the same way as food and sex do.27 Astonishingly, the participants in this particular experiment were even willing to give up monetary rewards for the opportunity to talk about themselves. The results also suggest that the existence of a reciprocal cyclical feedback for self-disclosure rewards and perpetuates the sharing of personal information on a basic biochemical level. Consequently, the appeal of social networking is rooted in a biological drive of which we are largely unaware and which we find difficult to control voluntarily.
Although we may not be aware of it as a basic, biological need, the conscious craving for personal expression and self-disclosure could be the key to what so many find compelling about Facebook and other types of cybersocializing. Although social networking sites will, of course, make such communication easier, the socializing itself may not be the key issue. Instead, the real hook may be the experience of transmitting personal information on an unprecedented scale, because Facebook and other comparable sites encourage you to divulge information about yourself to others in a way you may never have done before. When someone updates her status with something personal, she shares it with her hundreds of Facebook friends. Just think about it. Of course we have shared personal information with one another since the dawn of time, but now we do it with 262 people (the average number of Facebook friends across all ages and demographics) instead of just a few close friends.28 The point is that, when you share personal information on Facebook, whether through your profile or as a status, you share it with an immediate audience that is the largest ever in human history.
If so, then the next question is, why are we willing to give away so much personal information on such an unprecedented scale? Perhaps the rewards of participating in social networking sites and the psychological disposition toward self-disclosure reinforce each other. One of the most consistent outcomes of computer-related research shows that the lack of face-to-face communication leads to a corresponding rise in self-disclosure, because we don’t have visual cues or access to the appropriate body language to discourage us from self-disclosing or to make us second-guess what we disclose.29 When we meet people in the flesh, shake their hand, look them in the eye, and pick up on cues through body language, we gradually build trust and rapport; we come to feel we know the other person before we let our guard down. Until then, defensive body language, averted eyes, physical distance, and tone of voice may all act as warnings not to give too much away too soon. Body language is an ancient evolutionary mechanism that signals us when we should let our defenses down and when we should maintain them. If there are no such cautionary signs, nothing to prevent us from talking or writing on and on and on, then disclosure is far easier. People who want to disclose more will use social networking sites more, which in turn only encourages them to disclose even more.
For example, 488 users of social networking sites were surveyed in Germany twice within a six-month period.30 Individuals with a stronger disposition to self-disclose showed a higher tendency to participate in such sites. At the same time, frequent social networking use increased the wish to self-disclose online, because self-disclosing behaviors are reinforced through accumulating social capital within Facebook and similar environments. The $64,000 question then is: why? If loneliness is the main driver of social networking use, there are far more effective, reciprocal, and personal ways to communicate with individuals than the ubiquitous status update online. Yet the lonely are the most attracted to the screen. Just why is it so pleasurable (as the Harvard study clearly demonstrated)31 to divulge your feelings and thoughts not to a single confidant occasionally but to an audience of hundreds or thousands on a daily or even hourly basis?
Arguably, with time and distance to hide behind, you can portray yourself as someone completely different and more interesting. The opportunity to avoid the awkwardness of hesitating and stumbling over your words seems wonderful, especially as you won’t have a chance to say anything you don’t mean or might regret. You feel secure and inviolate as you derive tactile pleasure from tapping the keys, and you see the writing on the screen dance to your precise command and control. Another part of the excitement of being online comes from being constantly connected. Someone somewhere is always available to interact with you right now; after all, you are globally wired. But at the same time, you can say anything you like without the embarrassment or discomfort of a face-to-face interaction. No wonder such an experience makes you feel good.
In 2011 a joint Italian and American investigation aimed to dissect the type of experience people have while using Facebook.32 Is it primarily a relaxing experience or a stressful one? Thirty students aged nineteen to twenty-five took part in short exercises in which they first looked at panoramic landscapes (the relaxing experience), then spent three minutes navigating their own Facebook account, and finally spent four minutes completing a stressful task, such as solving a mathematical problem. During these tests, their physiological stress levels were recorded to measure how stressful or relaxing the participants found each trial. During the stressful experience, activation of the fight-or-flight system was triggered, resulting in increased respiration, sweating, and pupil dilation, whereas the relaxing experience led to activation of the parasympathetic nervous system, which resulted in the opposite reactions. What was most interesting was that navigating one’s own Facebook page appeared to offer an experience that was neither relaxing nor stressful, but a more active positive state. Participants showed a mixture of physiological responses also seen in the relaxing and stressful conditions. The researchers concluded that the success of social networking sites “might be associated with a specific positive affective state experience by users.” In short, going on Facebook is physically and/or physiologically exciting. But what biological process actually triggers this experience of feeling good, of enjoying Facebook more than you would, say, looking at a painting or going for a walk?
We saw previously how brain scientists have long been fascinated by the phenomenon of “self-stimulation,” where rats will spend all their time working at pressing a bar to stimulate key brain regions, to the exclusion of all else including feeding. The areas that, when stimulated, presumably caused the rats to “feel good” were those releasing the transmitter dopamine. As well as contributing to feelings of pleasure, dopamine plays another role in the diurnal rhythms of sleep and wakefulness, where it is linked to heightened alertness. Just think of the hyperactivity caused by “speed” (amphetamine), which releases abnormally high levels of dopamine in the brain. It’s not difficult to see an overlap between feeling excited and feeling happy. Many activities in life that are arousing, such as fast-paced sports, are also rewarding. Suffice it to say that if various brain states relating to arousal and reward are consistently linked to raised levels of dopamine, and if social networking is rewarding and exciting, it is very likely that social networking might serve as another trigger for the release of dopamine in the brain.
Dr. Susan Weinschenk, a behavioral psychologist who has published five books on user experience in computer systems, has listed the specific features of Facebook and other social networking sites that might make them triggers for dopamine release.33 First, they provide instant gratification: you can now connect to someone immediately and probably get a response in a few seconds. Second, they offer an anticipatory thrill. Neuroimaging studies show higher stimulation and activity when people anticipate a reward than when they actually get one.34 Similarly, the anticipation of whatever new tweets, updates, or comments on your profile you might find drives your fascination with social networking sites more than the actual information you receive. Third, these sites offer small pieces of information. The dopamine system is most powerfully stimulated when the information coming in is modest enough not to satisfy entirely. The limited capacity of a tweet or a “like” is therefore ideal to activate the dopamine system. Finally, there’s unpredictability. This is the much-studied reward/punishment mechanism involved in intermittent or variable schedules of reinforcement. When you check your email or text, or use Twitter or Facebook, you don’t know exactly who is contacting you or what you’ll receive. This feedback mechanism is largely unpredictable and exactly what stimulates the release of dopamine in your brain. The posting and receiving of entries on Facebook or Twitter could trigger the release of small blips of dopamine, possibly encouraging such activity to become compulsive.35
This almost instant feedback from others, which is unlike any real-world interactions, is much more prevalent when there are so many more people out there in cyberspace who can oblige. The sight of a name flashing up presents a little burst of excitement, a little blip of dopamine that will ensure anticipation for the next fix; you can never actually be satiated. But then why should the mere sight of a response on your particular site, irrespective of what it actually says, trigger that blip of dopamine in the first place?
Attention and approval from adults are among the strongest rewards we experience as we are growing up. Infants need a meaningful relationship with a caring and involved adult in order to survive, grow, and thrive. Astonishingly, human growth hormone is thought to be released in proportion to the amount of caring attention a child receives.36 When babies cry to announce their hunger or other discomforts, they rely on the world, particularly adults nearby, to correct the problem. These demands are necessary for survival, and when they are met the existence of the child is acknowledged. A hungry baby who yells until someone comes with the right source of nourishment knows that he has an effect on the world. The world acknowledges that he exists. This tiny human already has significance. A baby whose needs are ignored eventually gives up and “ceases to exist.” In extreme—and, fortunately, very rare—cases of neglect, such infants stop crying when they are hungry and literally starve to death. A child’s emotional well-being begins with attention paid to his basic physical needs. Yet the need goes further: the caregiver has to approve and to show approval. Once the physical needs are met, this drive for further validation is one of the strongest motivating forces in our nature. When we aren’t met with positive feedback, we no longer feel safe and protected. And over time we become conditioned to crave approval not just from our parents but from others as well.
The importance of such recognition does not diminish with age. Unlike the real world, Twitter and Facebook can always be relied on to provide an almost instant response to even your adult demands for attention. Facebook may readily be filling a gap that friends and family do not fill so comprehensively.37 This in turn may explain why the obsessive social networker relies on the illusion of cyberintimacy, despite the inevitable price of a loss of privacy. Many of us take privacy for granted until we feel it is being invaded, whether by an intrusive personal question or the extreme scenario of a helicopter from Google Maps hovering outside the bedroom window. As film star George Clooney quipped: “I don’t like to share my personal life … it wouldn’t be personal if I shared it.”38 Until now, most of us most of the time have felt in control of our private lives—of how much we confide, to whom, and when. But now such assumptions no longer hold.
It is impossible to give an operational definition of privacy, but most of us, until now, have had a strong instinctive sense of it. In his first nonfiction book, The Blind Giant, novelist Nick Harkaway weighs up the balance between the blessings and the threats of the Internet:
Privacy is a protection from the unreasonable use of state and corporate power. But that is, in a sense, a secondary thing. In the first instance, privacy is the statement in words of a simple understanding, which belongs to the instinctive world rather than the formal one, that some things are the province of those who experience them and not naturally open to the scrutiny of others: courtship and love, with their emotional nakedness; the simple moments of family life; the appalling rawness of grief.39
In contrast, at a technology conference in 2010, Mark Zuckerberg defended his controversial decision of the previous year to change privacy settings that pushed users to reveal more personal information, saying, “We decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.” Zuckerberg told his audience that Internet users don’t care as much about privacy anymore: “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people and that social norm is just something that has evolved over time.”40
Already privacy appears to be a less prized commodity among the younger generation of Digital Natives: nearly half of teenagers have given out personal information to someone they don’t know, including photos and physical descriptions.41 Meanwhile, over half of young people send out group messages to more than 510 “friends” at a time (the number of Facebook friends an average youth has),42 fully aware that each of these contacts could then pass on that information to their network of hundreds more. The trade-off for more attention and the possibility of fame is, and always has been, loss of privacy, and it was always a tough call on how to achieve the appropriate balance. So how is it that we previously treasured privacy so much, yet now hold it in increasingly casual disregard? Until now, privacy was inextricably linked to an internally generated sense of identity; the one always entailed the other. But if identity is now constructed externally and is a far more fragile product of the continuous interaction with “friends,” it has been uncoupled from the traditional notion of, and need for, privacy.
Of course, for many, social networking is a fun adjunct to a normal life that enhances communication with existing friends made in the real world. Yet there is more to the popularity of these sites than their trendiness and ability to make life easier would suggest. Social networking sites could be viewed as a kind of junk food for the brain: harmless enough in moderation, but deleterious when you overindulge. It seems that the something about social networking harnesses and promotes a potentially vicious biochemical cycle, whereby evolutionary biological forces ensure that humans feel good when they are combating loneliness by sharing personal information with others, mediated by the release of dopamine in the brain. As a result, self-disclosure creates a hit of pure pleasure as direct as that derived from food, sex, dancing, or sport. Until now, this natural urge to let it all hang out has been counterbalanced by the rigors and constraints of body language in face-to-face communication, which makes you all too aware of your private self. This awareness of being a private individual can serve the very valuable role of ensuring that we are not manipulated or taken over from the outside. So, by constraining the natural urge to disclose information about ourselves to everyone and anyone, the opposing desire for privacy will ensure that only trusted individuals access the “real,” vulnerable you.
However, social networking removes these constraints, allowing individuals to disclose more through this medium than ever before. The consequent trading in of the age-old birthright of privacy may mean that others will think less of the “real” you that is now revealed. But imagine if this mode of constant self-disclosure and feedback became the norm. It might become increasingly difficult to protect the “true self,” with all of its weaknesses and failures, from being reshaped and supplanted by an exaggerated, ideal self that is presented to an audience of hundreds of “friends” and “followers.” So what would happen if such a cyber-airbrushed persona started to elbow out the real you?