Behavior Change in an Age of Online Socializing: Part 2

COURTENEY MALIN – When I began writing this article, I planned for it to compliment the article that I wrote for the September issue. I was going to further explore how social media (SM) influences our behaviors, specifically our reactions to stressful situations. While I still intend to investigate this connection, I was also asked to elaborate on my personal experience with social media. In the previous article, “Behavior Change in an Age of Online Socializing,” I mentioned that I have a unique perspective on social media since I have never had any SM accounts of my own. I made this choice in middle school once I realized that my peers and friends were spending hours each day searching, scrolling, and posting. Since then, I have had multiple experiences that have reinforced my decision.

My Perspective

I have the same amount of time in the day as everyone else, but I spend my time a bit differently. I reach for my phone to listen to podcasts or to text and FaceTime my friends and family, but I rarely find myself grabbing it for quick entertainment. This is likely why my friends tell me that I am one of the few people in my generation that could survive with a flip phone; everyone around me seems to grab their phone the instant there is a moment of silence. Even when someone is talking, I find people mentally cast away on their phones, half-listening to the person speaking. This lack of awareness has grown into my greatest pet peeve.

I often watch in silence as everyone scrolls through their feeds. I have realized that I can be in the same room with hundreds of people, yet I am the only person who is fully aware of my environment. It is a bizarre experience to which I hope others my age can relate. My world is almost entirely still while the students before class in the lecture hall, the bus riders, and my family and friends delve into a completely different reality from my own. In their online reality, I do not exist.

As I am writing this article, my roommate is sitting next to me at the kitchen island, scrolling through her Twitter feed in search of news. My other roommate is watching TikToks on the couch and reading about the presidential debate tonight. They are both blissfully unaware that a spider nested in the upper corner of the room four days ago (I say blissfully because they both fear spiders). I cannot speak for them, but from what I have gathered, a lot of their environment goes unnoticed each day. I find myself actively hearing and seeing more in a day than those around me.

Since I do not have any social media, I often miss out on a lot of content. It has taken me years to figure out Vine and old meme references, and on a daily basis, my friends have to ask me if I understand what they are talking about. I also have fewer people in my social circle; friends and family must be willing to text me or call me since they cannot message me or like my images on any social media platform. The ease of connection is perhaps the greatest asset of social media, but without social media, I am always aware of who wants to be a part of my life because they put in the ‘effort’ to contact me without SM.

How Social Media Impacts Interactions with Reality

I initially made the choice to stay social media free so that I would experience my own reality as much as possible. However, Americans often use social media to escape their realities and decrease stress. Researchers have shown that when used in the correct way, social media reduces an individual’s perception of his/her stress. While this is beneficial in the short-term, many children and young adults are not developing coping skills for loneliness and cannot maintain a positive self-image without using SM. Their lives grow dependent upon the use of social media and the repeated behavior of scrolling through content. Researchers do not know if this will impact their lives; if they are constantly able to access social media, the impact of their limited coping skills and inability to preserve a good self-image may never present an issue. Nevertheless, there are many life experiences that may not be conducive to social media use for coping. For example, these children and young adults will not be able to access their SM in a difficult work environment to reduce their stress. If they are currently not developing coping strategies, then a stressful SM-free environment could promote mental duress. Social media allows them to quickly forget about the stressful situation, but without SM, young adults and children report feeling hopeless, confused, and withdrawn.

Social media can also directly increase worry due to “cost of caring.” Every day, SM exposes people to bad news associated with their distant relatives and friends. When bombarded with image after image of, for example, their old friend in a hospital, people experience heightened psychological pressure and stress. The “cost of caring” describes how caring about the world and people around you can be overwhelming when bad news is continuously available on social media. Couple the bad news from your friends with the constant national news cycles, and this exponentially affects an individual’s perception of his/her wellbeing.

I became interested in investigating this topic because of the slow behavioral changes I noticed in those around me. Unfortunately, due to the “newness” of social media, psychological research is limited. Most media outlets claim the extremes (i.e. social media contributing to suicide or social media ruining lives); however, SM media has benefits and downfalls. It falls in the same grey area where most psychological research falls. It is difficult to make an exact distinction about its consequences or advantages, but understanding how it affects human behavior can guide us in deciding how we should interact with social media.

Photography Source: Shweta Mistry