Social Media & Sense of Self

 
Photo by Clark Alcantara @clarkos29

Social Media & Sense of Self(ie)

By Zahra Dowlatabadi

Exploring Balboa Park in San Diego, I suddenly found myself in one of those “frozen space moments” which is fairly common in Southern California. A celebrity has been spotted and the immediate world is caught up in between disbelief, awe and what to do next? It turns out that I walked into an event organized by #BalboaParkMeetup, an Instagram posting that has invited photographers and aspiring models to show up on the bridge at 3:00 pm. The average age of participants was mid-teens to early 20s. In attendance were passers-by, lookie-loos, photographers and models of all shapes and sizes in colorful wigs, full make-up and eclectic clothing!  It was a  seamless event organized through social media with all types of people arriving or passing through, with minimal control over who will do what and for how long.

Witnessing the excitement around me, it is clear that this is an exchange where the main participants don’t formally know each other. The models’ gain from the experience is to get exposure via Instagram or other forms of digital publishing, and the photographers benefit from having access to willing subjects eager to be photographed and thereby giving them the ability to generate new content to post. The objective for all parties is ultimately the same: to garner more views, likes, comments and followership. But beyond the series of shutter clicks, the models move on and the photographers do the same.

And yet, as impersonal and oddly distant as this event is in person, when matching the subject’s or photographer’s image on Instagram, all of a sudden extremely personal details are noted for mass viewing. Once again, I am momentarily stunned to realize that for anyone and everyone interested, there are listings of self-identification, sexual preference and romantic scenario considerations attached to the posts. ‘Non-binary’, ‘they’, ‘pansexual’ is listed below the model’s profile picture. Translation: the model’s self description is as someone who is neither male or female, would like to be referred to as ‘they,’ and the sexual preference could be a person of any sex or gender.

In interviewing wonderfully forthcoming, communicative and articulate teenagers, I have learned that there’s a further division in offering information about oneself, specifically sexual and romantic preferences. The first is strictly in relation to physical contact, while the latter describes the expectation of mutual emotional availability and PDA (also known as public display of affection.) In transmitting these details in advance to the world at large, youth have saved themselves hours, if not days, of conversation. More than likely, the listing of such details can prevent many heartaches since the posting individual might be aiming to attract someone who simply is not interested in someone with your attributes. What I find surprising, however, is how a teen can possibly know so much about his or her sexual preference when in fact he or she is yet to be sexually involved with anyone! Even if there has been some exploration, why is there a need to predefine and control future interactions? Is announcing one’s sexuality the most critical thing about oneself?

First thing in the morning and last thing at night, with tens of times (if not hundreds) in between, teens and young adults do a check-in with the cell phone. Their social media participation is focused on viewing content, swiping, clicking and more swiping with isolated, judiciously crafted comments. The majority of teens start and finish their days (that often don’t end until early hours of the next morning) fixated on what is on their phone. For those who also generate content, their output is driven by the consumers’ responses. In one way or another, all of them feel that they are on constant state of display. Caught up in this juggernaut, their preferred mode of communication is texting using emojis and abbreviations. Why? Because they can have full control of what and when they opt to say something or respond…if they respond at all! It’s not like a phone conversation when you are expected to be in the moment and reply in person.

And this leads me to another question: when did it become OK to not be present? Did it start in the prephone era when children were babysat by hours of television consumption? Did it continue with using an iPad or a phone to pacify the toddler? What is the proper response to a dad who proudly shares that he and his four year-old spend hours binging a TV series? Which part of that can be described as parenting? Should a four year-old be binge watching anything? I recall my friend propping up her bundled baby in front of the TV to watch Barney and proudly announcing that her daughter is going to have a flawless American accent. Yes, I can attest to that now thirteen years later, she speaks as though she was born here, which in fact she was!  That baby is now a teenager and last time we were together, she looked straight at her mom and with zero accent announced, ‘I can’t talk to my mom. We always fight.’  This brings up yet another question: if your parents are for the most part emotionally and or physically absent, where do you learn how to socialize?

A cyber sleuth once shared with me that by placing a computer in a child’s room, you are in fact opening the front door of the house and inviting anyone and anything in. She asked pointedly, “Do you leave your door open? No. So why would you enable your child to be exposed to content that he or she may not have the developmental faculty to understand, digest and place in the appropriate mental shelf?” I am guilty of not having 24/7 supervision of sites visited by my child, but then again, she was taught to automatically erase all search history before shutting the computer down. Ultimately though, my hope is if something came her way that she didn’t understand, she would feel comfortable asking me what it meant. Does that actually happen? Yes. In every instance? Probably not. As a child, she would leave the room if anything on TV were upsetting her, so she showed me early on she was well tuned into her tolerance level and never over-taxed it. I have always been proud of her for learning the word “inappropriate” when she was no more than five or six years old and self-monitoring if I wasn’t around. As adulthood has emerged, she needs to navigate the waters independently and I would be delusional to think I can filter everything and protect her from all potential toxicity.

Bahari’s song “Fucked Up” [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQlIZPEFFBE ] captures perfectly the way Generation Z want to be seen. With a song written about what it’s like to fall in love and lose control, the performers in the video are for the most part emotionless. A hair flick is used to punctuate a moment. Three young women with similar hair color, length and body shape sing and play on their instruments with minimal inflection and auto-tuned voices. The music video is youth projecting to youth and successfully sharing a song where every detail is orchestrated to express a sense of ennui and “I really don’t care” which translates to today’s version of “cool.”

Beyond being “cool,” it’s a full-time job to be present on the social media circuit and maintain status, and in return for their time investment, youth get their sense of self from all the responses to their postings. Little by little, there’s less a sense of how doing x or y makes me feel about myself, and more and more of how capturing me doing x and y creates reactions to my posts and therefore defines me. That’s why a brilliant young woman with very high mathematical aptitude dresses like a nun in real life, but on Instagram she prominently displays her cleavage on all pictures. When asked why she opts to present herself with her breasts first, she admits that the reactions make her feel better about herself.

 Our current stream of self-obsession closely parallels Narcissus in Greek mythology, a demigod who fell in love with his own reflection in the river and opted to take his own life when he realized that his love could never be reciprocated. According to an article published June 2018, “suicide is a leading cause of death for Americans,” says Anne Schuchat, M.D., Principal Deputy Director for the Center For Disease Control. Of course there are many reasons offered for this alarming news, but how should we account for the spike in suicide for girls aged 10 to 14?

As we dig deeper into the millennial and post-millennial vicious self-inhaling cycle of images of oneself and others, it becomes clear that the majority get their sense of self though image validations by likes, comments and numbers of views racked up. If an Insta-post doesn’t get any likes in the first minute, it is typically deleted since it is considered a failure, and never mind the throttling that paces how the responses are translated back to the individual posting. Is this the healthiest way to get a sense of oneself? Instagram, Snapchat etc. is here to stay, but it’s made me wonder: what are possible other alternatives to divert the attention away from the phone screen?

I am eager to start a dialogue and also offer a possible answer. What we can do as parents is to engage our children from an early age by participating in our community. Instead of solely focusing on family issues, wants and needs, we can also talk about urgent community needs and what can be done as a family to alleviate the problems. For example, in Los Angeles area, there are many citrus fruits in our backyards that never get picked. What if we joined as a family to help pick fruit and share it with Food Forward that has managed to harvest tons of food and deliver it to food shelters? In the process of doing a simple act of fruit picking, the child can learn what he or she can do to help others and also understand the implications of wasting food or taking its availability for granted. The child can learn that just doing good makes him or her feel good…a productive alternative to the “looking good and having others recognize that I look good makes me feel good” cycle.

As parents, we should never push our children in a direction that is not natural to their personal interest. That will only backfire, so perhaps we could channel that passion into doing good instead. For young women obsessed with watching YouTube hair and make up applications and becoming experts at it, what if they helped a homeless woman get ready for a job interview? It’s a win-win scenario where the homeless woman benefits from looking more presentable at an interview and feels good about the personal attention, and meanwhile the teenagers learn and feel pride in what powerful capabilities they already possess. Other teens might want to help the elderly at the Farmer’s Market or senior citizen’s center and teach them how to use their smart phones. In parenting younger children, we can expand their earth-friendly thinking by exploring different ways we can help our community by picking trash out of LA River or composting our greens. And in time, together as a family we can find new horizons to explore and expand one’s sense of self while caring for and supporting others, with no virtual swipes or ‘likes’ necessary.

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