Who Hath Not Googled Thyself?
Have you ever searched for your self on the Web, entering your name into the Google search engine to see if you come up? Go on. Be honest. Only the very few cannot be curious to know what’s been said about them, if anything at all. And where better to find your self than on the Web? It’s the electronic version of looking first for your self in the group photograph or hearing your name mentioned in a crowded cocktail party and then straining to listen to what is being said about you. The advent of the Web has made our preoccupation with what others think about us a part of human nature. For better or worse, most of us in industrialized countries are now on the Web whether we like it or not.
Many of us enjoy being on the Web and actively use it socially to interact with others. Social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Bebo have attracted millions of users, many of whom have integrated these sites into their daily lives. The mightiest at the moment is Facebook, which currently has over 750 million active users. There are several core features of the different social networking sites. First, they enable users to construct public and semi-public profiles on a website. Second, the website enables users to view other users who subscribe to the service and, most importantly, enables them to communicate with each other by messaging and facilities for sharing files. It’s like a 24/7 virtual cocktail party where you mix with friends but sometimes meet new acquaintances, swap stories and opinions, share a joke, maybe look at each other’s family photographs and flirt (or sometimes even more). Or perhaps you sign a petition or start a cause to change things. As the new media expert Jenny Sundén succinctly put it, social networking sites enable users to, ‘type oneself into being’.7
Not surprisingly, an analysis of personal profiles posted on social networks reflects a great deal of narcissism8 – the tendency to be interested in one’s self and what others think about us. After all, why wouldn’t we want others to know about how successful our lives were? However, this obsession with our self on the Web will depend mostly on who you are. Being online is not for everyone. For example, my wife refuses to join social networks but then she also does not want to appear in the public light. Like my wife, many of the pre-Web generation cannot understand what is going on and frankly do not feel the need to surrender precious time, effort and especially privacy to join online communities. They don’t get YouTube, they don’t get Facebook and they certainly don’t get Twitter, which seems to be the ultimate in broadcasting trivial information about one’s self. However, even stalwarts against the onslaught of social networks are being dragged, kicking and screaming, into a new era. The social networking sites that have sprung up in this last decade are changing communication between people and will play an important role in self-identity. If the self illusion is correct, social networking sites will continue to expand in popularity and will increasingly shape the sense of who we are for the next generation and those that follow. As long as we remain a social animal, social networks in one form or another are here to stay.
This is because most of us want to be noticed. Surveys consistently show that the West has embraced the celebrity culture. When 3,000 British parents were asked what their pre-teen children wanted to be when they grew up, one in three said they wanted to be a sports figure, actor or pop star. Compare that to the professions that topped the aspiration list twenty-five years ago: teachers, bankers and doctors.9 Children now want to be famous for the sake of being famous because they equate fame with success. A recent survey of the UK Association of Teachers and Lecturers revealed that the majority of students would prefer to be famous than academically gifted.10 The Web facilitates this obsession with fame and popularity by providing a readily accessible and updatable medium where individuals can indulge their interest in the famous but also begin to make an impact of their own. Anyone can gather a following on the Web. It has levelled the popularity playing field so we can all be noticed.
Also, for most people, the Web is first and foremost a social medium. According to the Neilson Company, which specializes in analyzing consumer behaviour, the majority of time spent online is engaged in social networking sites and that is increasing each year.11 By August 2011, we were spending over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook alone. One in five US adults publishes a blog and over half of the American population have one or more social networking profiles. Even when we are at work, we are social networking: on average a US worker spends 5.5 hours each month engaged in this activity on company time.12
It is even more pervasive in adolescents and young adults. At the moment, if you grow up in the West and are between sixteen and twenty-four years of age, being online is essential. This age group spends over half of their online time engaged in social networks in comparison to older age groups. Many Western teenagers feel they do not exist unless they have an online presence. Life online has taken over from the school playground and the shopping mall where the kids used to hang out.13 It has extended the window of opportunity to socialize at anytime and anywhere. We used to tell our kids to get off the phone. Now they use their own phones and can be chatting online whenever they want. According to the most recent report by Ofcom, the industry regulator of communications, half of all UK teenagers compared to a fifth of adults possess a smartphone.14 The most common use of the phone is not for making calls but visiting social networking sites. Two-thirds of teenagers use their smartphones while socialising with others; a third of teenagers use them during mealtimes; and nearly half of teenagers use their phones to social network in the bathroom or on the toilet. No wonder that six out of ten teenage users consider themselves addicted to their smartphones. They get to continue socializing well after the school is shut, the mall is closed or their families have moved them to another town.
How is this online activity going to affect their development, if at all? A child’s social development progresses from being the focus of their parent’s attention as an infant and preschooler to stepping out and competing with other children in the playground and class. Initially, children’s role models are their parents but as they move through childhood and develop into adolescents, they seek to distance themselves from the family so that they can establish an independent identity among their peers. As a parent, I have come to accept that what peers think can easily trump whatever a parent wants for their child. This may not be such a bad thing. I am not a therapist but I can easily believe that overbearing parenting creates later problems if children are not allowed to establish their identity among their peers. These are the popularity contests that preoccupy most adolescents in Western culture. It is through this chaotic period of self-construction that the adolescent hopefully emerges out the other side as a young adult with the confidence to face the world.
As every parent in the West knows, adolescence is typically a time of rebellion, bravado, showing-off, risk-taking, pushing boundaries, arguments, tears, strategic allegiances and Machiavellian negotiation. Some blame immature brains, which has perpetuated the ‘teen brain’ hypothesis – that the disruptive behaviour of this age group is the inevitable consequence of lacking of inhibitory control in the frontal lobes which are some of the last neurological structures to reach adult levels of maturity. Teenagers are hypersensitive to social evaluation, but does that explain the increase in risky behaviour? Psychologist Robert Epstein believes the teen-brain account of delinquency is a myth – that adolescent turmoil is more to do with culture and the way we treat our children.15 He points out, for instance, that teenage misbehaviour is absent in most pre-industrialized societies. He argues that teenage delinquency is an invention of modern societies and media stereotypes, and describes how, before the arrival of Western media and schooling, the Inuit of Canada did not have the problems of teenage rebellion. For him, the problems we see in Western teenagers are more to do with the way we isolate this age group and effectively let them establish their own social groups and hierarchies. These are the pecking orders of popularity through the processes of affiliation, competition and establishing one’s self esteem in the eyes of one’s peers. In this situation, teenagers think that in order to gain a reputation among their peers, they have to be outsiders to the rest of society.