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How do social connections affect the human psyche?

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How do social connections affect the human psyche?

Viewing photos of someone’s “ideal life” for a moment reduces the feeling of loneliness in young people. But it is disastrous: young people imagine that they are “in touch” with those they observe and may even be part of their lives. This has serious consequences.
Psychologie in sozialen Medien

Almost everyone has a Facebook account. Companies often have social profiles instead of websites because they want to be where their customers are.

What is social media anyway? This term applies to all online media and mobile technologies that allow you to communicate on different levels with other people. Social media breaks down location barriers. They allow you to maintain social contacts with people living even on the other side of the globe.

When was social media created?

Social Media doesn’t have such a short history, because they started in 1978. It was then that the CBBS program, created by Ward Christensen, appeared on the market, thanks to which computer enthusiasts could communicate efficiently. But it was not the first portal that resembled today’s platforms.
The first platform for the exchange of information was the American portal classmates.com. It was created in 1995. SixDegress.com is also worth mentioning, which existed in 1997-2001 and had a million users at its best. In 1999, Blogger was founded, which has been owned by Google since 2003 and is quite a strong brand.
The real boom in social media is the beginning of the 21st century. It was then that Linkedin (2002) and MySpace (2003) were created – which enabled the creation of private profiles. In 2004, the most popular Facebook in the world was created. Originally, only Harvard students were to have access to the platform. Today it is the largest online community in the world.
In the following years, other platforms known today were created, such as: YouTube, Pinterest or Snapchat, which revolutionized social media. The application allows you to send short videos of up to 10 seconds, as well as photos with captions.
Probably in some time new platforms will be created and others will begin to fall into oblivion, as was the case with Google+ in 2019.

SOCIAL MEDIA ADDICTION – HOW DOES IT BEGIN?

Social media can be a great tool full of inspiration. Unfortunately, they can also turn out to be a burden – because they consume a lot of time and create harmful models of behavior or unrealistic canons of beauty. We use them at work, at home, to check information and communicate with others – which makes it very difficult to see when a real problem arises. Here are some alarming symptoms of addiction:

Checking the phone right after waking up,

  • Lack of access to social media causes irritation, frustration, anxiety,
  • Repeatedly reading or watching the same content on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,
  • Isolating yourself from others to spend time on social media,
  • The feeling of “wasting time” when browsing social media,
  • The impression that real life “happens” in social media: on Instagram and Facebook,
  • Lack of a sufficiently large number of likes generates anger, sadness and disappointment.

Krystine Batcho, professor of psychology at Lemoyne College (NY), believes that social media has made many positive and negative changes to society. As he says, “Overall, we as a society have benefited greatly from the advent of Social Media. However, there are also many concerns that our interactions with others become impersonal and distancing occurs. ” Batcho explains that our behavior in cyberspace is slightly different from the attitude we adopt face-to-face during a real conversation.

The results of several studies show that there is a sincere desire to pretend in order to try to please others. This is clearly seen in the need for social approval in social media.

Thus, the desire to appear on social networking sites seems to result from an innate need for social approval. This means that we want others to accept us and give us positive reinforcement.

For example, when we post selfies on the Internet, our well-being improves. We receive support by counting likes and nice comments. After all, who doesn’t like flattery?

 

The effect of “contagious happiness”

Research from the University of California suggests that a person’s mood changes and is conditioned by the posts they see on social media. Thus, the published content is supposed to give the impression of “contagious happiness”.

According to this research, seeing others happy and well-being encourages us to achieve this state. Therefore, it pushes us to create similar content and produce the effect of “contagious happiness” ourselves.

This is why the portrayal of “happiness” on social media is spreading at such speed. It also increases the desire to be present on social media to soak up the constant wave of “happy” messages and photos.

In conclusion, you can see that most of the information we come across on social media does not reflect reality. As we explained earlier, the way we present ourselves on social networks is completely subjective.

We should not be fooled into believing that there are people who are happy 24 hours a day. Remember that we all experience feelings of sadness and frustration at times.

Bad days are part of our lives and help us appreciate the good times even more.

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