How has social media changed human interaction?

Social media is a "hybrid" media form that has never appeared in human history: it is a tool for interpersonal communication like the telephone, and a platform for mass communication like television.

Not only that, it also mixes the processes of interpersonal communication and mass communication more closely, allowing us to frequently insert mass media content into private chats with friends, and also making mass media content rely on the sharing of each individual to achieve "viral spread."

This hybrid form, coupled with the huge number of users (Facebook and its Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger have a total of more than 3 billion monthly active users), makes social media demonstrate tremendous connectivity.

On social media platforms, the interaction between people and information is unprecedented. However, this interaction also faces unprecedented challenges.

This challenge can be seen from the changes that Facebook has experienced. At first, people regarded its founder Zuckerberg as a young hero who changed the world, and Zuckerberg was ambitious to connect the entire world. Later, with the prevalence of problems such as security, privacy, false information, and polarization of opinions, Zuckerberg almost became a public enemy. He himself admitted in 2017: Connecting people does not automatically make the world a better place.

Despite Facebook's astonishing number of users, our world remains as divided as ever, perhaps even more divided than before. Even if social media is not the culprit for the world's division, it has at least failed to bring the world closer and more united as people originally hoped.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg: From a young hero who changed the world to a public enemy who divided the virtual world

The shift highlights both the glory and the peril of social media.

So, what new possibilities does interaction on social media bring, and what are the roots of the challenges it faces? In this article, I will discuss this in detail, combining academic writings and real-life cases.

I will first use the social media analysis framework proposed by Nicole Ellison and Danah Boyd to discuss how the four elements of social media (user profile, network relationship, information flow, information sending and receiving) affect users' interactive behavior and psychological state. Then, I will combine the platform analysis framework proposed by José van Dijck to reveal the deep structural factors that shape interactive behavior, especially the impact of mainstream business models.

It is important to note that interactions on social media are always shaped by multiple factors. Although platform designers and developers play a major role, users can also use the platform creatively and invent unexpected ways of interaction. Both developers and users need to act within a certain regulatory framework and social norms.

Therefore, although we focus on the specific functions of social media, we should not adopt a technological deterministic mindset and believe that functional design will simply determine user behavior.

01 User Profile: The Limitations of Self-Presentation and the Challenge of Authenticity

The first step to start using a social media platform is to register a personal account, fill in user information, and create a personal page. This is also the first major element of social media.

Generally speaking, a personal page on social media includes basic information such as profile picture, introduction, gender and age, background picture, previously posted content or status, and some also include information such as "mutual friends". This information is largely the basis for interpersonal interaction on social media - we can know whether we have common interests and hobbies with another user, whether we are from the same city, and even whether we have overlapping social relationships.

Therefore, some scholars call the user's profile page the "social lubricant" on social media. Whether a user can use this "lubricant" well will, to a certain extent, determine whether he can successfully expand his relationships on the platform and gain more social capital, because social media may show our profile to a large audience that we have not expected.

Stills from the third season of Black Mirror, "Nosedive," which tells a story about another reflective future:

All your actions will be scored online and regulated by the scores.

In the process of filling in information and maintaining pages, what users actually do is a kind of "self-presentation", that is, controlling their own image in the minds of others.

Sociologist Goffman once said: Each of us is constantly "performing" in our daily lives, presenting different images to different people in different occasions. For example, the tone and words we use when talking to our parents and classmates and colleagues may be very different, and the clothes we wear when meeting our boss and friends are also mostly different.

Similarly, we also "perform" our own image on social media, and the main battlefield of this performance is our user profile page - we can change our avatar, change the text of our introduction, selectively delete our previous status, and so on.

However, unlike offline self-presentation, self-presentation on social media lasts longer and is difficult to target a specific audience. Once we have decided on the image we "perform", we cannot always change it, and it is difficult for our parents and our friends to see completely different content (although the "friend circle grouping" function can achieve this purpose to a certain extent).

Therefore, scholar Bernie Hogan proposed that self-presentation on social media is more like an "exhibition" than a "performance" based on different situations - it is more fixed, exists longer, and faces a wider audience.

From "performance" to "exhibition", it seems that the pressure on users is reduced (no need to adjust from time to time), but in fact it may bring more problems, that is, it may show inappropriate content to some audiences. This is actually a loss of control, just like forcing us to use similar faces to face relatives, classmates, colleagues, friends and strangers.

Because of this, many people choose to "open a second account" in order to avoid the attention of certain audiences, just like opening another exhibition that only certain audiences can enter. This creative user behavior is actually a response to the limitations of social media. The reason why the "disappearing after reading" social media (such as Snapchat and Instagram's story function) that emerged in the past few years is popular with some users is that its self-display is time-limited, which reduces the pressure of "exhibition".

The "exhibition" mode is more likely to bring privacy risks, especially when we show the content that should be shared with friends to the unknown public. Under external pressure, platforms such as Facebook have provided relatively powerful privacy settings for users to carefully choose the target of each piece of information and each data.

However, compared with the complex interpersonal relationships in real life, the functions of these settings are still too weak - even if A and B are our friends, we may present very different faces to them in offline interactions, but the functions of social media greatly limit this, which makes it easier to cause loss of meaning and even misunderstandings.

Another challenge associated with user profile pages is that of authenticity.

Most people may choose to beautify their image, and a few people will directly falsify it, which may have a negative impact on interpersonal interactions. Studies have found that the phenomenon of falsified information on dating apps is particularly serious. This is of course related to the purpose of these apps, but it is also directly related to another factor - people rarely meet friends they know offline on dating apps, so the probability of being "exposed" is also very low.

Social psychology research has found that showing one’s true self on social media does increase people’s confidence and self-esteem — but this only applies to people who already have high confidence and self-esteem.

For those who lack confidence and self-esteem, being authentic does not have a positive impact. From this perspective, encouraging people to use authentic information on social media may lead to a more serious "rich and poor" gap in confidence and self-esteem.

02 Online relationships: Does it expand social connections, or does it still make you lonely?

After setting up their own personal page, the next thing users often do is to follow a group of accounts, and continue to increase the number of people they follow and gain followers during the process. This is the "network relationship" element of social media.

Different social media platforms provide two different ways to establish relationships: one is to allow one-way following (such as Twitter and Weibo), and the other is to require two-way friends (such as WeChat and LinkedIn). Of course, there are also platforms that provide both possibilities. For example, on Facebook, you can follow a user without becoming a friend, and on Instagram, you can only allow some people who have been manually approved to become followers. These features give users more control.

Many studies have shown that more social relationships can be established on social media, thereby improving one's social capital. However, this also depends on how users use the functions of the platform.

For example, studies have found that if you search for casual acquaintances on Facebook, you are more likely to expand your social circle than if you search for acquaintances or strangers. In other words, from the perspective of increasing your network, the function of searching and adding friends is best used for those who are neither completely strangers nor familiar.

In outdoor public spaces, everyone is looking at their phones - perhaps social media does not bring people closer together, but rather drives them further apart.

This kind of interpersonal relationship with people you don’t know is called a “weak connection.” Studies have found that after establishing weak connections through Facebook, as time goes by, the connection will gradually become stronger, and users will be able to gain more social capital.

In addition, if we use social media platforms to actively seek out new information, then we may also gradually gain more social capital - in short, this depends largely on how we use the functions provided by social media.

However, don’t be too optimistic and think that social media can save us from loneliness. In fact, many studies have shown that when you need support from friends, seeking help on social media may not be as smooth as you think.

First of all, due to the problem mentioned in the previous section - we have to show the same information to different audiences, writing an appropriate help message is a very challenging task in itself. In order to face the largest audience, we may end up choosing to write a very bland message without too much personal, emotional, or sensitive content, but this will reduce the possibility of getting support.

Secondly, the study found that people react more enthusiastically to positive emotions on social media, and are less willing to respond to negative messages. If it is a familiar friend, we may choose to send a private message instead of responding publicly; if it is an unfamiliar friend, we may not respond at all, but pretend not to see it.

Third, even if people are willing to respond, they will be limited by the platform's functions. For example, many platforms only provide the option of "like" in addition to commenting, but the meaning of "like" is actually very vague. For some people, "like" may just mean "read". Therefore, from the perspective of the person seeking help, even if they receive a lot of likes, they will think that these likes are not very significant. In other words, the social support effect of likes is very limited.

Previous research has also found that when people seek help on social media platforms, the actual response and support they receive is often lower than they initially expected.

In other words, although social media has become the "address book" in modern life, where we accumulate social resources and where we will quickly think of when seeking social support, when we feel lonely and need care, the role that social media can play is actually limited. This is due to both the limitations of platform functions and the influence of human psychological instincts.

03 Information flow: the pressure of comparing with others and the intervention of algorithms

Information flow is a common way of presenting content on various social media platforms. Compared with other more active interactive behaviors (such as commenting and forwarding), information flow is a more passive way of acquiring information, which is the so-called "scrolling through Moments" and "scrolling through Weibo". After various platforms generally use algorithms to intervene in the sorting of information flows (Moments is a rare exception), this kind of "scrolling" has a more "feeding" feeling.

When users see other people's status, photos, videos, etc. in the information flow, they will naturally develop a comparative mentality and may be under tremendous pressure because the content sent by others is carefully selected and often deliberately presents the bright side of life and hides the dark side.

As early as 2012, studies have shown that Facebook users tend to think that their friends' lives are better than their own, especially those friends who have a similar social status to themselves but are not very familiar with them - because if they are very familiar friends, we will know that they are not as glamorous as in the photos.

The heavier the user, the more obvious this comparison psychology is. This effect is even more obvious among people who tend to compare themselves with others. This also shows again that when faced with the same function, different people may use it in very different ways and be affected by it.

Comparing with others on social media platforms is a bit like observing others in public and comparing yourself with them. However, the pressure of comparison on social media is even greater because the platforms generally provide quantitative indicators: how many likes a photo gets, how many responses a status gets, and these very intuitive data further increase the pressure of social comparison. The study also found that when people browse photos with a high number of likes, they are indeed more focused, their brains are more active, and they are more inclined to like them, which will undoubtedly increase the "rich-poor divide" in the number of likes.

There have been a lot of studies that have proven that using social media like Facebook can increase people's jealousy. So, what kind of content is more likely to cause "envy and hatred"? The study found that it is vacation photos. In contrast, showing photos of new things you bought will cause less jealousy.

Of course, "envy, jealousy and hatred" are not necessarily all bad things. Research has found that under certain conditions, this mentality can have positive consequences, that is, it can motivate people to make progress.

Another focus of information flow is how it is sorted.

The earliest social media platforms basically arranged content in chronological order, with the latest content being at the front. But later, most platforms changed to an algorithm-intervention sorting method - the algorithm will guess the importance of the content based on a variety of factors, such as the frequency of interaction between two people, the popularity of a piece of content, etc., and determine the order of its arrangement.

When the algorithm sorting was first introduced, it was fiercely opposed by users on Facebook, Twitter, and Weibo. However, the same thing happened on all platforms: after the algorithm sorting was forcibly applied, users gradually accepted it. Many people found that when they followed too many accounts, it was impossible to read all the updates. The algorithm can indeed play a screening role to a certain extent.

However, the threat that algorithms pose to human subjectivity always exists. Even if people have used algorithms to sort their behavior, they are still psychologically reluctant to accept the fact that "machines interfere with the content I watch."

The most obvious manifestation of this mentality is the controversy caused by an academic paper in 2014. The paper was jointly completed by researchers from Facebook and universities. By changing the proportion of positive content in some people's information flow, they found that when people see more positive content from their friends, their own content will also become more positive.

After the study was published, it sparked public criticism. The focus of the controversy was: How can you intervene in the content I see? What if my friend's relative passed away, but you don't show me the status of my friend's post because you want me to see more positive content? Later, the researchers responded, and one of the key points was: In fact, Facebook has always intervened in the content you see, and this is nothing new. However, this point is indeed difficult for many people to accept.

In addition to the psychological offense to one’s own subjectivity, people have another core concern about algorithmic intervention, which is the possible existence of “filter bubbles” and “information echo chambers” - will algorithms make the world we see narrower and narrower? Regarding this point, I have previously concluded in another review article that academic research has not found that algorithms directly have such an effect.

In fact, there are many factors that affect our reading perspective: whether individuals can consciously choose diverse content, whether they actively follow more diverse accounts, whether they can maintain more heterogeneous social relationships, and what the specific rules of the algorithm are.

This also proves once again that there is an interaction between the characteristics of technology and the way people use it.

04 Information sending and receiving: the hidden dangers of “overconnection”

"Sending and receiving messages" seems to be a very traditional way of interaction. Emails and text messages all realize this function. However, it is indeed a core element of social media - whether it is the "private message" function of some platforms or the chat function of platforms like WeChat. On social media platforms, sending and receiving messages is the most direct social connection.

This kind of social connection has reached a peak in today's mobile Internet era. The portability and long-term operation of mobile phones make it possible for App-based platforms to assume that everyone is online. The most intuitive example is that QQ distinguishes between online and offline, while WeChat does not distinguish between these states. In other words, we are permanently online and permanently connected on platforms such as WeChat.

What kind of content and expression can get the most likes? This has become a "mantra" for many users on social media.

This changes our expectations of interpersonal interaction. On the one hand, we assume that others are always online, so when we have something to share, we send it immediately; on the other hand, when we don’t respond to other people’s messages in time, it will cause anxiety.

Platforms like WhatsApp provide indicators to indicate whether a message has been delivered and read. On the one hand, this provides more information, but on the other hand, it also creates more pressure - especially when the other party has read the message but has not responded.

Academic research has indeed found that social media platforms can lead to a state of “overconnectivity” that can cause anxiety and, in a small number of users, even “behavioral addiction” where they constantly check their phones for new messages.

In addition, when we pay too much attention to messages on social media, we may ignore what happens offline. Whether this "displacement" phenomenon really exists is still controversial in academia. But what is certain is that online and offline behaviors are actually closely connected, rather than occurring in two parallel universes.

There is another more common information reminder and receiving function in the mobile apps of social media platforms, that is push notifications. This function is a powerful tool to increase user activity, but if it is used excessively, it will also increase the user's information burden and may cause users to choose to completely turn off notifications.

An interesting detail is that Facebook's internal staff once revealed that Facebook's designers originally made the small dot icon indicating the number of unread messages on the App blue, because it looks in line with Facebook's main color, and is low-key and non-intrusive. But this design was soon replaced with a conspicuous red one, because only in this way can it stimulate people to click it.

Now, each of us has countless such small circles on our phones, and they are all red without exception. Because red is a striking warning color. Every time we click on those App icons with red circles, we are looking forward to the content behind them - is it something interesting or important? The unknown makes us more curious to click on those red circles.

This suggests that the functional design of social media may make you unable to resist spending more time on it. The problem of "overconnection" is mostly the result of human psychological weaknesses being exploited by the specific design of social media platforms. As for why it is designed like this, it is related to the topic to be discussed in the next section.

05 Negative impact of mainstream business models

Social media has created unprecedented levels of connectivity and interaction between people, but there is also a growing awareness that we may not be fully prepared for this level of connectivity and interaction. In particular, the vexing issues related to privacy and false information have increased the urgency of addressing the challenges.

Social media acts as a "mask", but the voices that users send out through social media may not receive equal echoes or feedback.

Dutch scholar José van Dijck is an expert in studying social media platforms. She once summarized the mechanisms of such platforms into three aspects:

First, datafication.

All activities, transactions, and information occurring on the platform will be recorded in the form of data and, after being processed by algorithms, will have a new social and economic value.

"Datafication" is the core of the platform mechanism. Compared with social media platforms, the productivity of traditional media lags behind, not because they use paper, but because they cannot digitize readers' reading behavior on paper, which means that these data cannot be used to create more value, such as personalized and precise matching of advertisements.

The same is true for other industries. For example, in the medical industry, Philips is an important medical device manufacturer. Previously, its business model was to sell machines. But now, it has transformed into a data company because the MRI and other instruments it sells transmit inspection data back to the company every moment. The value that these data can create far exceeds the profit from selling equipment.

Second, commodification.

The core of the platform's business model is how to transform these digitized information into economic and social value. In the process of commercialization, data becomes an important currency.

Third, automated selection.

The data stream is filtered and processed by algorithms and robots, which leads to automated selection (such as personalized information flow push, ranking, word-of-mouth system, etc.).

José van Dijck concluded that platforms promise us many seemingly beautiful things: on the one hand, they provide personalized services, and on the other hand, they contribute to public goods. However, how do we judge the impact of these platforms on public life?

She proposed a set of indicators, which includes six elements. The first three elements are accuracy, safety, and privacy. They mainly involve the specific design of the platform itself, and see whether these three values ​​can be well realized on these platforms: accurate information, and security and privacy are protected. The last three elements are transparency, fairness, and democracy. They involve whether these platforms can be transparent to the public and whether they can promote the values ​​of fairness and democracy.

Focusing on social media platforms, we can find that the above-mentioned characteristics of dataization, commercialization, and automation, and the business model based on "obtaining user data and monetizing it", mean that the beautiful promises made by the platforms will not be automatically realized.

In this sense, there is a certain misalignment between the commercial purpose of mainstream social media platforms and the public value of social media. The former seeks to digitize and commercialize people's interactive behaviors on the platform as much as possible, while the latter seeks to make people's interactive behaviors on the platform beneficial to each other's physical and mental health, as well as to the healthy operation of society.

How to deal with such a dislocation? An important direction is of course to find a new business model and get rid of the dependence on user data.

In the absence of new business models, José van Dijck recommends that owners and developers of social media platforms focus more on long-term trust rather than short-term profits; be transparent about data flows, business models, and governance structures; and think about how to embed public values ​​into the design of the platform, such as incorporating protection of user privacy and healthy interpersonal interactions into platform design.

Editor's note: This article comes from the WeChat public account "Tenyun" (ID: tenyun700)