How social media has affected the human psyche on a biological, societal, and emotional level, and what we should do about it.
Also includes thoughts on adolescent development, Sex Ed in America, and bitchy high schools.
Scrolling through snapchat stories, my friend Molly’s caught my eye. I thought, I genuinely wonder what she's up to. Then I thought, I haven't had a real conversation with her for a few years and yet I know what she's been doing in life. I have developed a representation of her in my head largely based on her social media profiles:
People have a completely different perspective on other humans now than they did long ago. Long before, when a human thought of another human, they tag them with emotions. The thought of another person triggers past memories, how they feel when they are in their presence– your response to their mannerisms, the pheromones and such that are sent, picked up, and matched up– setting off these biological representations of other humans in our own heads. Basically before technology, people attached emotional responses to other people.
But now the technological age has brought about infinite types of social media. Photos, statuses, video shares... now we gather information about a person from their profiles. Profile pictures, thumbnail photos…when you think of a person, you think of the pictures not even videos, right? Cousins, acquaintances, classmates. Your mental representation of these people [that you know more through social media than in person] no longer includes an emotional component. We fear robots taking over because they lack the human empathy or emotional processing necessary to account for human life. But what we don’t see coming is that – dare I say – we are becoming more robotic-like in function than ever before in human history.* This is not to say that we are a lost cause. Humans contain the capacity for this primal instinct of connection. The problem is that humans are also pretty ignorant (ignorance is bliss is so real and explains why most people are ignorant because bliss is better than hell and most people tend to go for positive over negative things like on a larger/meta scale but that’s for another stream of consciousness). And we’re right in the middle of this shift into technology and social media. I am blinking in this important blip of time – stopping the world for a moment. And taking it in.
Anyways so humans have this primal instinct of connection but we are also ignorant and that’s why we got here, to mental schemas of others that have no emotional coloring. So all this social media blasted into the world of middle schoolers just a few years ago – the perfect target consumer. The human psychological developmental course guides the adolescent through infinitely new experiences – no precedent has been set for these behaviors yet (adolescents are cute awkward organisms who have all this capacity but don’t know how to process it and it’s a terribly misunderstood mess. But I digress). These new experiences include exploring freedom from their parents, building autonomy, and they are largely influenced by their peers. So as adolescents are trying to build their autonomy, simultaneously trying to be liked by everyone (they don’t have the life experience yet to know that some people just don’t vibe with each other and that’s ok) (also, as people grow older they each become more unique. Like all the middle schoolers like, do, and wear the same things because they’re just trying to fit in. to not stick out. to not get made fun of)….as I was saying, as they are trying to build their autonomy while also trying to be liked by everyone, social media has now appeared. And now, you can hide everything that’s weird about you and show everything that’s awesome about you. And you think that’s great because everyone will like you. But guess what. The mental representation people have created for you is not you. As I said before, the representation you have of someone over social media is not equal to representation you would make based off in-person interactions. So when someone who has been following you online meets you in real life, you will not meet their expectations (I mean unless you are true to yourself but let’s be real that’s usually not how it goes in social media, especially since I’m talking about middle schoolers now. But I am getting ahead of myself). There is no possible way for you to meet the expectation you set over social media. Because again, social media gives you a mental opinion of someone, but it takes away the ability to form an emotional or physical opinion/reaction. This inevitable disconnect and disappointment of expectations in turn causes discord, negative behavior, social destruction [I know that sounds dramatic but just listen]. Back to the middle schoolers, recall their priorities. Lack of life experience means no knowledge of how to cope with failure. Failure is a scary unknown.** Social failure is death in adolescence. So they strive to be as far from the bottom of the social hierarchy as possible. In this case, show their best face on social media.
Ok back to the dramatic point I’m trying to make, social media gives adolescents the opportunity for social anarchy. Some schools are really nice you know? What do you think of, a hippie or rural type school? But some schools are catty and drama-filled like the ones in LA or NY. Which type of school do you imagine there are cell phones and social media? [is this fair to say?] Kids from which type of school care about online profiles more than their real physical representation? This is all to say that social media causes (or can cause) drama, power struggle, and therefore negativity into people’s lives.***
As I said before, we humans are not a lost cause. We do have the capacity for the primal instinct of human connection. Of love and compassion. I do believe the world can be most successful on those ideas. We must not let ignorance get the best of us. Or maybe not ignorance but lack of awareness. Lack of acknowledgement– of our ancestors, where we came from, of our home and life force earth. Technology is shiny and instant. It is beautiful and functional and yes it has undoubtedly brought us to the modern day. But social technology (such as phones, computers etc) has existed for less than a century. Thus, human nature is based largely on the actions and knowledge of those who came before us. Since humans first became socially aware, we have been coloring our perceptions of each other with rainbows of emotion. Love, disgust, indifference, hate. It has only been in age of social media that this mental social framework has been threatened. Our adolescents aren’t learning the emotional components that accompany interpersonal connection. As we see them grow up, they age out of it (life experience shows them in-person connection is more fulfilling), they stay into it (spending their lives putting on makeup, plastic surgery, or just generally being insecure or unfulfilled) or going straight into large tech companies to churn out even more social media outlets.
And then what? We are at a crucial point in human history: we have time to stop the disintegration of real human connection. We must think of ways to combat the threats of the technological age. How can we be most effective? As I said before, adolescents are the perfect target for social media because they are so impressionable. This is why it is necessary to teach them life skills such as dealing with relationships and break ups etc. (could be integrated into a sex-ed class, but you would have to change the name because people are scared of the word sex …a whole other story)**** If we can give people tools to buffer against the negative effects of social media when they are young, they will be able to effectively and competently go through life, unaffected by any distorted perspectives or discord caused by social media in this technological age. Once the Social Media Kids have their own kids, society will go down a one-way waterfall fast. If left to the forces of social media without intervention, Social Media Kids will be disconnected, leaving their children to watch, model, and adopt disconnected behaviors. It is important to act now, in the immediate aftermath of the birth of social media. We must give our impressionable, vulnerable kids the tools to use social technology in a mutually beneficial way before we do in fact become a lost cause.
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*is this just the United States? Most of the world probably isn’t glued to their cell phones…?
**The word failure is horribly negatively connotated. Why is failure thought to be such a bad thing? You have to fail in order to learn, to know what works and what doesn’t and what will succeed in the long run. Failure is not bad, failure is important. Maybe if we taught our adolescents that, they wouldn’t be so stressed out and crazy all the time.
***not sure if I really think this, but just exploring it
****I can’t help myself – sex ed in America is so messed up because it’s based off the ideas brought to us by the forefathers, which was religious and abstinent. Religious abstinence is all good and fine, but then America decided to separate the church and state. So public government schools should not have a religious component right? (money, the pledge of allegiance, the oath in court have god in it too but whatever) Anyways so now hundreds of years later the government still promotes abstinence because that’s just what has always been done. At the same time, the social vibe of America is getting more liberal. Hippies were cool with sex and since then people are more and more open to it. But legislation doesn’t really reflect that and kids are getting mixed signals. So basically kids are getting told that sex is bad by the government, teachers, and probably parents. But if you were told growing up that sex is bad (more specifically, don’t have sex end of conversation), how are you to become a responsive and responsible sexual adult? How are they supposed to learn what sex actually means? Why we do it or what comes before or after? Sex is a two person thing, so it is inherently about human connection. Shouldn’t we be talking about that? Shouldn’t we be educating our kids about human connection? That’s the meaning of life in my opinion. Sex ed does not have to be all about sex, it should include relationship skills: how to deal with breakups, why you are having issues with someone and how to deal with it etc. This is all to say that there should be a more relationship-based approach to sex ed in America at least.
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