A friend recently told me that her tween daughter was spending the afternoon with her girlfriends, doing a photo shoot.
Their goal? To capture just the right images to upload to their Facebook pages.
When I was in high school, it was all I could do to appear “cool” in school, between the hours of 7:30 and 2:30. Today’s teens have to maintin this facade 24/7, on Facebook.
What’s the harm in this? Plenty, according to some psychologists.
Writing for the Psychology Bulletin in 2004 (the same year Facebook was born), Sally Dickerson and Margaret Kemeny published research on changes in the levels of the stress hormone cortisol when people faced certain “social evaluative threats” - experiences by which they would be judged by their peers.
They found that cortisol spikes when you can’t complete a task well in front of others, or when you do a task and are told that you’re failing (even if you’re not failing.) They write, “Human beings are driven to preserve the social self and are vigilant to threats that may jeopardize their social esteem or status.”
In other words, no one wants to look like a dork in front of their peers.
And this is why Facebook is turning our next gen into a bunch of narcissists.
Narcissists are folks who have an oversized sense of their own importance or success. Think Charlie Sheen. Like Narcissus (from Greek mythology) Sheen seems to have fallen in love with his own reflection in a pool.
This isn’t much different than our kids’ obsessions with their Facebook pages. In Generation Me, psychologist and author Jean Twenge parsed 50 years of self-esteem data taken from adolescents and college students. She found that by 2006, two-thirds of America’s college students scored above what had been the average narcissims score in 1982. Today’s 20-somethings feel more self-important than 20-somethings did in the 1950s.
But there’s another, more profound effect that Facebook is having on our kids. They’re not growing up privately, where they can make mistakes without anyone seeing. Thanks to Facebook, every dork move and head slap can be recorded for posterity. Usually, it’s no big deal. But sometimes, it is. Tyler Clemente jumped off a bridge because of a video his “friends” posted on Facebook.
In The Spirit Level, authors Wilkinson and Pickett conclude that despite the material wellbeing we enjoy in America, “We may, by the standards of any previous society have become highly self-conscious, obsessed with how we appear to others, worried that we might come across as unattractive, boring, stupid, or whatever, and constantly trying to manage the impressions we make.”
In other words, Facebook entices many of us - and teens especially - to pay greater attention to managing our digital profile than our real results. A new generation of narcissists are learning that if you can’t be successful in “real life,” you can still spin, airbrush, and photoshop the digital perception of your success.
Comments
great post Rebecca and very relevant for me as I watch my three young girls begin to embrace technology and the Web. It’s a little scary to think about them falling them into this trap. I think you are right on target with your comment that kids are growing up in public. We’ve seen what childstardom does to kids, now we have an entire generation that yearns for its own 15 minutes. Fame is a hard drug that can take down even the best and brightest.
