Ep#92 The Psychology of Social Media

The Happiness Project

Welcome back to the 92nd episode on THP podcast. I am in an absolutely amazing state of mind this week and am pretty excited for LIFE! There have been so many developments in my life and all of them make me want to look forward to the future. Well, I really hope you guys are hopeful as I am for the last few months of 2021! Today’s episode is the ‘ever-popular’ topic around ‘Social media’ and how it has impacted our lives, mostly in negative ways! The only time you should look in your neighbour’s bowl is to make sure that they have enough. You don’t look in your neighbour’s bowl to see if you have as much as them. Or the classic, Comparison is the thief of joy. We are social beings and need company, affirmation, and friendship. Traditionally we sought that in face-to-face interactions, the most remote form of it was the penfriend. Someone we had never met but who we wrote letters to. We protected our identity and personal information and guarded it jealously and would go ballistic if even our parents, closest relatives or friends opened any letter of ours or read our diary without our permission. Then came social media in 2004 and opened the doors for us to seek affiliation and affirmation without any boundaries or rules and without the tools to even assess its reality or effect. The first social media site to reach a million monthly active users was MySpace and was the beginning of social media as we know it. Yes, it is, as recent as that. Facebook which owns Instagram, Twitter and WhatsApp has over a billion active users who volunteer their information for it to harvest and use for anything at all, is even more recent. Only in February 2012 did Facebook become a public company. Its first IPO in May raised $16 billion, giving it a market value of $102.4 billion. Today it is worth over $300 billion. Ask how your wealth increased from 2012 to 2021. With social media, suddenly from a few real friends who we knew, we ended up with tens and hundreds of virtual ‘friends’ and ‘followers’. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and everything else in between encouraged us to share the most mundane information about ourselves and suddenly made it the means to become ‘popular’. They gave us ‘role models’ like the Kardashians and others who post what they post to induce us to do the same. Like faithful sheep, we followed. I am putting words like ‘friends’, ‘followers’, ‘popular’ in quotes to underline the fact that none of that is real. However, human nature is such that it does not analyze or deny pleasant experiences. And so, if we have 2000 virtual friends on FB or 3000 followers on Twitter, we do not question the reality or check it against real evidence. We are happy to stay with the fantasy and give in to the drive to increase our ‘following’. This also means that we will do whatever we need to, to ensure that we don’t lose any friends or followers. Remember that all this happens very unobtrusively and quietly and our behavior changes without our being aware of it. Rapidly we get our own sense of identity hooked to this and start to look forward to seeing what our ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ think of us. We want them to like us and so we do what they like. We think we are independent. We are not. We are enslaved. Tune into the entire episode here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6UDPnM2zsHVqXeWi55WARM?si=gKMu0WR0SMGpvXMM3LlQpQ&dl_branch=1