How Facebook and Twitter play with our minds
New media has been around for some time but surprisingly little research or examination has been done on how it affects us behaviourally, physically and mentally. Offline, of course, the Facebook eggs debate – where the company recently offered woman employees the chance to freeze their eggs to delay pregnancies for the sake of their careers – has been discussed threadbare, but little has been done to analyse Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others on the online front.
This is not only surprising but a little disappointing, given that already changes in behaviour and modalities of work and leisure are emerging. What we need to do is be aware of them, as they have, and already are, changing that way we think, speak and work.
The first major change is in the "self". Older technologies such as the traditional camera posited people into an album, which one perused through and got a sense of history ie these are your relatives etc... New media is slowly effacing that history through its sense of the immediate. If you sample any Facebook page it is about “where I was with friends.” This coupled with growing culture of the "selfie" has made last week, what to say of many years ago, redundant. In this way, personal history ie the culture of the "album" is slowly being wiped out. Of course, the album still exists, but keeping personal history will be a struggle, especially as most new media excludes the elderly.
The sense of "self" has ensured that people have willingly blurred the lines between private and public, ensuring that they foist their lives onto others. In this sense – everyone’s life today on new media is like The Truman Show – a movie starring Jim Carrey which is about a man whose life is watched 24 hours a day.
Truman eventually escapes but we do not because we don’t want to. Instead, we are slowly but surely breaking the conventional laws of behaviour such as examining tweets or posts on phones while someone else is speaking. It is not because the other person is less interesting, but it is because he is less important than your reality show. The amount of likes, retweets, and tags on your selfies give your "reality show" or virtual self more importance than your real self. And with MNCs slowly admitting that a potential candidate’s Facebook profile plays a role in his hiring; maintaining your perfect profile will soon become a 24-hour job.
That above will have behavioural, mental and social fallouts that one can only dream about. Will speech change? Shorthand and symbols will change language. In fact it has already, with word crunching becoming the norm "chge" for change; "plz" for please etc. Will behaviour change? Yes, we are already seeing it. Facebook – through the friends circle still maintains expected social norms but on Twitter and YouTube, abuse is rampant, because of the need to call attention to oneself is all consuming.
This has big consequences for the next generation, especially children who will no longer have social buffers of parents or teachers. In earlier technologies like television or the video, parents can and still do decide what programs are inappropriate, but in new media that simply isn’t possible. Thus children will be thrust into a no-holds-barred world and the fallout is something with which society will have to find new methods of coping. Cyber-suicides (where one declares one’s suicide online – in some cases one even shows it); cyber-bullying and even "virtual rape" – yes in 2007 there was a documented incident where a male character allegedly raped a female character in "Second Life" (a popular online fantasy world) – is seeing many of society’s offline evils being enacted online. New crimes have already developed and a new "virtual police" force will be required to catch up.
All of the above suggests a very gloomy picture of new media. New media has much going for it. Indeed, the availability to use technology to share your e-book or your own virtual photo or art gallery, is something that shows almost everyone can be a potential entrepreneur, without needing that start-up capital. But let’s not forget the bigger picture. This basket of roses comes with some very sharp thorns, which if we don’t understand handle well – could cause some deep incisions.