Despite the potentially negative psychological side effects that our use of social media can have, it has undoubtedly brought many positives into our lives and can continue to do so, provided that we use it with caution. Social media enables us to connect with friends and family, to build new communities and to offer and receive validation and recognition. However, social media can also reinforce and even create negative connections and feelings for both ourselves and others. This can be particularly the case for people in the public eye, but can happen to all of us. The suicide earlier this year of Caroline Flack perhaps reflects some of the pressures of a life lived online and in the public eye. While it is clear that she had struggled with her mental health for a long time, and while there were many factors that ultimately led to her decision to take her own life, social media clearly played a role in creating the feelings of despair, vulnerability and exposure that she expressed in the Instagram post her family shared following her death.
The fact that Caroline Flack intended to share her feelings on Instagram reflects the key role that social media plays in the lives of many people in the public eye. For them, a social media presence has become a crucial way to connect with the public and yet, as was clearly the case for Caroline Flack, they are just as prone to a sense of disconnect from their online identity as any of us might be. Not only does that identity conceal the complexity of the life going on behind the screen, but it also makes them particularly susceptible to criticism and worse, when the gap between the social media fiction and the reality of everyday life is exposed, as it was for Caroline Flack in the most dramatic of ways when she was accused of attacking her boyfriend. She was harshly criticised by the media, and also by individual users on social media platforms, including many who had previously followed and liked her posts and stories. Many of the comments made to and about Caroline Flack were aggressive and vitriolic. She was by no means the first person to suffer this kind of abuse, and sadly will certainly not be the last. We know how unkind and actively cruel people can be on social media. The application of theory to the ways in which we interact can help us understand where these negative emotional responses are coming from.
I have written about social objects, and to a certain extent the identity of the individual can be subsumed into the content they post online. They can almost lose their identity as an individual, which in turn makes it easier for others to objectify them and to criticise them without worrying about the potential repercussions of their words and actions. Furthermore, social networks like Twitter enable us to interact with others without fear of the personal consequences of direct emotional feedback from the people with whom we are interacting.
Freud’s model of the mind – the id, super-ego and ego – can help us understand how the distance afforded by social media can lead us to express negative responses in a more unfiltered way. According to Freud, the super-ego is our moral conscience, and the id is the instinctual part of the mind that contains sexual and aggressive drives, and hidden memories. The role of the ego is to regulate our relationships with the outside world, ensuring that we present a socially acceptable face. The immediacy and partial anonymity of social media enables us to bypass this regulation and express the emotions owned by the id more directly.
So, in part, we might say bad things online simply because it is easier to do so than in face-to-face communication. Of course, not all of us are tempted down that particular path, and the ways in which we choose to use social media are once again linked to our feelings about ourselves and how we manage them in terms of our relationships with self and other. An example might be the way we process our shame. Shame is a difficult feeling to have and often relates to the negative feelings about ourselves that we attempt to conceal from the outside world. It can also have a positive function, in the sense that it encourages us to comply with social norms. However, shame can also be used in such a way that it harms other people. Shame is dependent on an audience. I took a dramatic tumble at the beach recently. Luckily, no one saw, and I was spared the shame I would have felt had I fallen over in front of a crowd. In terms of social media, we might choose to project our shame onto someone else, in order to get rid of this difficult feeling. We might criticise a celebrity or politician who we feel has made a mistake, or even turn to anonymous trolling. The process of projection enables us to feel more secure and better about ourselves, albeit at the expense of another person.
The fact that we are able to engage in such negative and destructive interactions online is linked to the way that social media pushes us towards a loss of empathy. Firstly, social media encourages us to idealise people to whose lifestyle and status we aspire. When we feel that they have let us down in some way, we are prone to direct our feelings of disappointment or disillusionment at the person who we feel is their source, and almost feel that it is our right to do so. Secondly, as mentioned, social media encourages us to reduce others to profiles on our social media and in our minds. This limits our empathy for them, since we can tend to use them as objects to be picked up or dropped at will, with no sense of the other as a whole person with their own feelings and their own experience of our interactions with them. Increased access to the lives of others and the way in which we are disinhibited by our physical distance from others, and by the seemingly simplistic and often black and white nature of online communication, all serve to allow us to behave online in ways that we would not consider in face-to-face communication.
This tendency is further encouraged, or exacerbated, by the way in which social media encourages our ego to look outside of ourselves and to engage in this outward-looking virtual psychic space. As we do so, we pay less attention to our inner life and perhaps to some of the constraints and aspects of conscience that would lead us to modify any tendency to more negative online interactions. That inner part of our identity, with its own psychological and emotional needs, may be increasingly neglected as we experience recognition and validation only of the aspects of ourselves that we have put on display on various social media platforms. This may lead to a fragmented sense of self, which in turn leads to increased anxiety and also makes it more likely that we will deal with our negative feelings by projecting them onto other people. And so the cycle continues.
Conclusion
In this article I have sought to explore some of the theories behind our engagement with social media and the ways in which it can have a deleterious effect on our emotional wellbeing, and on how we interact with others. That is not to say however that I am advocating that we should cease to engage with and use social media. It can bring many benefits, as long as we are aware of the potential pitfalls it presents, and if we take care to protect both our sense of self and the life and relationships that we have built offline, in the real world. We should make a real effort to nurture and develop the inner aspects of our ego. We should enjoy a gig, rather than watching it through our smartphone as we film it to share online. We should pause and appreciate a sunset, rather than seeking to capture and share it on Instagram.
We can also make a concerted effort to counter some of the common psychological defences that often come into play in how we use social media. Rather than displacing our anger online, we can step away from social media and take time to consider where our anger actually comes from. Rather than projecting our negative feelings about ourselves - our weight for example - into the comments we make about public figures online, we can try to be honest about and sit with our feelings, to find a way through them. We can also make a concerted effort to say nice things to others on our social networks, all the while remembering that the identity and life that we and others create on them can never be more than a partial representation of the more important and more complete lives and experiences that we are living on a daily basis.