Social Media addiction is a phenomenon. A lot of people have and use it. I admit it that I’m one of the social media active users among 72 million users in indonesia that pretty much feel the benefits and harms.
The impact delivered from a somewhat-person’s random posts in a social media may be a great deal for some even many people. Massive publications are created through shares or like buttons that instantly disseminate information unselectively; not only formal information from an official social media account, but also personal information from an individual. People including me utilize this technology also as a tool to express personal things. The information then may build assumption, prejudice, variety of personal perceptions, or the softer one is a decent knowledge regardless what the motives and purpose that the people try to either obviously showing it or instead hiding it.
Natalya Bazarova in her journal has conducted a research involving a group of students that are told to input their Facebook updates consist of status, wall post, and private message to a survey website. She seeks for the students’ motives behind their updates. The data shows that most of the updates relate to the reason of social validation and to develop a relationship. Social validation here means an approval or support seeking of a concept and relationship development aim to manage or maintain a relationship. Some updates also relate to the fact that people use social media to express thoughts and release pent up feelings. As an active user, I don’t use social media solely for one motive. I believe other people too. Here I’m focusing to the utilization of underlying purpose that whether unconsciously or not planted on humans’ brain when they use social media. It is self-disclosure.
Self-disclosure means to reveal personal information to others. In other words, motives that I told you in previous paragraph which are from Bazarova’s research are packaged in an action called self-disclosure in a social media. So, is it good to actually give personal information in a social media?
In 1955, Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham developed a tool called Johari Window to demonstrate the importance of self-disclosure by doing an open communication to build trusts. It contains of four quadrants that one of the quadrant says an open area which means that you know about yourself, so do other people; this area is encouraged to be widen. They believe that by telling our traits, skills, attitudes, and knowledge to people, trust between each other will improve because each of us know what to do when we face certain kind of condition with somebody. Frankly, I don’t reject the theory, but what happen if we openly share ourselves publicly through social media? Johari Window doesn’t tell us how if it applies in a virtual world where public is so much public. Does it improve trust?
Let’s take an example of Instagram (IG). I notice that people can make it private in the setting feature IG provides but let’s be honest that we see a lot of people bravely show the pictures publicly as if telling people “hey, this is me and my life, take a peek!”. Many users eventually become popular because of their pictures posted, whether it shows the beauty of girl faces, controversial pictures, or sensational one. We disclose ourselves through pictures. Without knowing the underlying motivation, we know that people are what they post. Some people will prefer a less public social media like Path when you need to add a person as a friend before taking a look at their posts. But what is the point when you know that the friends you have in a social media are no longer your inner circles? Is this kind of self-disclosure really healthy? Does it really build trust or all the way around?
Honesty and openness has come to people around the world, not only western society. Social media then somehow facilitate the openness. For introverts mainly, they probably more comfort to express thoughts and feelings –to be open- through writing rather than talking directly; they may feel less afraid of people’s comment when they post pictures to tell story rather than speaking out loud to people. Social media then become their friends; tumblr, blog, line, twitter, many more. In reality, introverts sometimes struggle to tell who they are unless it’s a deep conversation with a small group of people. To me, it is not a mistake. Yet, is this kind of ‘honesty’ really healthy when bias is actually present without others know? Does the person act the same way in real life like she/he writes or post virtually?
Extroverts also utilize the idea of virtual sharing with other motives rather than only feeling comfort. Self-disclosure aims to build trust, and also building motivation as a motivator says that people need to do self-branding to motivate, that probably many high achievers-extroverts and some introverts do this. But the thing is how far this self-disclosure really motivates people? Encourage people to do goods instead of making people keep comparing someone’s life that will create an unhealthy jealousy? How this self-disclosure really help each other build healthy environment instead of creating prejudices and stereotyping? Whether it’s a good or bad trait that we share in social media, how this self-disclosure is not seen and not done too much?
The underlying motivations that are classified by Bazarova in her journal more and less tell on how we manage our attitude toward social media. The motives include identity clarification, relation development, social validation, social control and resource gain, self-expression and relief of distress, information sharing to benefit others, and information storage and entertainment. Basically, trust that is expected from a self-disclosure surely depend on what information we share regardless the motives. The motives are basically humane but that doesn’t necessarily lead to a justification of all more detail derivative motives. People themselves who know how much the social media addiction harm them and others; they actually know when they have used social media too much, substantially and technically.
Everyone knows, too much is never good.
#selfreminder
