Exam preparation materials

Chapter 13 • Social Networking Experiences

A woman holds an iPhone with the social media widget that shows icons for the apps of Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, Gmail, WhatsApp, Pinterest, Viber, and YouTube with the number of unread notification shown for each. An iPad is also seen.

With follow, friend, block, and mute, as well as the options to follow hashtags or specific topics, social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram allow users to customize their content.

iStock.com/bigtunaonline

Key Idea: Digital media provide platforms to attract audiences who want to create their own media experiences to satisfy their needs for social contact and cooperation.

· Friendship

o History

o Attraction

o Effects

§ Negative Effects

§ Both Negative and Positive Effects

· Dating

o Attraction

o Dangers

· Living

o Second Life

o Farmville

o The Sims

o Attraction to Virtual Worlds

· Opinion Sharing

o Blogs

o Attraction

· Media Literacy with Social Networking

· Summary

· Further Reading

· Keeping Up to Date

· Exercise

The digital media provide platforms for people who want to engage in social interactions in ways that they cannot in real life. These platforms give users opportunities to maintain existing friendships as well as attract new friends to an extent far beyond what they are able to do in real life. While these platforms are relatively new, they have quickly grown to be extremely popular. By 2008, 24% of the U.S. population were regular users of social media sites and this percentage steadily increased to about 77%, where it leveled off from 2016 to the current time (Baer, 2020).

This chapter explores four types of digital platforms that people have made very popular as a way of satisfying their needs for interacting with other people. These are friendship, dating, living, and opinion sharing. The differences across these four types are due to the motives people have when using them. While motives differ, there is often a sharing experience across the different types. For example, people who are looking to make friends and maintain those friendships can do so in all four types of sites.

FRIENDSHIP

The most prevalent platform for friendship is the social networking site (SNS). These are web-based platforms that give individuals the opportunity to create a personal profile that they make public so they can attract friends by generating connections with visitors to their site. To help people satisfy this need, these SNSs make it easy for users to create profiles with text, photos, and video. By using the internet, SNSs allow users to overcome the limitations of geography so they can attract friends from anywhere in the world. Therefore, the social communities that people build on SNSs are constructed by psychology (shared interests) rather than by geography.

History

The earliest SNS was SixDegrees.com, launched in 1997. While this site was innovative, it did not grow very large. Then, in the summer of 2003, a SNS called Myspace launched by offering users a profile page where they could post pictures and text as a way of communicating with their friends as well as attracting new friends. The early users of Myspace were primarily teenage girls who used it to keep in touch with their friends around the clock by posting photos and actively blogging. Their major activity was friending, which is getting people to add you to their friends list and agreeing to be on your friends list in return. Friending grants users special privileges. For example, on Facebook, a person’s friends are granted the privilege of viewing and posting to one’s timeline.

Until April 2004, Myspace only allowed its members to view the profiles of other Myspace members. As the company began seeking advertising support, it needed to increase the number of users so it would be more attractive to advertisers. Myspace began allowing nonmembers to view profiles of users as a way of stimulating new people to join their site. Myspace also started providing games, blogging (called journals early on), and even horoscopes. Then the site made it possible for users to download songs, create their own mash-ups, and share their remixes. And Myspace allowed fakesters by permitting users to be whoever they wanted to be—themselves, a celebrity, a pet animal, or a wholly made up person with a fictional identity. All of these features were successful in attracting new users, and by 2008, Myspace was by far the most popular SNS.

Facebook was launched in 2004 and quickly became a major competitor to Myspace. Initially, Facebook’s membership was limited to Harvard students, but it expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. During its first year, Facebook was much smaller than Myspace with just 10 million monthly visitors compared with 24 million for Myspace, but it grew quickly as it expanded to include any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone age 13 and over. Facebook also introduced several new features such as News Feed, which provided members with updates about their friends’ activities. SNS users began moving away from Myspace and into Facebook. Advertisers followed. Myspace went into a steep decline. By the summer of 2011, Facebook had 600 million users worldwide and virtually eliminated Myspace (“The New Tech Bubble,” 2011). By 2014, Facebook had 1.3 billion users worldwide and this continued to increase to an expected 1.7 billion in 2020 (Statistica, 2019).

Mark Zuckerberg is seen on a stage with a large screen behind him that has the Facebook logo on it and the word safety below it. He points to it as he speaks.

Mark Zuckerberg presents a keynote on new privacy features in the Facebook family of platforms. Have privacy concerns, recent data scandals, or increased scrutiny of political ads changed how or if you use Facebook?

AMY OSBORNE/Getty Images

There are now hundreds of SNSs worldwide; they accounted for 3 billion users in 2019 and that number was expected to grow to 3.4 billion by 2023 (Clement, 2020c). The most visible and well known are Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

Attraction

SNS platforms are designed to offer users opportunities to develop and maintain friendships. They attract users by offering two sets of tools. One set includes tools that help users easily construct their own profiles by uploading text, photos, and videos. The second set includes tools that help users communicate with others by allowing them to leave messages and reactions on each other’s profiles.

Many users were attracted to SNSs for competitive reasons; that is, they used the friending feature to achieve the largest friend list possible—sometimes growing to numbers of friends in the thousands (Angwin, 2009). Such competition led researchers to wonder if there was a limit to the number of friendships a single person could maintain. Some scholars evoked something known as Dunbar’s number as a way of establishing a natural limit for the number of friendships a human can adequately maintain. Dunbar’s number says that 150 friends is the upper limit. Aiken (2016) attributes this limit to a physiological basis when she says,

Given the size of the human brain, the number of social contacts or “casual friends” with whom an average individual can handle and maintain stable social relationships is around 150. This number is consistent throughout human history—and is the site of the modern hunter–gatherer societies, the size of most military companies, most industrial divisions, most Christmas card lists. (p. 128)

As SNS users amassed large numbers of friends, they began to consider different levels of friendship (such as close friends, acquaintances, and strangers who have friended them) and thereby set up different ways of communicating with them. For example, some users of Instagram created a second account known as a Finsta, which is short for Fake Instagram where the owner of the account limits access to only close friends.

Facebook is so pervasive that it appeals to people all over the world and of all ages. For example, a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults (N = 2,003) compared the usage of Facebook by older adults (aged 65 or older) and younger adults (aged 18–65 years) and found that the two groups did not differ in the amount of time they spent on Facebook, the frequency of their visits, or their engagement in relationships (Yu et al., 2018).

Why do SNSs attract so many users? To answer this question, scholars have gone back to some foundational ideas about human socialization originally articulated by George Herbert Mead and Erving Goffman. The influential sociologist George Herbert Mead pointed out that people continually define themselves by trying on different roles (Mead, 1934). As people continually watch how others behave and think, they identify certain people as role models. We then closely observe these role models to figure out which behaviors to try out in our own lives.

Another prominent sociologist Erving Goffman (1959) built on this idea by pointing out that as we try these different roles, we are performing; that is, we are putting on a show, even if just for ourselves. We act in ways that we believe our role models would act. This is how our personalities evolve. We have an idea of who we want to be and in order to realize that idea, we try out different behaviors in order to test how those behaviors impress other people. When we find that those behaviors trigger others to treat us the way we want to be treated, we continue to perform those behaviors and eventually those behaviors become who we are.

SNSs give us an opportunity to experience far more social interactions online than we can experience in our unmediated lives. With the media, we can observe a much greater variety of personality characteristics than we can in real life. And with the digital media, especially SNSs, we can try out a greater range of behaviors with a greater variety of people, to test which of those behaviors are the most successful in attracting the kinds of friends we want. SNSs allow us to present ourselves through text, photos, and videos. SNSs also allow us to develop special ways of communicating through abbreviations and symbols that serve to create special in-groups of friends. Examples of these symbols are emoticons (text-depicted pictures of emotional states such as smiles, frowns, and winks) and emojis (small icons and graphics of all kinds).

People can now post and archive their entire lives down to the smallest minutia. This has been labeled lifelogging (Raine & Wellman, 2012). Continually recording the details of one’s life can be very useful, revelatory, and even life changing (Bell & Gemmell, 2009). It can trigger deeper reflection into some of the values that are at stake when one considers living in a more quantified fashion—values such as autonomy, solidarity, and authenticity. But there is also a downside to such lifelogging—when you digitize information and post it online, you open yourself up to other people hacking your data, transforming it in ways you did not intend and sharing it without your permission. This can lead to embarrassment and even harassment.

Sherry Turkle in Alone Together (2011) writes about the Goldilocks syndrome in which people use SNSs to make a special kind of friend—one who is neither too close nor too far in terms of psychological distance. Turkle explains that SNSs are a useful tool for users to maintain a kind of middle-level form of friendship where they can avoid interpersonal contact that is too close and intimate (phone conversations) or too far and formal (writing letters). Turkle explains,

Texting puts people not too close, not too far, but at just the right distance. The world is now full of modern Goldilockses, people who take comfort in being in touch with a lot of people whom they also keep at bay. (p. 15)

The use of SNSs has also been found to be related to self-esteem, but in a curvilinear manner. A Dutch study of adolescents’ use of Facebook found that the heaviest users exhibited a medium level of self-esteem (Cingel & Olsen, 2018). Adolescents low on self-esteem as well as high on self-esteem spent relatively less time on Facebook.

The use of SNSs has been found to vary by culture. For example, Xu and Armstrong (2019) conducted a study to examine how U.S. and Chinese athletes present themselves on SNSs. They found cultural differences, with the Chinese athletes’ self-disclosure exhibiting much more gender stereotyping than did the self-disclosing of the U.S. athletes.

Effects

Although SNSs are relatively new, scholars have already conducted some lines of research that show how the use of SNSs can lead to effects. Most of those media influences that have been studied so far focus on negative effects. This is not to say that researchers have not also found that the use of SNSs can lead to positive effects; however, the practices that researchers have found that can lead to positive effects can also lead to negative effects.

Negative Effects

The research that examines the negative effects of SNSs have focused on dependency, burnout, depression, narcissism, cyberbullying, and body image beliefs.

Recent research has shown that many users of SNSs have developed a dependency on them in an effort to satisfy their need to belong (Ferris & Hollenbaugh, 2018; Kim et al., 2019). This is a negative effect when users depend so much on SNSs for attracting friends that they do little or nothing to attract friends in their real lives. Also, users of SNSs frequently experience burnout. A survey of Australian youth found high rates of burnout “from constant connectivity to social media use” (Australian Psychological Society, 2015, p. 34). The authors argued that this burnout “lays the grounds for serious anxieties associated with social media use” (p. 37).

The amount of social media use has been found to be positively correlated with depression; levels of depression are highest among the heaviest users of social media (Kamenetz, 2018). One reason for this finding is that people who are feeling depressed are more likely to use SNSs to ruminate about their social problems so that over time, they experience an increase in anxiety that is triggered by a fear that they may be missing something. To illustrate, a 2-wave panel study (N = 1,840) of boys’ and girls’ use of Facebook found that depression was related to the amount of rumination they demonstrated online (Frison et al., 2019). In addition, the researchers found that private Facebook interactions were predictive of relative increases in boys’ and girls’ perceptions of online social support over time (i.e., six months later). Thus, when Facebook users felt they were getting adequate social support from their online friends, they were more likely to exhibit fewer depressive symptoms over time.

A recent psychological survey has investigated the FOMO factor, or the fear of missing out, as a contributor to anxiety and depression among young users of social media (Australian Psychological Society, 2015). The authors report that 45% of Australian teens felt that their peers were having more rewarding experiences than they were.

There has also been a rise in self-reports of narcissism along with a decline in empathy among American college students since the 1970s, with the steepest drop in concern for others and perspective-taking in 2000 (Kamenetz, 2018). This rise in narcissism is likely to be a result of a complex interaction of factors that become active when people use SNSs. To illustrate, Jin and Ryu (2018) conducted a cross-sectional survey of 398 Instagram users and found a dynamic relationship of users’ narcissism with their self-confidence, intra-sexual competition for mates, need to belong, need for popularity, loneliness, number of selfie/groupie posts on Instagram, and number of Instagram followers/followings.

A very serious negative effect is cyberbullying, which is when people use SNSs to post messages designed to cause harm to others by embarrassing, belittling, and/or harassing them. In a recent survey, 23% of young people (10–23 years of age) said they have witnessed cruelty online and 13% reported being a victim of it (Brooks & Lasser, 2018). It appears, however, that bullying online is not as prevalent as bullying in person. Kamenetz (2018) found that 7% of teens in their survey reported experiencing cyberbullying compared to 21% who reported being bullied in person.

Media researchers have long ago found that when people are continually exposed to ideal body types (especially from fashion magazines and music videos on cable television), they come to believe that these ideal types are the norm; when they compare their own body to the ideal “norm,” they become depressed because their body is far from that false norm. This leads them to believe that they are not attractive. This research has recently been expanded to digital media. For example, Kleemans, Daalmans, Carbaat, and Anschütz (2018) conducted an experiment in which 144 girls (14–18 years old) were randomly exposed to either original or manipulated (retouched and reshaped) Instagram selfies. Results showed that the manipulated photos were rated more positively than the original photos and that exposure to manipulated Instagram photos directly led to a more dissatisfied belief about their own bodies. Researchers also found that girls with higher tendencies to make social comparisons were especially affected negatively by exposure to the manipulated photos.

Both Negative and Positive Effects

Some effects of exposure to SNSs are open ended. By this, I mean that they could be positive or negative, depending on the motives of users and how they use those experiences. For example, SNSs can trigger a positive as well as a negative mood. As for creating a positive mood, Johnson and Knobloch-Westerwick (2017) found that when people were in a negative mood, they tended to expose themselves to the photographs and status updates posted by friends as a way of improving their mood. This was especially the case with people who were high group identifiers (people who felt the strongest attachments to their friendship groups). But other research has shown that SNSs can trigger a negative mood, especially when users engage in social comparison. An experiment had participants read positive comments about strangers posted on SNSs. The researchers found that when participants felt that they did not exhibit characteristics in their own lives that would trigger their friends to post positive comments about them, their mood became negative. In contrast, when users relied on an emotional contagion perspective to interpret strangers’ positive posts, their mood was positively affected. That is, individuals who tend to avoid engaging in social comparison reported higher positive mood after viewing positive posts than after viewing neutral or no posts (de Vries et al., 2018). These findings indicate that it is not the messages themselves as much as how users of SNSs interpret the messages that determines how SNS messages will affect their mood.

Another example of how SNSs can lead to both negative and positive effects is with parasocial relationships. Users of SNSs frequently develop parasocial relationships with other people who post on their sites. This is especially the case with users developing parasocial relationships with public figures and celebrities. Research on this topic has shown that a person’s mood can be altered by how they interact with public figures on SNSs. When people interact with a public figure and receive confirming replies, they feel a greater sense of intimacy with that public figure than if the public figure ignores them or sends them a disconfirming reply (Dai & Walther, 2018).

Many media personalities have established parasocial relationships with their fans, and those fans experience all sorts of emotions in those parasocial relationships. Gregg (2018) conducted a study to examine what happens to fans during a “parasocial breakup.” In a case study, the researcher found that when a large-market radio DJ was removed from the air, the fans with the strongest parasocial relationship with the DJ developed the strongest feelings of loss and the most negative feelings about the radio station.

Another effect that can be positive or negative concerns attributions. Users of SNSs frequently make attributions about their friends from what they see posted on their friends’ sites. A recent experiment found that fewer status updates on a profile led to evaluative judgments of the profile owner as being more depressed and less socially skilled than owners who post status updates more frequently (Tokunaga & Quick, 2018). The researchers also found that these attitudes about owners’ level of depression and social skill deficits were used as a basis for making judgments about how attractive the owners of those profiles were.

Sometimes people have a great deal of information to use in making attributions; at other times, people have little information and must make many inferences from their limited information. For example, compared to face-to-face communication, emails lack information that is conveyed through gesture, tone of voice, manner of expression, and context. Riordan and Trichtinger (2017) conducted three experiments to examine how people make attributions about writers of emails. The researchers found that people often make inaccurate evaluations about the meaning conveyed in emails as well as the people sending those emails, although most people think they are making highly accurate attributions.

One key factor about how people make attributions of other people and whether those people warrant their support has been traced to whether people believe the others are responsible for their distress. For example, an experiment was designed to examine the effects of identity cues concerning a support seeker’s responsibility for their distress. Researchers found that their participants evaluated the support seeker more negatively, produced support messages containing lower levels of person-centeredness, and used fewer politeness strategies when participants attributed the support seeker as being more responsible for their distress than when the seeker was less responsible (Rains et al., 2019).

DATING

While people frequently use a general friendship networking platform such as Facebook to move beyond friendships and into dating, there are SNSs specifically designed for partner seeking, such as Tinder, OkCupid, Coffee Meets Bagel, Hinge, Tastebuds, and Match.com to name a few. These sites require you to set up an account where you fill out a questionnaire about yourself and the kind of potential dating partners you would like to meet.

Attraction

Dating sites are popular with people of partner-seeking age. Research has found that 49 million people in the U.S. have tried a dating site and that 19% of adult singles are registered on at least one site, with the average person using 2.4 dating sites (Dating Sites Reviews, 2018). There are now about 8,000 dating websites worldwide, and almost 50 million Americans have tried at least one of these sites. Users of these dating websites were found to spend an average of $243 annually for memberships (Matthews, 2018).

These sites use the information provided on member questionnaires to show potential matches to each member. These sites differ in the ways they match people and what services they offer to subscribers. Some sites send users suggested matches while others use GPS to help members find dates in the vicinity and send them instant messages. For example, the dating app Tinder focuses on proximity and attractiveness. Tinder uses the GPS feature on mobile devices to show their members photos of other members who are near them at any given time; users then swipe right on their mobile screens if they like a picture and want more information on that person. Thus, Tinder places a premium on first-impression attractiveness as conveyed by each member’s photo. Tinder was launched in 2013; within three years, it was in 196 countries as users were swiping 1.4 billion times and making 26 million matches every day. Tinder claimed to have generated 9 billion matches, which is more than the entire population of the globe (Aiken, 2016).

Some of these dating sites are designed to match users with virtual partners rather than real people. For example, LovePlus is a Japanese app video game that offers avatar love. This is a dating simulator designed to help people learn how to be in a romantic relationship. Men choose Rinko, Manaka, or Nene and date them online without having the hassles of actual real-world dating (Aiken, 2016).

Dangers

Researchers have uncovered some potential dangers of using dating sites. For example, Matthews (2018) found that 53% of all users of dating websites say they have lied about themselves. Typically, the lies are about minor things such as height, weight, and age, but sometimes it is more major, such as not revealing that they are already in a relationship. Surveys have found that 62% of online daters are already in a relationship or are married. Markowitz and Hancock (2018) conducted several studies of people who used mobile dating apps. They found that about 7% of messages were deceptive and that nearly two-thirds of lies were driven by impression management, particularly self-presentation and availability management goals. A participant’s lying rate was found to be correlated with the perceived lying rate of the partner; that is, participants who thought that others lied on their dating profiles were more likely to lie on their own profile.

One form of lying is catfishing, which is when someone pretends to be someone they’re not on a dating site, social network, or chat site. Sometimes they do this to scam people out of money, but FreeDating.co.uk found that their users were more likely to catfish because they were seeking revenge or simply because they were lonely or bored.

A person sitting in front of a TV holds a mobile phone with the picture of a bare-chested man in sunglasses with two options below - a cross on the left and a heart on the right with the phrases swipe left and swipe right under each respectively.

From posting pictures that are a little retouched or out of date to creating entirely fake personas, not everyone on dating apps is who they appear to be.

iStock.com/Diy13

Business Insider reports that 10% of accounts on dating sites are fake. In fact, one dating site, SeekingArragement.com has been deleting over 600 fake accounts every day. Many of these fake accounts were set up by spammers who were trying to collect email addresses to send users unsolicited advertisements (Matthews, 2018).

LIVING

Entrepreneurs have created digital platforms with geographies, economies, and societies to attract people who would like to live a significant portion of their lives in a virtual world. These virtual worlds can be as elaborate as the worlds created for competitive purposes (massively multiplayer online role-playing games [MMORPGs]) but these worlds do not require competition; instead, they offer opportunities for cooperative experiences. Users typically enter these worlds with the intention of engaging in social connections (making friends, dating, marrying, joining clubs, etc.) and building a life (getting a job, earning an income in order to buy clothes, a house, furniture, etc.) all within that virtual world. These worlds are not constructed with rules that require users to compete; instead, these worlds leave it up to the users to decide how many people they want to meet or how many possessions they want to acquire—as in a person’s everyday real life.

Also, these worlds are not constructed with the intention of teaching anything to users. However, the users can still learn valuable lessons about how to interact with others and how to engage in economic exchanges. The purpose of these worlds is to give people a place to play and to experience an existence that is an alternative to their everyday real lives. Let’s take a close look at three of these virtual worlds: Second Life, Farmville, and the Sims.

Second Life

The most well-known of these social interaction virtual worlds is Second Life. In 2003, Linden Labs launched Second Life as an open internet platform that provided a set of tools and 3D spaces in which users could develop their own avatars, objects, and surroundings. Linden Labs emphasizes that Second Life is not a game. In Second Life, there is no winning, only living.

People who join the site are called residents. Anyone 13 years of age and older can join. Membership is free, although many residents pay a monthly $10 membership fee that enables them to purchase land parcels.

New users begin by constructing an avatar that is a virtual representation of themselves. Avatars may take any shape or form (human-like, animal, object). Using a menu with a vast array of choices, residents can design how their avatar looks (body shape, hair, clothes) and acts (personality traits and physical abilities). If residents feel the menu choices are not sufficient, they can design a customized avatar from scratch. Creating one’s avatar as well as other objects in Second Life is done through the purchase of features from other residents or through the use of a 3D modeling tool that allows a resident to build virtual objects. This can be combined with a Linden Scripting Language to add functionality to objects (Strand, 2014).

Second Life avatars can explore the world, known as the grid, which features 3D user-generated content. As residents use their avatars to interact with other avatars, places, and objects, their primary concern is to build a social life by meeting other residents and participating in group activities, such as engaging in conversations; hanging out in virtual bars, restaurants, and cafes; building friendships of all kinds; dating, including engaging in sexual activity; designing and delivering artistic performances; engaging in political practices; pursuing commercial interests; and participating with others in religious rituals.

Due to the range of possible activities that Second Life allows, residents have created a variety of microcommunities, such as unique neighborhoods and clubs. Also, residents’ activity within Second Life often spills out beyond the borders of that virtual world. For example, there is an abundance of weblogs connected to specific Second Life communities, topics, and commercial activities. Also, movies filmed in Second Life proliferate on YouTube (Strand, 2014).

While Second Life is primarily a social world, it also has developed an elaborate economy. Residents make a virtual life by earning money and buying goods and services. Residents can buy land, build and furnish a home, and launch a business. In Second Life, the currency is the Linden Dollar, which is convertible into U.S. currency. Ryan (2009) explains,

As of May 2007, over 12 million economic transactions were conducted each month as virtual goods were bought and sold, including over $6.8 million dollars (U.S.) in monthly economic transactions and almost $500K in daily currency transactions. Linden Dollars can be purchased and sold on the Lindex at the current market rate, or residents can set their own limit to get a better exchange rate. Between 2008 and 2017, the rate of exchange remained fairly stable with a high of L$270/USD$1 and a low of L$240/USD$1. (p. 37)

In November 2003, Linden Labs changed the terms of service for Second Life to allow residents to retain intellectual property rights to their creations that would be honored in the real world under U. S. law (Ryan, 2009). Ryan continues,

This critical shift in ownership, which distinguishes Second Life from other competitors, has contributed to an explosion of creativity and innovation among entrepreneurial members. For example, some residents design clothing for avatars and have their designs protected so they can sell their line of clothing and benefit from the income those sales generate. This has made it possible for many residents to develop successful commercial businesses in Second Life . . . In any given week, 75 percent of Second Life residents create a new object from simple primitives, and 25 percent of those residents create content for use by other residents. (pp. 37, 38)

“This is play, certainly, but it is serious play” explains Sherry Turkle in her book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2011, pp. 158–159). Turkle talks about a Second Life resident she interviewed named Pete who is married with two children in real life but was a very different person when he was on Second Life, where his avatar was in a serious dating relationship with an avatar named Jade.

On most days, Pete logs onto Second Life before leaving for work. Pete and Jade talk (by typing) and then erotically engage their avatars, something that Second Life software makes possible with special animations. Boundaries between life and game are not easy to maintain. Online, Pete and Jade talk about sex and Second Life gossip, but they also talk about money, the recession, work, and matters of health. Pete is on a cholesterol-lowering medication that is only partially successful. Pete says that it is hard to talk to his “real” wife Alison about his anxieties. (p. 159)

In his book, Online a Lot of the Time: Ritual, Fetish, Sign, Ken Hillis (2009) refers to Second Life not as a virtual world but as a “graphical chat,” explaining that the platform lacked the explicit game elements of other massively multiplayer online worlds (such as a combat engine), the required puzzle solving and teamwork, and a linear narrative. Hillis argues that Second Life is more like a social institution. He says the avatar in Second Life is an index of the human behind it; it is a re-embodiment of the human, a physical body translated and transported into a digital medium. The avatars are experienced as material but are also abstract. They are not simply the pixels on the screen; they become the person behind the avatar as well as the person in Second Life.

In 2007, Second Life reached a peak of 7.2 million residents with about 1 million residents actively using the platform on a regular basis. Almost 60% of users ranged in age from 25 to 44, and the population was 43% female (as a percentage of time spent in-world; Ryan, 2009). While users had created 36 million accounts by 2013, the number of active users declined to about 600,000 and has stayed at that level (Jamison, 2018).

A mobile phone held with is open to the screen that reads, The Sims FreePlay on it. It is superimposed on a landscape with a boat in a river.

Simulation games such as The Sims and Animal Crossing give users a godlike ability to create and control characters in complex worlds.

Postmodern Studio/Alamy Stock Photo

Farmville

Farmville is a popular online experience where players become virtual farmers who raise crops and livestock. It was developed by Zynga and launched in Facebook in 2009. It became the most popular game on Facebook from 2009 to 2011, when it had about 60 million active users.

Farmville is an agriculture simulation social networking world that involves various aspects of farmland management such as plowing land, planting crops, harvesting, and raising livestock. Users begin with a piece of virtual farmland and a fixed starting number of Farm Coins, the primary currency in the game. Players custom-design an avatar, which they can change at any time. While people participate in Farmville activities, their status rises as they earn credits for performing certain actions in the virtual world, such as plowing land or buying items. As players obtain more items, they progress through levels where more things become available for purchase using either Farm Coins or Farm Cash. Farm Cash is earned by leveling up or completing offers or purchased for real-world money.

Farmville incorporates the social networking aspect of Facebook into many areas of gameplay. Contacting other players allows users to improve their farms more quickly by using other players as farmhands or by gaining rewards from helping them. Often, the aid of other players is a substitute for Farm Cash, thus giving users an effective choice between spamming their friends with Farmville messages and requests or paying real-world cash.

The Sims

The Sims is a series of life simulation platforms developed by Electronic Arts, which also developed the Madden Football series. The Sims Online is similar to a very junior version of Second Life, where users can create an avatar that expresses aspects of yourself, build a house, and furnish it to their taste. Thus provisioned, users can set about reworking in the virtual aspects of life that may not have gone so well in the real world (Turkle, 2011, p. 179).

Attraction to Virtual Worlds

Because virtual worlds are limited to the digital media, researchers have found that people are attracted to these virtual worlds for different reasons than why they are attracted to messages from the analog media. The major attraction of these virtual worlds is that they offer people an opportunity to try out behaviors that they are reluctant to try in their real-world lives.

Turkle (2011) explains that people use virtual worlds such as Second Life to try out various behaviors as a testing ground for real life. When they find behaviors that work, they practice them to increase their social skills before trying them out in their real lives. She cautions, though,

People don’t forge online identities with the idea that they are embarking on a potentially “therapeutic” exercise. . . . Yet, in these performances . . . something else breaks through. When we perform a life through our avatars, we express our hopes, strengths, and vulnerabilities. They are a kind of natural Rorschach test. [bold added] We have an opportunity to see what we wish for and what we might be missing. But more than this, we may work through blocks and address insecurities. People can use an avatar as “practice for real life.” (p. 212)

Compare & Contrast Electronic Games and Social Networking Sites (SNSs)

Compare: Electronic games and SNSs are the same in the following ways:

· Both offer users a way to interact with other people without being in the same physical location.

· Both exist in cyberspace and can be accessed on one’s computer, tablet, smartphone, or any other device that can connect to the internet.

Contrast: Electronic games and SNSs are different in the following ways:

· Electronic games primarily feature competitive experiences whereas SNSs primarily feature cooperative experiences.

· Social interactions in electronic games primarily occurs through building teams for the purpose of completing tasks whereas social interaction in SNSs focuses more on creating and maintaining individual friendships.

Another reason why people are attracted to these virtual worlds is for social interaction. Residents in Second Life spend a significant amount of time in social interactions with other residents. Although some residents are loners or keep to a small circle of friends, most residents spend their time in Second Life interacting with other avatars in informal and formal groups. For example, Boellstorff (2008) conducted an ethnography of Second Life residents in which he became a resident himself so he could interact with others and observe the Second Life culture in detail over several years. One of his observations was that most residents are strategic in their social interactions. He said that when many residents begin a session in Second Life, they typically access a map of the Second Life grid that displays a green dot for each avatar in residence. They notice where the greatest concentration of dots are and use this as an indication of where the most interesting social gatherings are taking place. They then gravitate toward those social gatherings so that they can connect with large numbers of people and share their social experiences.

Zheng (2009) conducted a study of Second Life residents and found that residents engaged in all sorts of social interactions; a large proportion of those interactions were of an economic nature. That is, residents spent a good deal of time in marketplaces where they exchanged virtual goods and services. This finding led Zheng to speculate, “The convergence of public and marketplace may suggest a trend in the commercialization of virtual community” (p. 107).

A third reason for this attraction is people experiencing the pleasure of immersion, intimacy, and social attachment. Successful virtual worlds make users feel totally immersed in the fantasy experience. Turkle (2011) explains that simulation not only demands immersion but creates a self that prefers immersion through the simulations in the virtual world. A desire to feel this sense of immersion is what drives users for repeated exposures to virtual worlds.

Boellstorff (2008) has pointed out that one of the most

consistent findings of cybersociality research has been that virtual worlds can not only transform actual-world intimacy but create real forms of online intimacy. While many residents seek feelings of physical intimacy through sex, almost all residents seek it at a more basic social level of friendship, where they can share their most fundamental feelings, desires, and fears with a significant other. (p. 156)

Observers of virtual worlds have long noted that persons engaging in forms of computer-mediated communication often “come to feel that the very best and closest friends are members of their electronic group, whom they seldom or never see” (Boellstorff, 2008, p. 156). “Friendships are the foundation of cybersociality” because “for most residents . . . friendships were a primary reason for their participation. Residents spoke of making life-long friends in Second Life” (p. 157). Boellstorff (2008) also found that many residents of Second Life were searching for feelings of attachment that could be created by a close social bonding. He found in his research that there were two primary models for social relations in virtual worlds—the friend and the partner. He said that while the drive for friendships was primary among all residents, for many residents, “romance was extremely important” and went beyond physical sexual activity to achieve a close bond of attachment (p. 166)

The attraction to virtual worlds is often thought to be an opportunity for people to radically change their lives, but researchers have not found this to be the case. Researchers have found that when people construct their social identity in a virtual world, they do not radically alter who they are in real life. For example, Heider (2009) conducted a study of residents in Second Life and found that although Second Life gives people the opportunity to redefine themselves in radical ways, most residents do not radically redefine themselves. A likely explanation for this is that people enter a virtual world such as Second Life not to become someone very different from their real selves (e.g., having superpowers or very different personality characteristics). Instead people are seeking a way to explore who they really are in ways that real life does not allow them to. That is, in virtual worlds the social limitations that constrain them in real life are gone, and people are free to be themselves more fully.

In his ethnography of Second Life, Boellstorff (2008) observed,

In comparison to online games that coexisted with Second Life during the period of my fieldwork, Second Life was not predominantly a role-playing environment. Most of those with whom I interacted felt that role-playing, in the words of one resident, “quickly loses its appeal; then you concentrate on being yourself, since that’s what most people are good at.” For most residents, their primary mode of engagement with Second Life was as, in some sense “themselves.” . . . Their online lives could make their actual-world self more “real,” in that it could become closer to what they understood to be their true selfhood, unencumbered by social constraints or the particularities of physical embodiment. Common in this regard was the view that virtual-world experiences could lead to greater self-confidence. (pp. 119, 121)

People who spend a lot of time on Second Life and in role-playing games often say that their online identities make them feel more like themselves than they do in their real lives (Jamison, 2018). This belief is triggered each time a person enters the virtual world. Over time, as people spend more time feeling at home and like themselves in these worlds, this belief gets reinforced more and more.

OPINION SHARING

Blogs

The most popular type of interactive platform that allows people to share their opinions is the blog, which is a truncation of the words web log. Blogs are websites where an individual posts personal opinions and invites responses from readers. Structurally, blogs consist of textual elements (diary notations, hobbies, quotes, lists of favorite sites, etc.), visual graphic elements (photographs, icons, weblinks) and interactive elements (online discussion, emails, etc.). Some blogs are focused on the authors themselves while others are focused on issues or interests. Blogs offer the potential for an unlimited audience size and unlimited freedom to talk about anything. Thus, they can address issues outside the mainstream media. Blogs are dialogic; that is, they elicit responses, so bloggers post their thoughts with the expectation of receiving reactions.

The first blog when online in 1994, and by 2012, there were more than 200 million blogs worldwide. Now it is impossible to tell accurately how many blogs there are, but by 2018, there were over 440 million blogs on the three most popular platforms (Tumblr, Squarespace, and WordPress; Mediakix, 2017). More recently, it has been estimated that there are about 500,000 blogs, and these account for over 2 million blog posts every day (Galov, 2019).

While most blogs feature the personal ramblings of opinionated individuals and each receives only a few hundred visitors at most, there are other blogs that do qualify as examples of the mass media. These are highly organized sites usually focused on a particular topic with many postings designed to attract large numbers of a particular kind of audience; they are also supported by advertising messages. For example, the Drudge Report with 1.6 million unique monthly visitors and the Huffington Post with 773,000 visitors are political blogs but have postings on entertainment, business, media, lifestyle, and other topics. Both in the range and quality of their messages as well as their reach among readers, they rival major newspapers.

A paper titled Word Press with two blank boxes labeled Username and password under it. A pair of glasses and a pen are seen on the paper.

Blogging platforms such as WordPress and Squarespace have democratized the blogging space. They allow anybody to set up a professional-looking blog without having to know much about web hosting, coding, or web design.

iStock.com/-Oxford-

Included in this blogosphere is Twitter, which began in 2006 by allowing users to post tweets of up to 140 characters. Tweets are typically impulse messages containing mundane information about users’ everyday lives (such as what they ate for breakfast) and their opinions about whatever they care about. By 2012, Twitter had increased to more than 555 million active registered users who were sending a total of 58 million tweets each day (NumberOf.net, 2015). Since that time, Twitter has shrunk in terms of users but has grown enormously in number of tweets. By 2018, Twitter had 330 million active users who sent a total of 500 million tweets per day (Aslam, 2018).

Twitter doubled the limit of characters in a tweet in 2017. This provided researchers with the opportunity to examine whether this increase in characters would result in a change in the quality of comments. Jaidka, Zhou, and Lelkes (2019) analyzed 358,242 tweet replies to U.S. politicians from January 2017 to March 2018 and found that doubling the permissible length of a tweet led to more civil, more polite, and more constructive discussions online.

Attraction

Blogs give people the opportunity to engage in collective activities such as building and maintaining a network of people with similar beliefs and values. An online experiment designed to examine why people used SNSs to engage in collective activity identified four reasons (Nekmat et al., 2019). One reason was that people were more likely to engage in collective activity when they had stronger beliefs about the events and issues they were posting. Second, people were more likely to engage in collective activities when the posted information was from personal (friends and family) rather than impersonal sources (organizations). Third, people engaged in more activity when the posted information was perceived as credible. And fourth, when people had stronger perceptions of their self and technological efficacy, they were more likely to engage in collective activity.

People are more attracted to blogs for the purpose of reinforcing their existing beliefs and attitudes rather than expanding their perspectives. For example, Aruguete and Calvo (2018) found that people who share posts on sites such as Twitter are more likely to share news that supports positions with which they agree. As users select or discard content, they strategically highlight facets of events or issues so they can promote a particular interpretation. Many people use blogs to reinforce their existing attitudes (Cho et al., 2018). That is, people will seek out blogs in which their existing attitudes are expressed by contributors while avoiding those blogs where contributors express opinions contrary to their own. Thus, blogs typically exert an echo chamber effect by serving to reinforce users’ existing attitudes rather than challenging them by exposing users to a wider range of opinions.

Blogs also offer a means of sharing information among people who have particular problems. People use these blogs to connect with others to learn about how to deal with these problems and to provide comfort to others in the same situation. In a four-year longitudinal study, Yang and colleagues analyzed 90,965 messages posted on a health forum by 9,369 people who had a particular problem (irritable bowel syndrome; Yang et al., 2018). They found that people engaged in considerable social support with each other and that both receiving and offering support significantly encouraged continuous social support exchanges. The researchers also found that when patients self-disclosed their emotions when they were seeking support, they received significantly more support in return.

Some people are reluctant to post their opinions on blogs because they fear being attacked online and/or being socially isolated. Neubaum and Krämer (2018) conducted an experiment to test the expectation that being personally attacked can explain why people are more willing to voice a deviant opinion offline rather than in online environments. They found that when people face a personally relevant audience, they are prone to hold back their opinion because they fear losing control over the reactions of their audience. In another study, Neubaum and Krämer (2017) found that people’s fear of isolation sharpened their attention toward user-generated comments on Facebook that, in turn, affected their willingness to contribute to online discussions.

MEDIA LITERACY WITH SOCIAL NETWORKING

As you continue to rely on social networking platforms, the most important thing you can do to increase your media literacy is to keep making a clear distinction between opportunity and addiction. Your control over using the media to satisfy your needs increases when you use SNSs and electronic games as opportunities to satisfy your personal needs more efficiently and more effectively. These interactive media platforms can expand your experiences and give you many opportunities to move significantly beyond the limits imposed by your everyday life. These experiences can give you a much richer understanding of your strengths and a greater ability to work on your weaknesses at your own pace and in your own way.

These same digital platforms, however, can lead to addiction if you allow them to condition you so strongly that you cannot control your time with them. These interactive platforms can become so addictive that they consume a great deal of your resources without delivering commensurate satisfaction. They can alter your mental programs to such a degree that you keep living your life through these platforms even though such an existence is making you unhappy and depressed. If you become addicted to one of these platforms, it takes over your personal goals and you slavishly work to achieve the platform’s goals beyond the point in which the platform is bringing you any excitement or pleasure.

When you use these SNSs, keep your own personal goals in mind. Think about the nature of your friendships. Are your closest friendships with people who live thousands of miles away from you—people you will never interact with in person? With these friends, you cannot borrow tangible objects like a cup of sugar, a sweater, or their car. But you may find the opportunity to create deeper relationships based on a closer matching of interests than you could with the people you hang out with in your neighborhood. These changes in relationships are likely to have even more profound questions about romantic attachments: Can people develop truly meaningful romantic attachments by texting and Skyping? Is physical contact a necessary part of any romantic relationship?

How important are the cooperative interactive platforms to you? Try working through Exercise 13.1 to take an inventory of your SNS experiences. If you never access a SNS, then you cannot do Exercise 13.1, but do not ignore this issue. Instead, ask yourself why you have been avoiding them. Are all your needs currently being met by spending your time in other ways? Are there SNSs that could help you develop skills you would find valuable? Are there SNSs that could provide you with more emotional experiences?

SUMMARY

SNSs offer a wide variety of cooperative experiences for users. There is nothing inherently negative or positive in any of these experiences. Whether an experience is rendered negative or positive depends on how you engage with the platforms and how you use those platforms to achieve your own goals. When these platforms are used strategically as tools to provide you with experiences to satisfy your needs for arousal, emotion, building skills, and connecting with other people in meaningful and rewarding ways, they can be very valuable. However, when these platforms begin to dominate your life by consuming your resources while returning only frustration, false experiences, and isolation, they can be very harmful. The media literacy perspective offers you a way to make more conscious and more meaningful assessments about the degree to which various platforms are meeting your particular needs.