The Imperceptible Impact Of Social Media On Our Everyday Lives
“The
essence of ultimate decision remains impenetrable to the observer - often,
indeed, to the decider himself” – John F. Kennedy
There have been a increasing number of studies recently looking
at the impact our friends can have on our decisions through social media and I
wanted to follow up with my own thoughts on the subject.
While I think it’s interesting to explore how the potential to
share more experiences with more friends is an evolutionary step in
word-of-mouth marketing, I remain convinced that the biggest impact social
media has is on our own everyday behaviour, not our friends or followers.
The potential to document our lives online means that a status update on Facebook, Tweet or
Instagrammed photo doesn’t just become a record or reflection of our behaviour
but a direct cause of it.
Whether it’s purposefully reading articles to find quotes we
think our Twitter followers will find interesting, or making choices about our
weekend activities to share on Facebook in the hope they will make us appear
cultured or popular, we’re not only increasingly documenting our lives online
but are making decisions with the knowledge that we will subsequently share
them through social media.
It’s why the idea that social media is frivolous and independent
of the ‘real world’ is not only short-sighted but, when more than half of the US
The medium is the message
I've written for Social Media Today before about
how the motivation to share our thoughts on social media is subtly shaped by
the sites we use and it’s those social networks that quantify our success with
statistical feedback (such as the number of re-tweets, likes or comments) that,
by appealing to our ego (and exploiting our free time), are most successful.
The consistently excellent Cyborgology blog recently speculated how
different Facebook would be if you removed likes, comments and friend
counts. In other words, taking away the motivating metrics that spur us
to use the site and lure our friends back each day.
The Machine Starts also wrote an insightful post on
Facebook last year in which he highlighted how the site’s developers had built
“many functions to encourage the
narcissist, but no tools to dismantle him”.
It’s precisely because of the addictive nature of the
statistical feedback these sites provide that we keep coming back to share our
thoughts and experiences.
It’s also how and why they shape, not only the decisions we take
about what to share but, crucially, the plans we undertake because of the
intention to subsequently share them.
Or, as social media theorist Nathan Jurgenson describes it:
"Our brains [are] always looking
for moments where the ephemeral blur of lived experience might best be
translated into a Facebook post; one that will draw the most comments and
“likes".”
Social media and influence
“To understand the influence of social media you need to go
beyond mentions and take two more steps – ascertain how those mentions translate
into reach and figure out how the impact in the social media world leads to
changes in perception and behaviour in the real world” - Stephen
Shakespeare, YouGov
The more we use social media, the more it creeps into our
consciousness and unwittingly impacts the decisions we make.
It’s why it’s important to not only think of a post on social
media merely in terms of how many people it has reached, and what evidence we
can find as to how it has impacted others, but to see it as a direct record of
an experience that has been influenced by the medium on which it has been
shared on, prior to the event itself.
