He that loves pleasure must for pleasure fall.
Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus
Many of us pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that we hurry past it.
Søren Kierkegaard
There are only two professions that call the people who use their products “users.” One is drug dealers, the other is us [software developers/designers].
Aral Balkan
I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
Maya Angelou
The last chapter asked an important question: If social media are not good for us, aren’t uniquely social, and don’t on the whole make us feel better about our lives (let alone our bodies), why do we find it so hard to avoid using them? This and the next chapter will endeavour to provide the answers. When Kari J. Milberg crashed her car in 2013, tragically killing her daughter and two nieces, it was because she was attempting to use Facebook on her smartphone whilst driving. Any argument that social media usage is primarily driven by basic practical and social motivations such as keeping in touch with friends and staying informed simply fails to explain the pattern of compulsive usage behaviours such as Milberg’s. The irrationality with which people are increasingly using social media suggests that they are driven by far deeper and more powerful psychological forces that social media platforms are able to unleash and harness. The first aspect of social media that needs to be interrogated is therefore the individual, subjective experience of using social media and the psychological drives within us that social media exploit, whether by design or otherwise.
Human beings, whether we like it or not, aren’t always very sensible. This is not intended as a value judgement — lots of things need not be “sensible,” or are conducted harmlessly without “sense” ever being involved: Smelling a rose as you walk past on a midsummer’s day is not “sensible,” for example. Neither is writing poetry, playing basketball, or listening to an electric bass solo, but all are of unquestionable value. People who focus too much on some rational end-point, and say for instance “people have sex in order to reproduce,” are people you politely back away from at a party. For the rest of us, whether it is eating too many Haribo, gambling away our life savings, buying an SUV on a high-interest loan, or drunk-WhatsApping a crush, the tension between what we know we should do in our long-term interests and what we feel like doing right now is a common (and well studied) feature of human behaviour, and occurs especially in the context of activities we think will be pleasurable, cool, fun, and so forth. There’s that drive towards things that promise they will make us feel somehow more awesome, more in control, more sated, that we can’t always avoid listening to. Nor should we always listen to it, but it is in this sense — the capacity to make a larger sacrifice for a small reward — that I say we aren’t always “sensible,” and crucially it is according to this pattern that we must understand the widespread use of social media.
As I have said, the idea of individual responsibility is an important part of how politics, justice, morality, and even health are conceptualised, and is based on the idea that we can easily avoid doing illegal, self-detrimental, or injudicious things. Eating too much? Go on a diet! Not earning enough? Work harder! Going on Facebook for hours a day? Just use it less! Narratives abound about people “pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps” (physically impossible), or “snapping themselves out of it,” but this is a barbarically unfair and myopic way to understand human behaviour. Not only are there structural and systemic issues in every society that often prevent easy answers, but individually we are not robots either — to be human is inescapably to be irrational.
Irrational use of social media has been the subject of considerable research. University students — being amongst social media’s most voracious users — are frequently the test subjects of such experiments, so it should be no surprise that procrastination is one of several irrational uses of social media that are well studied. As nobody will need reminding, with procrastination there is a tension between a long-term “intended behaviour” and a short-term distraction (or many) that prevents or delays the intended behaviour from being carried out. While the aspect of procrastination that involves postponing or avoiding an intended behaviour is perhaps less relevant to the experience of using social media, it is essential that we learn what we can about the powerful irrational drive(s) involved in seeking distraction.
One particularly instructive study of Facebook procrastination amongst students, carried out in Germany by psychologist Adrian Meier and colleagues (2016), contains helpful reminders of some important aspects of the subject experience of social media use. Firstly, it finds that media stimulation from Facebook can be “hedonically pleasant,” or in other words that people are tempted to use Facebook because it is pleasurable. This aspect of how we experience social media may sound obvious to some readers and contentious to others, but the fact that pleasure is part of the experience of social media for even a significant proportion of people should not be taken for granted. Given the web’s historical characterisation as a practical, informational tool, it may be harder to admit that a website, or indeed an app, could or should actually be pleasurable. Over and over again, we are fed the idea that technology is invariably a faithful and unobtrusive tool that works for us. Tools are normally practical, and are usually sold to us as something useful and rational, but hedonic? When more conspicuously technological entities, such as robots or mechanical devices, are applied to basic acts of human life such as cooking, sex, health, or sociality, the most common response is suspicion, and rightly so as we resist the ongoing technologisation of our intimate lives. We recognise that pleasure occurs least often in automatic, predetermined, or technologised areas of our lives. Yet in social media we are happily welcoming massive technological edifices into our lives, our homes, our beds, our cars because they have found a way to be pleasurable without being too conspicuous. Technology being developed at the time of writing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology even uses sensors to detect the emotions of human beings when they are at home. “Researchers say that their so-called EQ-Radio devices can measure your heartbeat and breathing patterns to read whether you’re excited, angry, sad or happy, with 87% accuracy,” reports technology website The Memo (Knowles, 2016a). Chapters Four and Five will explore the implications of allowing technology to be so proximate to what matters to us, but whether or not we think of social media as pleasure for the sake of pleasure, it is clear that, for many, social media are a source of enjoyment.
Secondly, the procrastination study (Meier, Reinecke & Meltzer, 2016) argues that the primary draw of social media is not functional, but dysfunctional, and finds that Facebook is “often selected impulsively and in an uncontrolled manner” (emphases added). Again this will sound familiar to any regular social media users, but while it may be obvious, it is a significant characterisation of social media, because if the drive to seek a given pleasure is automatic, this suggests it is somehow beyond our control unless we apply conscious thought to it, requiring the additional effort of self-control, and that all-too-rare capacity of reflection on one’s own behaviour. It is exactly this failure of self-control that permits procrastination and other compulsive social media use to occur:
In many situations, users do not deliberately ponder over whether or not they should engage in media use (e.g. check their Facebook account). Instead, media exposure is initiated unconsciously through media habits […] More specifically, habits are characterized by automatic and impulse-driven initiation of behavior […] Thus the more habitually a medium is used, the more likely the medium is selected automatically and impulsively.
What this means is that even if your level of self-control is fairly strong, habitual use leads to further “automatic” (i.e. habitual) use, reinforcing the habit further still in a cyclical pattern, and eroding self-control that users might initially have had. Some research has even suggested that self-control is like a resource in that it can be depleted, leading to poorer decision-making (Wagner et al, 2013). To say that using Facebook is dysfunctional or born of a lack of self-control can be easily misunderstood to permit the deterministic arguments described above because it removes and externalises our agency, but just because your self-control may be weak in relation to things that you find pleasurable, that does not mean that the source of pleasure, be it Facebook or otherwise, has any direct power over you. As my students are sick of hearing me say, in order to be sure that they understand determinism, the reasons why you might eat a packet of Skittles are not within the packet itself; however much you might enjoy eating them, the Skittles themselves do not make you eat them.
The fact that social media use has the potential to be uncontrolled and automatic in this way has other consequences too. Some pleasurable activities, such as going out to dinner with friends, are selected and planned consciously, and can therefore be accommodated relatively easily by effective time management, but if conscious processes like self-control and time management are absent, automatic and uncontrolled use can potentially have a severe impact on the time we do have available, using up time that might be essential for other activities or responsibilities. One South Korean couple became so engrossed in an online game (games being another example of procrastinatory, hedonic media use) that they let their baby die of neglect. More tragically still, the game was itself a simulation of parenting (BBC, 2010). Thankfully, the same has not happened with social media, perhaps because they have less capacity to be so engaging, but the conflict between the time we have and the time we end up spending follows largely the same pattern.
In Chapter One, I urged that rather than the posting and uploading of media — so-called “user generated content” — it is the consumptive use of social media to which we really need to pay attention. The necessity of this emphasis is partly because production and consumption are, as in economics, a single process that is ultimately driven by demand. Similarly with social media, these consumptive and productive activities can’t entirely be separated, but this is precisely because they are mostly consumption-driven: We post because there is a chance others will see what we post; otherwise it is simply that proverbial tree, falling in the forest with no human being to “hear” it. But social media are not just any form of consumption: For reasons that will be outlined below, visiting and spending time on a social network needs to be understood as a form of consumption similar to that of other pleasure-oriented consumables such as junk food, alcohol, drugs, and pornography.
But what is it about the functionalities of social networks that might allow them to function in this way? Of all the innovations that have arisen as social media have developed, no more significant invention has appeared than the timeline; the roughly chronological, linear array of different “posts” or “tweets” containing a variety of different published materials. Facebook has one, Twitter has one, Instagram has two (sort of), LinkedIn added one some years after it launched, and YouTube’s subscriptions and “Recommended” functionalities both largely reproduce this functionality. Even chat applications like WhatsApp can amount to a timeline when many people are all posting media, links, or spontaneous reactions to an informal group chat independently of any given user. Think of yourself scrolling down your Facebook feed. The most essential element of any timeline implementation is the user’s sense of “what else is there? what’s next?” You don’t know exactly what your scrolling or clicking will reveal, but you know there will always be something else, and this provides you with an incentive not only to keep scrolling, but to keep coming back. Cast a sneaky eye over a stranger’s shoulder on any given day on any given public transport system in any given metropolis, and you likely will see exactly this behaviour — endless scrolling, usually with the thumb. The exact form and underlying technological underpinnings may vary from platform to platform, and in some cases the functionality of a timeline is implemented more loosely, showing one post at a time rather than a list, and providing a user interface that allows the user to move from one item to the next in a more or less linear way. The endless stream of personal images on Tinder is broadly an application of the same idea, and the recommendations YouTube shows at the end of a video are also a good example of this architecture. The underlying pattern that involves continuous navigation of novel media is a hallmark of a social media timeline, and it is this architecture that reveals social media use as a form of consumption.
One very apt description of the dysfunctional and irrational relationship that we have with timeline-centric social media platforms, far better than Facebook’s own bizarre and disingenuous claim to be “making the world more open and connected,” has ironically appeared in “meme” form in the Facebook timeline itself. It reads:
Facebook is like a fridge: You know there is nothing new inside but you check it out every ten minutes.
Admittedly, it was probably intended as a joke, but just as they say that in all the best comedy there is a degree of truth, the fridge simile turns out to be much more than a joke. The scenario above has even literally played itself out, or almost: One respondent in a psychology study that asked university students around the world to go without any social media for twenty-four hours reported that: “I literally didn’t know what to do with myself [when I couldn’t go on social media]. Going down to the kitchen to pointlessly look in the cupboards became regular routine” (Moeller, Powers & Roberts, 2012).
It may not have the figurative originality of Lady Macbeth’s indelible spot of blood, Marx’s base-superstructure, or John Donne’s island-that-no-man-is, but the scenario of a slightly hungry person repeatedly checking a fridge (or cupboard) with unchanging and somehow unsatisfactory contents is surely a perfect allegory (although admittedly phrased as a simile) for many people’s usage of social media. With the reader’s permission, the idea deserves some unpacking.
Even in the case of literal hunger, forgetting for a second the comparison to social media, this pattern is a strange one. Fridges are where food is stored, so to visit them when hungry or even when seeking the pleasure of eating palatable food is understandable, but the repetitive action of checking the fridge while knowing that the situation inside it has not changed is not something a theoretically rational person would do. Articulated as a commentary on social media, the fridge comparison appears to recognise that in social media usage, as elsewhere in life, there is a wanting — an instinctive drive and desire that subordinates our capacity for logical thought. Just like how our desire for enjoyable food might drive our behaviour more than our logical certainty that we will still not find any adequate food in a fridge we have already checked repeatedly, our desire for… something… from social media also drives our behaviour more than logical thought.
The real question is, what is that something? For a hungry or stoned person, food is eventually the answer, but what is it that social media promise that could be comparable, and encourage the same type of pattern? What is the association in our heads that would lead us to feel we will find comparable satisfaction at a psychological, emotional, or purely hedonic level with that which food would provide? What are we hungry for when it comes to the social media timeline?
Critical theorist Walter Benjamin observed famously that whereas a concentrating person is absorbed by what they see, such as a work of art, the masses, who are merely distracted, absorb rather than are absorbed by what they see. Distraction and consumption, in other words, go hand in hand, and in the end distraction is something that can be consumable in itself. While the idea of distraction usually has a cognitive emphasis, which is to say that it is a change in your conscious attentions, the reason the distraction provided by the timeline is important is because of the emotional effects this change in attentions provides.
The social media timeline has been conceptualised widely as a news and information source, and has come to have an important role to play for the public sphere (the implications of which will be discussed further in the latter half of Chapter Five). However, far less has been said about how its content makes you feel — the subjective emotional experience of the timeline. This is strange, because the subjective emotional changes that result from the media you encounter, or what academics call affect, are inescapably its primary function. Affect can be thought of as the supercategory to which emotion belongs. Where emotion may properly be thought of as basic sensations such as fear, sadness, or jubilation, affect also includes a wider and more nuanced array of other subjective responses and states such as associations, moods, and reactions. Writing long before the inception of the social media timeline, journalism academic Todd Gitlin (2003) described the subjective experience of the “feeling of feelings” that occurs in media consumption generally. Besides being rational and informational, he wrote, media are “something we call fun, comfort, convenience, or pleasure. We have come to care tremendously about how we feel and how readily we can change our emotions.” While some users might be logging on some of the time to find out what’s happening, or to look for something specific, the social media timeline is relied upon far more often as a means for its users to manage their emotions. Some psychologists have developed the idea of people “managing” their emotions into a field called emotion regulation. Emotion regulation is defined by psychologist James Gross as “the processes by which individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express these emotions. Emotion regulatory processes may be automatic or controlled, conscious or unconscious” (1998).
By allowing the user to encounter a stream of novel media stimuli from familiar sources, the timeline facilitates an easy way to feel something other than the emotions that the user would otherwise be experiencing at that moment in time. According to the research of psychologist Marvin Zuckerman (1980), this behaviour is called “sensation seeking.” Human beings, psychologist J.H. Patton tells us, are “aggressive sensation seekers” (2014). This momentary distraction from the user’s emotional reality provides an excellent means of emotion regulation. The appeal of the timeline for emotion regulation comes both from how it is structured and from the content itself as situated within that structure. The first place to begin understanding the timeline is to take a look at that content.
In so far as great books and films also make us feel something, we could simply consider the content of the timeline as another form of entertainment. But just as the timeline cannot be considered as purely an information source, to cast it simply as a source of entertainment akin to a novel or a movie would also be a superficial assessment. All entertainment to some degree gives its consumers something different to feel in the way that I have argued the timeline does, but other forms of entertainment mostly lack the features of the timeline, such as its uniquely interactive character and user-centrism. Each time you read a novel, for example, even if that novel is gripping at moments, even if that novel changes your life, the actual experience of engaging with it is not one that you seek under the table while at dinner, behind the wheel of a car, or furtively at your desk while you are at work. When we watch a movie it tends to be from beginning to end, and watched usually no more than once or twice. Even if we sense that a movie will be really good, its ability to entertain us is a temptation we can generally resist until the appropriate moment. Studies of our use of conventional entertainment can help us to understand our motivations for using social media, but we need to recognise that it would be a mistake to consider the timeline simply as a form of entertainment. If the timeline is a source of entertainment, it is radically different from other forms of entertainment in how it is mediated and constructed, and most of all in how it is consumed.
The different content items in a social media timeline all resonate emotionally to different quantitative degrees, as well as in different qualitative ways, but what is important is the fact that they resonate in a way that provides a form of emotional distraction that is pleasing to a given user and enables emotion regulation. The top hashtag on Instagram, for example, is #love, which has nearly a billion posts, almost double the number associated with next most popular tag. Some content is “feelgood” material that resonates with the viewer because it affirms positive or hopeful fantasies — for example, a destitute person unexpectedly receiving money or some other form of assistance by some random act of generosity; a person overcoming hardships “against all odds” to achieve some success or honour; a couple or a family being reunited against all probability; a person who has lied or cheated being exposed and receiving just comeuppance. Similar to standard entertainment, the same narratives tend to recur, often reinforcing ideology at the cultural level, but timeline media need not even have narrative at all in the way that other entertainment usually does, and it is partly their capacity to communicate something meaningful with virtually zero narrative that makes them so potent. For example, non-narrative media that produce an emotional response and might appear in a typical timeline could be: A sardonic cartoon about Brexit (despair and resignation), a video showing Dennis Bergkamp’s five greatest Arsenal goals of all time (belonging and awe), a satirical clip about Donald Trump (disbelief and probably dread), the wedding pictures of a high-school friend (love, envy, or perhaps pity), a petition demanding that a UK supermarket chain sell only free-range eggs (indignation, aversion to cruelty), and a photo of a sunset, possibly enhanced with a filter (aesthetic enjoyment, possible envy).
Instead of the “feelgood” variety, content might also be alarming, outrageous, arousing, disturbing, surprising, humorous, or stimulate other emotions or combinations of emotions, which do not all necessarily need to be positive or happy. At the individual level, specific media will also be experienced differently by each user because they trigger associations and reactions that are different for each person. Neuroscientists have shown that cognition and affect can’t ever be separated (Davidson, 2003). Your cognitive recognition of something and the associations that you have with it are what determine how you feel about it.
The precise feeling, however, doesn’t need to be the same between individuals, it only needs to have the capacity to make the user feel something; to provide emotion regulation. Of course, the whole point of all media consumption is that it is emotionally resonant, but in the timeline this resonance is increased by the variation from one media item in the timeline to the next. The sensation is potentially very different with each image, movie, link, or update from a friend; this adds to the timeline experience. Posts from somebody you are in love with will play a very different role in the timeline from pictures of food you want to eat, yet what the two have in common is the very fact of a certain form of hedonic stimulation itself, even while the affective experience of each item will be different. If everything in your timeline is happy, or everything is sad, the emotional effect of this can push you too far in one direction, and nobody would check an overtly sad timeline.
A controversial study in 2014, carried out on Facebook without the explicit consent of its users, found that this effect went so far as to facilitate what it called “emotional contagion.” Those who experienced more positive content were more likely to post more positive things themselves, and similarly those people exposed to negative content tended to post more negative things themselves. This is a reminder not only that the emotional responses we experience in relation to what we see in the timeline are enough that they have the capacity to alter our mood, but that generally the variation in how the different items in the timeline affect us is an important part of the experience, even if some of those posts have little effect on us at all (like this author and posts about rugby, The X Factor, or pulled pork recipes). Just keep scrolling!
As with the fridge meme above, there are moments where the content of the timeline “goes meta,” and provides useful critique of the very same experience that it forms part of. One such example is a cartoon showing two figures: The top one shows a serious-looking figure with the caption, “Sharing status about economic, politics, government, and other relevant stuff to my country,” and a single “like” thumbs-up icon. Below this, a feminised version of the same face, but made to look stupid with eyes pointing away from each other in different directions, is accompanied by the caption “Derpina went shopping.” A corresponding “like” icon shows 4,458 likes and 980 comments. In the bottom section, a figure up-ends their desk in frustration at the discrepancy in response between the two status updates. Despite the casual sexism in this depiction, the “struggle” it shows “is real,” so to speak: Content related to “serious” issues simply does not have the same appeal unless it can introduce some form of affective sweetener such as humour or outrage. Another example of this is the experiences of an acquaintance of mine whose job it was to distribute discount codes for different products every day on social media. “It’s a lot harder to get ‘likes’ on toilet paper,” she told me, than on hedonic offers like spa treatments and restaurant discounts.
Humour is consistently one of the most important emotional functions of the timeline that helps content achieve the resonance intended by its authors and those who share it. Amongst the dogs falling into swimming pools and “what my boss thinks I do” memes, humour is also one of the most effective vehicles for the communication of information and opinion about serious issues such as politics and climate change. Given the primacy of subjective affective experience, one might expect that conventional news and comment, usually connected with “factual” reporting, would no longer be part of what the timeline contains. Provided, however, that those who produce informational media are willing to “play the game” of affect-driven media, and incorporate affect such as humour into these media, informational content can still be popular. Indeed, humour provides a means of acceptable, if inadvertent, social commentary that avoids being preachy or sanctimonious, and often captures critiques that people would not necessarily think to make in sincerity since it is far easier to mock things than to argue with them. TV and radio shows like The Daily Show or BBC Radio 4’s The News Quiz show that the use of comedy for factual, social commentary is far older than the timeline, but the affect-centrism of the timeline is an environs for such media to enjoy widespread popularity. Al Jazeera’s social media news arm AJ+ employs comedian Francesca Fiorentini to present their news videos not just because of her talent, but for exactly this reason: She’s funny, and that gives their videos exactly what they need to achieve the affective impact that the timeline requires.
If informational media cannot be made to be funny, then other dominant affects can easily come to the rescue. Outrage and curiosity, for example, are also common vehicles in which information about the world often travels from one timeline to another. This in itself is not unique to social media. The sidebar of the Daily Mail’s website Mail Online, often referred to as the “sidebar of shame” and full of salacious, lecherous headlines is a classic example. But it likely accounts for why the website is the world’s most popular for English-language news (Press Gazette, 2015). The social media timeline takes this same feature — a stream of novel, emotionally salient material — and makes it into the primary feature. While the ability to find things interesting is generally something that is undermined by the prevailing culture of consumerism, and the vapid “ten pictures of celebrities without makeup” content that it produces, outlets such as Vice News and AJ+ have managed to use both curiosity and outrage to great effect in distributing news media according to the affectcentric rules of the timeline. To the extent that some elements of the public sphere have been incorporated into the social media timeline, an understanding of affect-centrism is essential for the survival of factual media such as journalism. A number of examples have shown affect to matter far more than informational content. In 2012, the short documentary Kony 2012 quickly began receiving millions of views as people became invested in the issues it raised, and the war crimes in Uganda it sought to prevent. But Joseph Kony, the Ugandan war criminal against whom the video was made, had left northern Uganda six years previously and life in the country had begun to return to normal. The film radically dramatised and simplified a complicated situation instead of prioritising the conditions on the ground in Uganda, arguably misrepresenting the issues to millions of people in the process. But that didn’t matter, now millions of people around the world had learned that there was a bad guy called Kony who must be stopped. Another even simpler example is Hurricane Sandy, which hit the US Northeastern Seaboard in October 2012. Alongside the genuine eyewitness reports, images, and footage of the alarming realities of how New York life had been interrupted, collected by individuals with smartphones, were numerous fakes and spoofs. One anonymous Twitter account tweeted that the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange was flooded, which was picked up by CNN, despite being completely false. Still images were taken from movies; others, such as sharks swimming at the bottom of an escalator or a diver in the flooded Times Square subway station, where the water is blue and the lights still switched on, were deliberate fakes, made with software such as Adobe Photoshop.
To illustrate to my students the ease with which these images can be created, I often create a similar image like the one opposite before their eyes using a picture of a platform on London’s Victoria Line and a stock image of a diver, but the point is that the veracity of these images is irrelevant: The fantasy, the aesthetic, the entertainment and the social value of these images are far more important to users, and these are all part of a subjective, affective experience. The implications of this affective emphasis for the continuing challenge of spreading accurate news and information are serious, and are discussed further in the second half of Chapter Five. Suffice it to say for now, however, that whether we are enjoying debating the veracity of the image or getting angry at what it appears to portray, emotion is everything in timeline media. It’s what keeps us scrolling, and what keeps us coming back “every ten minutes.”
Another easily demonstrable case where our automatic affective reactions to media are heavily implicated in our consumption of them is in cat videos. Long mocked as a caricature of the inane sort of thing that people waste time looking at on the internet, and on social media particularly, cat videos are a phenomenon that have also been studied in a serious academic context. According to a study by psychologist Jessica Gail Myrick (2015), there were more than two million cat videos on YouTube as of 2014, with nearly twenty-six billion total views, and two film festivals devoted to internet cat videos, in Chicago and Los Angeles. Myrick found that cat videos not only were a popular procrastinatory form of media, but that they had the capacity to improve people’s moods. “Levels of each self-reported negative emotional state measured in the study were lower and levels of each positive emotion were higher after viewing Internet cats,” she tells us. “Beyond hedonic implications for viewing Internet cats, the data indicate that the excitatory potential of the [cat] content can also reduce depletion and energize viewers.” Against the backdrop of this research, online sources such as Twitter accounts “Why my cat is sad,” “Emergency kittens,” and “Embassy cat” (which supposedly lives at the Ecuadorian Embassy with Julian Assange) reveal social media consumption, with or without cats, as being very likely an affect-driven means for managing one’s emotions.
There is a big difference between merely having an affective response to media that we encounter, which is unavoidable, and affect being the primary reason that we seek out the social media timeline. Besides the heavily subjective nature of how most of the media that appear in the timeline speaks to us, the encouragement on the part of the platforms to respond with non-verbal emotional gestures such as the like or the retweet, and there being very little else to explain the irrational, compulsive relationship that we appear to have with social media, we can also be sure that the consumption of media in the timeline is driven by affect because the reactions we experience to the media of the timeline are amongst some of the most potent feelings human beings can experience. Besides humour, belonging, curiosity and other common timeline media emotions, there is an even stronger affect: Anticipation.
Think of all the basic emotions that various religious people have told us to avoid over history — things like gluttony, lust, greed, envy, pride, wrath, and sloth. These are the things that connect us most with our most basic human selves, and that can release some of the strongest feelings, which is exactly why they have been forbidden by so many belief systems. They are also exactly the animalistic urges that Freud argued were often repressed in order that “civilisation” be able to function, hence the appeal of any media experience or platform that encourages them, albeit within restricted parameters. One of the more powerful affective sensations that the social media timeline provides the user with is arousal. As a major study of emotion and social media reported in 2016, “threads with emotional content lead to higher arousal than threads with neutral content” (Garcia et al, 2016). The word “arousal” is normally associated with the state one is in during sexual activity, but this is a far narrower meaning than the word is capable of. Arousal is actually a more general state of heightened sensitivity to an emotionally important activity and is defined in neurological terms as an increased activity in your sleep/wake system, unconscious bodily functions such as breathing and heart rate, and hormones, and as its similarity to the words “arise” and “arose” might indicate, its literal and original meaning means to be awake. Psychologists Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass describe arousal as “a volume level on things good and bad,” and as “the intensity of experience, [which] ranges from feelings of being energized, excited, and alert, to feeling calm, drowsy, and peaceful” (1998). The feeling you get just as a waiter puts your meal down on the table in front of you and your saliva glands increase production, or the nerves right before you go on stage to perform, are forms of arousal just as much as the anticipation of sexual activity might be, even if less intense. The hormones released may be different in each case, and the social meaning of each is clearly different — indeed, the same stimulus may cause different arousal in different individuals, but neurologists have identified arousal as a singular state that all humans are capable of feeling, however subjective the effect of the stimulus. Rather than being an emotion in itself, arousal is usually considered to be the strength of an emotion.
One feature of the more visual elements of social networks that supports the idea that social media consumption may be partly arousal-driven is the high prevalence of food images on social media. The initial complaint about Twitter, just as it was catching on, that it was “just people saying what they had for breakfast” may have been short-sighted, but there were, and still are, an awful lot of breakfast images on there. Other social networks are similar — at the time of writing, there are nearly fifty million images tagged “#breakfast” and well over 180 million tagged with “#food” on Instagram. Like selfies, the desire to share what you are eating may well be driven more by performativity as far as the user’s own experience of what s/he is doing, but the consumption and viewing of these media is the other side of the coin: We share certain content partly because we have also viewed such images, as well as the food they portray, and feel sure of the affective capacity of the former to excite us as if they were the food itself. This of course is ironic given that even a cursory scroll through the list of content tagged “#breakfast” on Instagram is an achingly banal experience.
Posting food images is not some obscure sideshow either: There are Facebook pages for almost every different type of food — even a page for those who want to “like” radishes, although at the time of writing it has only 356 “likes” out of over 1.79 billion monthly active Facebook users at the time of writing. When, for research purposes, I try to create a new account on social image-sharing platform Pinterest, having deleted my old account some years ago, “Food and Drink” and “Meat” are two of the most prominent “suggested” categories of image.
The depiction of things that give human beings pleasure and that appeal to our “forbidden” emotions is no accident, and is an important part of how we use the internet hedonically. The study of procrastination mentioned at the beginning of this chapter found, in addition to its other conclusions, that impulsive checking of social media “is particularly likely when individuals are confronted with stimuli that elicit strong automatic reactions” (Meier, Reinecke & Meltzer, 2016). What this means is that if some item we see on social media represents to us something that we have a strong reaction to because of a pre-existent relationship to it, such as food, it is more likely that we will check impulsively in the future for more such media.
That social media include representations that produce automatic or instinctive reactions in us — such as pictures of our friends in various scenarios, pictures of food, pictures of inexplicably adorable animals, or social drama of some kind — as one of their core features, should immediately tell us something about why we like them so much. The fact that these aspects of our environment are themselves psychologically active on us, and that we can’t seem to stop looking at pictures and other media featuring them, is a further reminder that social media cannot be studied purely as a series of convenient practical tools, and that their appeal goes much deeper than that. The way social media distil psychological stimulation and emotional arousal into a consumable experience is what gives them their power.
Where there are valuable things to be learned about the relationship between human beings and the technology they have created or use frequently, we shouldn’t be coy if some of the most important conclusions we could draw may come from internet media usage that is beyond the bounds of acceptable social, and, for some, moral and political conduct. If there is one context in which the hedonic consumption of digital media that have automatic psychological and neurological effects on their users occurs, it is in the use of internet pornography. Pornography use takes place on a massive scale. While for it may just be a hastily closed browser tab out of sight, the pornography industry is worth ninety-seven billion dollars globally, dwarfing the main revenue for social media — advertising spending (which will be lucky to reach half that in 2017).
Alongside the “Food and Drink” and “Meat” icons on the Pinterest sign-up screen is the category “Curvy women” with its own icon. If sexual arousal and looking at images of food have nothing to do with one another, why are they on the same platform? What could be similar about the experience of looking at pictures of food and looking at pictures of “curvy” women? And why is Pinterest, which knows only my age and gender, so keen to show me them concurrently? Never mind the obvious objectification involved in reducing human beings to nameless “curvy women,” why would I want to use the same media platform on the same computer, possibly even in the same session, to look at both food images and images of women with a particular type of figure? It says a lot about Pinterest’s expectations of how I might use their platform, but is unlikely to be unique to that platform.
Food and sex are both central areas of human pleasure — one thing philosophers and scientists can agree about. Whether an image depicts food, cats, your best friends at a party, or something sexually resonant, it’s possible that the same little voice somewhere in your brain says “oh hello — that looks like reward behaviour to me,” and this connection is worth exploring further.
The same connection is probably made most explicitly by the term “food porn,” which is a well-known genre of image. Especially in a digital context the term subtly reveals more than a simple metaphor. Even if inadvertently, it acknowledges that the hedonic viewing of media that features food you cannot eat might be in some ways analogous to viewing media featuring sex in which you cannot participate, with people you will never know.
There are over ninety-two million images on Instagram tagged “#foodporn,” as well as several variants such as “#foodporno” and “#foodpornxxx.” The most popular Facebook page by the name “Food porn” (there are several) has well over two million “likes.” Interestingly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, it is operated by an agency called “Consumed Media.” It features photos, videos, and recipes for food that is probably very tasty, but that is also clearly unhealthy and calorific. Some recent examples at the time of writing include balls of bread stuffed with cheese and coated with pesto, called “pesto cheese bombs,” and several other recipes for food that is in some way or other stuffed with cheese. A comment from one of the page’s subscribers on one of these posts reads, “You have done well today food porn.” Another “Food porn” page with over two million likes shows pictures and recipes for cookies, burgers, and Nutella-filled cupcakes. Yet another one, again with over two million likes, features a short movie clip illustrating how to make a kind of burger sandwich labelled the “OMG roll.”
Appending the suffix “-porn” to other forms of content also acknowledges that the hedonic consumption of visual materials is integrated into our most fundamental human drives. The comparison is not even limited to food. The suffix is also used for other types of visual content distributed via social media that are considered by some users to be particularly appealing. Some real-life examples are: A video showing people experiencing accidents or assaults immediately after having committed some deviant act themselves, labelled “justice porn”; real footage from fighting against the Taliban in Afghanistan shot with a GoPro camera, labelled “war porn”; a room stacked from floor to ceiling with firearms, labelled “gun porn,” which is also the name of a Facebook page with over a hundred thousand likes; and a Facebook page consisting of typographically stylised phrases, sentences, and paragraphs bearing messages usually having to do with self-love and relationships, called “word porn,” which has over eight million likes. The Twitter account @wordsporn has approximately 240 thousand followers, and somewhat amusingly, Twitter’s heuristic algorithms seem to have taken the metaphorical comparison to real pornography at face value and provided a warning that “The following media may contain sensitive material.” Only if you are allergic to Sex and the City quotes about loving yourself. As both a bass player and an occasional Instagram user, when I open the Instagram app I am invariably exposed to images of exotic and expensive bass guitars in all shapes and sizes, and featuring an alarming array of tropical hardwoods, usually tagged #bassporn, of course. Perhaps the most bizarre example I have regularly encountered on the web is that of “process porn,” in which various industrial and manufacturing processes such as machine welding, moulding, laser cutting, extrusion, and computer numerically controlled machining are all rendered with perfect precision, albeit a predictable narrative. And there is no doubt that on some level it is at least intriguing to watch, for example, a sheet of iron cut by a laser into hundreds of tiny, perfectly formed pieces in 1.8 seconds, even as the voice of Karl Marx screams loudly in my head and the ghost of Frederick Winslow Taylor floats somewhere nearby. The technology world’s obsession with 3D printing can be read as an extension of this same fetish.
I often ask students who study the psychology of digital media with me why they think “food porn” bears that name. The answers are usually quick, and always along the same lines. “Because it’s a guilty pleasure?” offers one young woman. Having suspected from the “food porn” and similarly named pages that it might be worth investigating the psychology of pornography consumption in order to understand what allows other forms of digital media to be compulsive and hedonic, I could not help but chuckle when I first opened psychologist Dr Gary Wilson’s illuminating book Your Brain on Porn (2015). Wilson is one of the world’s leading researchers on pornography addiction and the validity of his work is supported not only by painstaking and difficult research, but by the fact that all the people who try to shut him down are invariably male freedom-of-speech activists who exude toxic masculinity like it’s going out of style. There in black and white in Wilson’s chapter on internet pornography, titled “Wanting Run Amok,” was far more evidence of a relationship between pleasure, anticipation, digital media, and technology than I could ever have thought possible, and as we will see below, many of his words could almost have been lifted out of their pornographic context to describe Facebook use without any modification at all.
The most instructive sections of Wilson’s chapter on online pornography focus on the neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine has many roles within the body, but most relevant to this discussion is that whereas chemicals known as opioids are responsible for the feeling of pleasure itself, dopamine is responsible for the motivation to seek pleasurable rewards. “At the top of our human reward list,” Wilson says, “are food, sex, love, friendship and novelty. These are called ‘natural reinforcers,’ as contrasted with addictive chemicals.” “Dopamine surges are the barometer by which you determine the [likely] value of any experience. They tell you what to approach or avoid, and where to put your attention,” he continues. “The bigger the squirt [of dopamine] the more you want something. No dopamine and you just ignore it. High calorie chocolate cake and ice cream — a big blast. Celery — not so much.” This sounds almost too plausible, and I wonder whether a JPEG image on one of the many “Food porn” Facebook pages showing chocolate cake and ice cream might have a similar effect, and whether that is the reason why the official Facebook pages for “Cake” and “Ice cream” have nearly seventeen million likes between them, while that for “Celery” only has a modest (but surprising) nine thousand. Wilson quotes: Dopamine is “your motivation and drive to pursue potential pleasure and long-term goals.” Like food, sociality also appears to be connected to dopamine release, and researchers have found that the drive to achieve social status is also dopamine driven (Martinez et al, 2010). One of the most important lessons we can learn from the research that has been done on human reward-seeking, also seen in the patterns of how people use internet pornography, is the role of novelty, which is itself something the reward systems of the human brain crave alongside food, sex, love, and friendship. “Dopamine surges for novelty,” Gary Wilson tells us. “A new vehicle, just released film, the latest gadget… we are all hooked on dopamine. As with everything new the thrill fades away as dopamine plummets.” There is nothing in these words that is exclusive to pornography, and it is hard not to think immediately of the timeline.
Could it be that when we visit the emotional hamster wheel of the social media timeline, unsure of exactly what we will encounter but certain it will contain new content posted by our “friends,” our brain is involved in a very similar but lesser version of what happens in the brain of an internet pornography user on a so-called “tube site”? Might social media use, with its “food porn,” “process porn,” and the like, be a more respectable version of the same behaviour; what Freud or Lacan would have called a sublimated version? This is at least a possibility that we need to consider.
There are of course many important critiques to be made, or which have been made, of pornography (West, 2016; Power, 2009; MacKinnon & Dworkin, 1988). Ultimately, pornography is the site at which patriarchal capitalism extracts value from sexual objectification and often even degradation. It is usually consensual, and can even be well compensated, but all within a hegemonic, exploitative framework that prioritises the consumers and producers of such media far more than those portrayed in it, who are dehumanised and humiliated for a fee.
Whatever your feelings about pornographic material, however, this is not an argument about pornography; it is an argument about other media, informed by a consideration of how pornography is used. Rather than engaging directly with the content or social context of pornography beyond what we all know about it, we need only to acknowledge that it is psychologically and culturally salient material created for a form of hedonic personal consumption, via a private, digital, networked architecture.
In the context of this book, the important point is that online pornography needs also to be included in any serious discussion of psychology, technology, pleasure, and the internet, since it shows us that the relationship between hedonic pleasure and the internet is a much older one than social media and a far deeper one than we might be led to believe by the North American culture from which social networks have tended to originate, or its puritan origins. The argument here is not that social media are “like pornography,” that the form of arousal experienced in conjunction with their use is the same, that they are used for the same purpose, or that the content of social media have the same cultural or subjective meaning as pornography. Neither is my intent to naturalise or normalise these patterns of other pornography use or social media use; quite the opposite — they must be seen precisely for their cultural specificity and psychosocial context, and the chapter that follows will situate them more firmly within that context. Like the eroticism of pornography, the resonance of all timeline media is both socially constructed and part of an individual subjective experience that reflects both the society and the individual, and there is no necessity that any two users experience or use the timeline in the same manner, or respond in exactly the same way to the emotional stimuli in the timeline.
Rather, the point is that social media and online pornography both exploit similar aspects of the human subjective experience related to how people seek and anticipate novel pleasure from digital sources, especially in the absence of the genuine human relations that those sources appear to represent and portray. The fact that sex, friendship, novelty, and calorific food all stimulate the brain’s reward system in comparable ways, and that the stimuli for these effects can all arrive via digital media, including social networks, means that our motivation for using any digital medium that appears to indulge these cravings is at the very least comparable, regardless of the specific content sought.
At least according to the naïve, primitive logic of the emotional brain, the promise of any basic and enjoyable form of pleasure, towards which psychologists would argue we are predisposed to turn our interests, is surely an enticing promise, even if an ultimately unfulfilled one. The relevant lessons that can be learned about social media from looking at research on pornography are therefore lessons about how our brain craves what it anticipates will be pleasurable, and how media technology that offers to provide it, without necessarily delivering it, can be used irrationally and excessively. It need not be the case that viewing pictures of highly palatable food is actually as pleasurable as eating actual food, just as few would argue that viewing sexual images serves as an adequate proxy for genuine sexual contact, that accruing Facebook “friends” is necessarily the same as having more friends, or that looking at images of cats is the same as having a real cat. As psychologist Barry Schwartz (2005) has observed, wanting something and actually enjoying the consumption of it are two dissociable affects. It is not the having so much as the wanting that is connected with dopamine, and the thrill, arousal, and anticipation that it produces. For that, images of what we want (or of what Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest think we want) are enough. Looking at images of food gives us a similar feeling, as if we were just about to eat that food, looking at pictures of our friends makes us feel as though we are about to see them, and looking at pictures of silly cats may even make us feel as though we will shortly be petting them (if only they would come a bit nearer). Anticipation itself, then, is a key driver of our consumption of the timeline; it is not the movie or the image, but the way it manipulates us into responding as though what it depicts is real and about to be ours that makes it pleasurable. As Marge Simpson’s would-be lover Jacques once said in The Simpsons as he prepared to seduce her: “Better than the deed, better than the memory; the moment of anticipation.”
Besides its content, the timeline has a number of structural and design features that are intended to make it as appealing as possible and to accentuate the social and affective value of its content. One such feature is in how we respond to the content contained in the timeline. While sharing and retweeting are multi-use gestures that allow content to be passed on for informational value, affective value, or any other reason, the “like” gesture is unambiguously an analogue of the user’s subjective emotional response to the content they see, albeit within fairly narrow, if versatile, bounds. Originally developed by aggregator site FriendFeed, which was later bought out by Facebook, the Like button has been widely copied and interpreted on other platforms seeking to replicate the affective qualities of Facebook. Twitter even bizarrely converted their “favourite” button into a “like” button in order to make their implementation of this functionality more faithful to the similar buttons seen elsewhere. The fact that in 2016 Facebook expanded their version of this gesture into six responses — “Like,” “Love,” “Haha,” “Wow,” “Sad,” and “Angry” — is an unambiguous confirmation of Facebook’s own understanding of the timeline’s primarily emotional orientation. Indeed, users had clamoured for years that Facebook implement a “dislike” button to enable negative reactions to the content they saw. The buttons could have been “Interesting,” “Informative,” “Relevant,” and other more neutral descriptors, but they weren’t and that is no accident. Buzzfeed, who publish content with titles such as “This One Question Quiz Will Tell You If You Actually Prefer Food Or Sex” that are designed especially for the timeline, also make a similar acknowledgement, allowing you to respond to their stories with six slightly different buttons: “Lol,” “Win,” “Cute,” “Fail,” “Omg,” and “Wtf.”
Another important feature of various versions of the timeline is the way that sociality is incorporated into the overall consumptive patterns that the timeline implements. After all, to emphasise the essential role of affect in timeline media and to take issue with the emphasis on sociality as a primary characterisation of social media is not necessarily to suggest that social media use or the consumption of media in the timeline do not occur in a highly social context. The sociality suggested by the name “social media” is not a complete misnomer, so much as a half-truth, and the media consumption and the social context in which it occurs are intertwined in a variety of different and important ways.
Because these media are shared publicly or semi-publicly, we consume them knowing that others with whom we share the same “friend” or the same interest in the form of a “like” or a “follow” can see them too, and we may get into conversations or participate jointly in reacting to a given item with individuals who are socially known to us to some degree. It is in these moments that the social nature of the timeline is apparent. As outlined in Chapter One, all media are social, and one of the main drivers for media consumption is the “water-cooler moment” in which we can discuss media with friends and co-consume. But it is also important to remember that such interactions are optional, and that the timeline can function very effectively as a private media-consumption platform with no water-cooler moment.
The fact that such sociality is optional is essential to the appeal of the platform. The architecture of the timeline incorporates the social context in which the consumption of the timeline’s content, like most consumption, takes place. One of the interesting and subtle features of timeline-based social networks is structural ambiguity in how they combine public with private, social with personal. Users may even view media out of curiosity or outright enthusiasm that might put them at odds with social connections, and may need to suppress their reactions in order to avoid social consequences. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social networks report user activity to varying degrees. If my mum saw me “liking” fascist pages, for example, she might be a little bit perplexed, so I would need to be careful, but media consumption that might be considered deviant by our social connections is easy for all but the most novice users.
There is also the capacity for outright debate. If one of your friends posts something you disagree with strongly, you may initiate a debate with them and enjoy doing so because it provides the sort of affect you are looking for, while others might avoid getting into such a debate out of fear that they may damage the relationship with that individual or otherwise adversely affect their own social position.
If something can be both consumptive and social at the same time, it can fulfil two needs at once, increasing its appeal and relevance to everyday life. This kind of multiple purpose, especially given the entertainment, emotional regulation, arousal, and information value covered above that are also part of the timeline’s consumption, hints at the extraordinarily broad role that social media have developed in modern life, which will be discussed further in Chapter Four.
Yet another important feature is the way that the timeline uses the scrolling mechanism of the devices used to access it. Scrolling is a functionality that has existed since the Seventies, but not until recently was it infinite, never mind so disconnected from the content being scrolled. The scrollbar used to show the length of the document being scrolled and the position to which you had scrolled; now it just jumps every time you get to the “bottom” once Facebook or Twitter has added more content for you to scroll, so that you aren’t at the bottom anymore.
If items in our timeline don’t elicit strong feelings, or don’t elicit the right feelings, we are free to continue scrolling with seemingly little effort or investment. In this respect, the scrolling of the timeline is a behaviour similar to how users of cable TV in the 1990s used to “channel flick,” popping quickly from channel to channel, assessing whether the TV program (or ad) on each was worth watching. The astonishing thing about watching somebody actually do this with cable TV was that nothing ever seemed interesting enough to keep watching; it was like the person was looking for something that was not really on offer. Social media timeline use is similar, and there is no guarantee that any of the items in the typical timeline will ever be sufficiently appealing, and thus no guarantee that anything you see in your timeline will provide you with the affective reward you so desperately crave. Ironically this is what provides the strongest reason to keep scrolling — that thing that you want to see, though you have no specific idea of what it is, could be just a bit further down if you keep looking for it, and Facebook, Twitter, and their friends surely know this. Worst of all, the less pleasing the items you do encounter, the more your ongoing usage needs to eventually produce a reward, since it is the reward “circuits” in your brain that are said to drive this behaviour.
What we actively seek from the timeline and the extent to which we are prepared to calibrate it by “liking” or “following” other pages are obviously different from person to person, but the inclination to keep scrolling is seamlessly accommodated by the infinite loading of more and more content, such that the scrolling need never end. Danish usability consultant Jakob Nielsen has long characterised use of the web as a “hunting” behaviour. His analysis is more based in the information-centric web of the Nineties, and so focuses on the idea of hunting for informational “solutions,” but even if the solution hunted for in the timeline is affect, rather than information as in Nielsen’s positivist, Nineties-flavoured analysis, the scrolling of the timeline is an almost perfect manifestation of what he described: Limitless discovery of new content and a fast means of assessing whether it is the desired “solution” or not. Unlike in Nielsen’s analysis, this is a process that is anything but rational, and yet the interactivity of the experience, manifested in features such as liking, commenting, or scrolling further to discover new content, gives us a mistaken sense that we are in control. This mistaken belief in our rational, controlled relationship to the timeline — however subconscious — echoes the narratives that, as described in Chapter One, we have always been fed about the role of technology in our lives as something that works for us, and makes our “hunting” easier and more efficient, but this illusion is exactly what gives the timeline its power.
Other recent technological enhancements to the timeline have focused on making content from other websites fit more closely with the functionality and aesthetic of the overall timeline experience, and making the quick evaluation of the content encountered in that experience into an easier process. Facebook’s implementation of auto-playing video, launched in 2013, meant that all video content, regardless of whether it was interesting or appealing, and even if it contained disturbing imagery, would start playing as soon as you scrolled to it. Not only did this expose users to potentially upsetting triggers, it sent mobile-phone bills rocketing because the broadband needed to buffer even the beginning of a video is so much greater than the proxy graphic that had represented videos before that. The feature can now be disabled, and video play starts off with the sound muted, but again the intention behind the implementation of this feature is not hard to see: Ease of consumption, to the point where it can even be inadvertent — you start watching a video you didn’t even know you wanted to see because the first half-second of it looks promising. At the time of writing, Twitter has also announced that videos and animated GIFs uploaded directly to the platform will also auto-play. Instagram and Vine videos also start playing without the need for any user action, although with sound muted.
Twitter’s “Card API” and Facebook’s “Open Graph Protocol” are both technologies that make links to other websites appear in a far more visually appealing way, and further enhance the user experience of scrolling and evaluating timeline content. Facebook also implements an open standard called oEmbed that allows content from a wide array of other websites that also implement the standard to be interactive and immediately playable without any further action. The choice is always the same: Either consume now, or keep scrolling for something else.
To summarise, taking both the content of the timeline and the architecture itself as a single subjective experience, the timeline has four qualities which together comprise a dramatic departure not only from the functioning of the “world wide web” in a historical sense, but from how culture and media themselves have been accessed, experienced, and consumed.
For a start, the timeline is composed largely of familiar sources, and gone is the anonymity of the early web. Everything from kittens to beheading videos is theoretically trusted and relevant to the user because it comes from a source that the user has selected. On Facebook and Snapchat, the familiar sources are your “friends” and/or the pages that you have “liked”; on Twitter and Instagram it is those people you have “followed”; on other channels such as WhatsApp groups that function similarly, it is the other members of the group. The familiarity of the sources you “follow” is what provides the timeline with its recurrent appeal; just like your friends themselves, the familiarity of the timeline is a long-term one. A timeline composed of items originating from complete strangers, after all, would surely have far less appeal, and would represent a completely different use-case. Our familiar lived reality is one we will do anything to extend and reproduce over time, and the timeline uses the familiarity of our friends, and to a lesser extent our certain chosen brands, to provide a stream of media that we already know we trust. Even if many of these sources are weak social ties such as old high-school friends, users learn that as they scroll effortlessly through the seemingly infinite timeline, the fact that they are acquainted with the person who has authored, recommended, or shared that content means that they can feel some sense of social connection as they consume or pass by that content.
Secondly, the seeming abundance of the timeline is also a major part of its appeal. Not only is abundance in itself an important sensation that at a very deep level offers human beings reassurance, it is constantly reaffirmed by capitalism as an essential and readily consumable output of efficient production processes. The greater the abundance, the more consumption is possible. The tendency when we are faced with abundance is to gorge ourselves, and this is exactly what we do within the timeline. As always when resources are abundant, they are perceived to have lesser or no cost, but in the case of media, that cost is time. The scrollable abundance of the timeline means we are limited only by the time investment we are prepared to make. That we may never actually discover content that gives us the buzz we are searching for appears to the user only as a limitation of the amount of time we are willing to spend looking for it. Sociologist Judy Wajcman has argued that capitalism has a history of using technology to transform our relationship to time. The true cost of this activity (time) is de-emphasised by the seemingly limitless abundance it appears to offer. This may not be the reason why the “timeline” has been given this name, but like “food porn” or “social media” it may be a naming that reveals more than intended about its origins, and it is essential to recognise the power of the seeming abundance of available content.
Third is the mixture of different items that occurs in the timeline. Unlike earlier media distribution and consumption technologies, what the timeline architecture enables is a complete reconfiguration of media consumption; a custom-built media experience, constructed in real time by sophisticated, proprietary technology. To the extent that culture was already commodified before the internet, it usually had a time, a place, and/or a physical form in which this happened. Movies were in the cinema, for example, music in the club or concert hall, or on a record or CD, and news on TV at certain times or in a newspaper. The fact that music, images, video clips, links to text articles, and informal content from friends such as announcements and jokes are all available together on one web page or in one app, in a linear, scrollable form, is a revolutionary development for media consumption. The timeline is now an addictive hosepipe for the commodified culture and public sphere of its users, where people spend time at home, at work, or even in the middle of the night looking at whatever might be there, without the need to discriminate between these formerly separate areas of culture. The only important basis for discrimination is the emotion regulation that it provides. Commodification itself, or as the French more aptly call it, “uniformisation,” is thus built directly into the architecture of the timeline. This development is part of a longer history of how the limitations in digital technology that stores and displays artefacts of human culture have forced a degree of sameness in the ways that information and culture are stored or displayed, meaning they have now been re-situated as merely “forms of content.”
Lastly is the novelty it promises and crucially the unpredictability it uses in order that the experience of each visit to the website or app is different — and new — each time. Above I have highlighted the way that novelty is exciting and rewarding in itself, right down to a neurochemical level. This sensitivity is stimulated by the fact that there is no common narrative to the timeline. The fact that we do not know exactly what we’ll find on the timeline means that right before each visit we cannot be sure whether there may be novelty or not, and feel the need to check, and this is the most important facet of social media that needs to be addressed. A clear separation can be made between forms of digital media that are used when somebody has a specific idea in mind of what content they are looking for, such as “how to convert to PDF” as a Google search or “Lion vs Tiger fight” on YouTube, and media that we visit simply to see what is new, or continue scrolling or interacting to see “what else” may be on offer. Whereas virtually all platforms that feature a timeline began initially by showing you what your friends had posted in reverse chronological order with the newest at the top, algorithms have now been introduced that select and reshuffle the items in your timeline and adjust their prominence so that even if you visit it twice in quick succession, you are not guaranteed to see the same content on both occasions. With enough sources, such as “friends” and liked pages, Facebook’s algorithm — which is based on machine learning and reportedly takes more than a hundred thousand different factors into account — will likely not show you some items of content at all. Facebook has used an algorithm for years, while Twitter and Instagram both adopted algorithms in 2016, ditching the strict chronology of their previous architectures.
As psychologist Ciarán Mc Mahon (2015) has observed, there is a technique used for training animals known as variable schedule reinforcement (henceforth VSR) that follows exactly this pattern. When an animal is trained using VSR, a reward is provided on an unpredictable schedule, so that the animal does not know when it will be rewarded and when it won’t. The animal hopes it will be rewarded in each instance, and thus repeatedly performs a given act (hopefully the one desired by its trainer) to check whether it will be rewarded. When the timeline contains such a variation of material that is rewarding in different ways and to different degrees, it is hard not to see the same variable schedule of reinforcement in play. You are incentivised to return to Facebook or Twitter again and again because you don’t know what affect, if any, you will be rewarded with by the media you encounter on each visit. The timeline is not the only aspect of the social media platform that uses something very analogous to VSR either. The “notifications” feature of many social networks also may or may not show something upon each visit, and thus requires more regular checking. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a “like” from one of your friends, a quote, a comment, a share, a retweet, an update from a close friend, or the birthday of some random person you never talk to, there might be a new notification, and unless you check what it is for, you won’t know, and unless you visit the social media platform, you won’t know whether it is there at all. The repetitiveness entailed in the fridge comparison above captures exactly the idea of repeatedly returning to a place where you expect to find something rewarding, only to find the same underwhelming contents as before. What this suggests is that there can be persistent temptation without a rewarding or hedonic payoff, that the temptation, the wanting, can exist without theoretically ever being fulfilled. Even if there is some pleasure, one study has shown that guilt about having “given in” to temptation can effectively cancel it out: “the hedonic payoff from enactment was much larger for nontemptations […] than the enactment effect for temptations which did not differ significantly from zero” (Hofmann, Kotabe & Luhmann, 2013). But even if we will not actually experience the timeline content in the rewarding way that is craved, this does not mean we can’t anticipate finding something worthwhile all the same. A bit like searching for Prince’s music on YouTube (which isn’t there), looking for something that you are unlikely to find only heightens your sensitivity to and hunger for whatever it is you are looking for, increasing your desperation for an eventual payoff.
Whether or not you have succumbed to temptation or are simply killing time, the fridge may be full, or it may be empty, and you don’t know if you don’t keep checking. This uncertainty is of course where the metaphor breaks down. A real fridge cannot magically update its contents without some manual intervention. The social media fridge promises to be slightly different every time you return using sophisticated algorithms. Even if, in the fridge, the old slice of lemon, nearly-used jar of mayonnaise, and bottle of chilli sauce that you found there last time have now been replaced by an old carrot, a jar of mustard, and a tin of anchovies — equally unsatisfying items — there may at least be some all-important novelty to reward your visit. That means you have two powerful reasons to check: Not only do you never know when there might be an assortment of cupcakes in that proverbial fridge, or a jug of sweet lemonade, contents that will stimulate your arousal and provide you with a much craved blast of dopamine, but you don’t know whether the contents will have changed at all, providing novelty. Thanks to the timeline’s increasingly algorithmic nature, novelty is encountered more often than not, but this only strengthens the timeline’s other possibilities: The most pleasurable items aren’t there every time, and appear only just enough that you think it worth checking.
To argue that social media train us would be to regress to a deterministic argument, but the idea that those who designed Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, to name a few, might have considered such techniques as their platforms were developed is far from inconceivable when it is recalled how valuable our usage of social media, and especially the timeline, is for social media enterprise. As will be explored in Chapter Four, social media are ultimately big business as an advertising channel, and the timeline is the main attraction. Hopefully it should also be clear that this crucial novelty element in social media does not contradict the familiarity mentioned above. The sources can be familiar, while the content itself is new, and it is still possible to seek novelty from a familiar source. Indeed, the idea of novel content from a familiar source is a powerful one. It is a long-held theory that capitalism must constantly represent itself as new, whilst simultaneously being trusted and familiar; here we see exactly this combination of features encoded as a hallmark of the social media timeline, but we are trained to seek novelty from familiar sources in almost every area of life, from “soup of the day” to Best Motion Picture to the newest Tesla model to software updates in the App Store.
Alongside an understanding of the timeline media’s content as primarily emotional stimuli, the way in which these four elements combine as one simultaneous and unified experience explains an awful lot about why social media are so hard to resist. The timeline is designed to allow a number of important processes to occur simultaneously in a way that provides stimulation of an intensity that was previously impossible and convinces users that it will be intensely pleasurable, regardless of whether this is reliably true.
More important than identifying these four features of the timeline is to ask why we appear to need so badly the social media edifice they comprise. The hedonic value of using social media outlined above might be enough to explain the use of it some of the time, perhaps idly “liking” the posts of friends for ten minutes here and there, but when millions of people spend hours on Facebook at the expense of their own wellbeing, we owe those people something better than the deterministic “technology X makes us do Y” explanation. Human motivation can commonly be understood in terms of a pull and a push working together; we are pulled towards something because of its own qualities, as described above, but in doing so we are often able to avoid or escape something else less pleasant. Now that we have examined the reasons why social media, and the timeline especially, might offer hedonic value as pull factors, it’s important to ask: What needs does this consumptive pleasure fulfil within the functioning of human emotion, and why is spending an hour on Facebook better than spending the same hour away from social media — or rather, why do so many people think it will be?
Frequently we eat various foods, smoke, take drugs, and buy things we don’t need because we believe it will feel good, and it usually does momentarily, but in these cases we are invariably using consumption to try and make ourselves feel better, and such hedonism is often about using distractions to escape, as Richard Wood has argued about video-game addiction:
People will at times undertake all kinds of activities excessively if the activity has the capability to distract them from other issues in their lives. This is particularly true if the person concerned is having difficulty coping with other aspects of their everyday life. (Wood, 2007)
With social media, the notion of “escape” is perhaps a bit too spatial, given the history of “cyberspace” that is best left behind, but the scenario of fleeting engagement with stimuli that represent people, places, things, and events that are external to the immediately proximate emotional and physical reality of the user is not unlike escape. Whether we call it escape, distraction, hedonism, we are as motivated to do it as a means of avoidance as we are as a means to pursue pleasure for its own sake.
In so far as the things that make social media seem enticing can be understood by looking at other forms of hedonism and consumption, it’s likely that there are also lessons to learn about what pushes us onto social media by examining what causes us to seek hedonism and consumption in other contexts. Food is also a good example of how stress produces irrational behaviour. Just as food intake has been relevant to social media use because of how both food and social media interact with the brain’s reward systems in a hedonic way, social media also have something in common with food in terms of how their use is driven by stress and other negative emotions.
When people are unhappy (scientists refer to this as an experience of “dysphoria”), they also tend to lack motivation even to effectuate the things that are in their control, never mind to challenge the things that are not. When somebody is coping with stress, anxiety, or grief, for instance, they may feel less able to imagine the positive outcomes of any efforts that they might make, decreasing the motivation to try. Not only does this make it harder to ameliorate such circumstances, it can push us towards behaviours that make things worse. When faced with this type of low motivation that originates in negative affect, we find it harder to do “what’s right” and easier to do things that make us feel good, albeit with a price to pay. Even rats show this effect (Coccurello, D’Amato & Moles, 2009).
When it comes to food and stress, the scientific consensus is generally that under-eating is the most significant marker of stress (Stone & Brownell, 1994), but when the available food is highly palatable or calorific, over-eating becomes a stress-induced behaviour (Adam & Epel, 2007; Torres & Nowson, 2007). Some scientists now suspect that visceral obesity (excessive fat around the abdomen) is an adaptation to stress (Drapeau et al, 2003). Interesting research on the idea of “comfort food” has revealed that some of the pleasure that arises from eating hedonic foods may go beyond the palatability of the food and actually have a therapeutic effect on negative affect and loneliness. It turns out that comfort food may have a genuine psychiatric basis and be comforting because it reduces loneliness and makes us feel closer to loved ones, with whom we associate that food:
A move away from home, a fight with a close friend, a breakup with a romantic partner, and many other circumstances can leave one feeling alone and isolated. When these things occur, the “embrace” of a familiar food can be particularly alluring. (Troisi & Gabriel, 2011)
What all this research suggests is that when we experience negative affect, the balance between our desire for hedonic (i.e. pleasurable) momentary rewards and our motivation to avoid things that are bad for us in excess is tipped in favour of the former. The relationship between stress, hedonism, and possible self-detriment is a recognisable pattern in many areas of life beyond what we eat. Stress can lead us to seek the momentary pleasure of sensation and consumption, even if these effects do not last. People more predisposed to stress by various individual factors are more likely to become and remain smokers of tobacco, for example (Kassel, 2000). Unhappiness and emptiness cause people to seek salve, comfort, and fulfilment. Indeed the availability of various forms of pleasure has always existed to mitigate the darker sides of living in an organised society. This aspect of our behaviour extends to how we use social media.
Psychologists trying to diagnose the broader and older phenomenon of internet addiction, distinct from social media use but comparable, have suggested a theory of what they call “compensatory internet use.” Psychologist Daniel Kardefelt-Winther tells us that “The basic tenet of the theory of compensatory internet use is that the locus of the problem is a reaction by the individual to his negative life situation, facilitated by an internet application.” The idea of the theory is that what people may be compensating for can be different from person to person: One individual may feel that they have no friends, and go online looking to make social acquaintances, while another may be bored and go online seeking entertainment. When the internet more generally, and perhaps social media more specifically, are used to make up for things that are otherwise absent from everyday life, at least in sufficient amounts, an important question arises: If looking for social connections is a compensation for not having enough friends, and entertainment is sought as a solution to boredom, what are hedonism, novelty, and reward sought for, and where do they fit within a compensatory model? If we are to understand social media as also being partly compensatory, then it would be inevitable that dysfunctional or compulsive social media use would be more likely in a context where the lives of its users are not particularly happy or fulfilling. In fact, this is exactly what the research is beginning to show: One recent study found that individuals who were happier showed significantly better self-control in relation to social media use (Wenzel, Kubiak & Conner, 2016). The research in this area is conflicting, and motivations that derive from people’s private affect are very difficult to measure precisely because they are so subjective.
The real question, then, is what are we using social media to escape from and to compensate for? What connects a university student procrastinating working on an essay by looking at Facebook, an isolated young mother at home with a newborn who can’t help spending hours on Instagram, and a depressed, unemployed drama graduate? The answer is emotional distress, whether acute or chronic, but we can and need to go further. It’s too simple to say that everyone who is unhappy is unhappy for different reasons. Obviously the boredom of a university student, the social isolation of a single parent at home with a baby and the futile emptiness of a disillusioned performing arts graduate are both circumstantial and different from one another, but these are foreground affects that point to a deeper, more systemic malaise that is shared by all three. At a time when abuse of prescription opiates is at an epidemic level in the United States, and depression is amongst the most treated mental-health concerns in several developed countries, it is not hard to see that there may well be a link between widespread, chronic, negative emotional disposition and equally widespread social media use. An understanding of sensory pleasure and broader societal patterns of unhappiness from which that pleasure becomes an escape, is an essential pattern for us to understand.