Why do you share what you share online? You share just because you share, because your “will to share” is so integrated into your daily life that you barely notice it, right? Wrong. You share because you’re telling everyone a story about yourself: and one of those people you’re telling is you.
We can understand the will to share as an ego motivation. After all, the ego’s main concern is managing how you show up in relation to others. Since we are relational beings, we see much of ourselves through the eyes of others - so you share as much for others as you do for yourself. Your smartphone enables sharing like never before, because it combines portable hardware, like an integrated camera and data connection, with the social media apps that allow you to post your experience publically at virtually any moment.
So our will to share is motivated by our egos and enabled by technology.
Our egos are particularly sensitive to the opinions of others – and they need lots of recognition. In fact, our need for recognition and acceptance is one of the strongest motivations we have – right up there with sex, thirst, and hunger. Unfortunately, authentic recognition, which is based on a complex interpersonal response to who we really are, is often confused with validation, which is much less complex and can be deployed simply by pressing a “like” button. Technology lowers the bar to both the deployment and receipt of validation – the fast-food version of recognition that keeps us coming back for more.
Validation both on and offline comes in a variety of guises and is deeply intertwined with our identities and the stories we tell about ourselves. The social media industry is founded on our deeply motivated will to share – there is so much information that many of us are happy to give voluntarily. Why? Because it gives us a publicly visible opportunity to curate an identity with which others can engage. This identity is often a somewhat idealised version of who we’d like ourselves to be – not so much untrue or fake as partial.
While we explicitly consent to share things online, what happens to all that data that’s collected about us is only implicitly consented to via the terms and conditions of use (that hardly anyone reads). Unlike handing over a loyalty card at a supermarket, which signals consent, we don’t consciously give “permission” for our data to be collected with each and every event. In essence, the ethics of the way in which big data capitalises on our inherent social motivations, without our explicit consent, begs questions.
The old adage that if you’re not paying for a service you are the product is no truer than in the case of social media. Our egos are so concerned with looking good online that we relegate the knowledge of the vast amount of information we’re freely giving about ourselves to big data collectors out of consciousness. After all “pretending that it never happened” is another sophisticated way in which egos keep unpleasant information outside of awareness.
The creators of our technologies (hardware and software) take great advantage of our willingness not to know – but our smartphones track our movements via geo-location, know what we’re searching the internet for, and know who our contacts are. On top of that, there’s all the information we freely give away via social media.
And the convenience of linking our social media accounts to other services, instead of using an email and password, allows a raft of that same information to be given to even more services. This information has a value – and yet we give it away for free.
That said, most people make relatively savvy choices about what’s up for grabs publicly, and what will only be communicated privately, even if the parameters are quite different either side of 30; those who grew up with Facebook or MySpace tend to be more liberal with their personal information than those raised with an Atari.
Both groups keep their private lives private, however. Ask anyone for the password to his or her smartphone and you’ll immediately see that not everything is up for grabs. Google searches made behind closed doors are much more indicative of what’s going in the depths of an individual’s mind than their Spotify playlist or holiday snaps on Instagram.
Because privacy norms are changing, explicit consent to use information knowingly put up on social media for marketing purposes isn’t likely to be so hard to get. In fact, people who identify with particular fashions, brands, or interests are often happy to have tailor-made suggestions sent their way. Explicitly buying into this kind of profiling makes it more honest and transparent and offers a way to empower users to make more conscious decisions about what they share within specific contexts. It has the additional psychological benefit of making our will to share over particular networks more of a conscious choice, thereby keeping those partial representations of the self in check.
Those who were at the forefront of the digital revolution, such as Jaron Lanier and Doc Searls, have for some time been calling on all of us to be less complacent about how our “private” data is being used. In much the same way Evegny Morozov has been vocally, if rather polemically, trying to remove the scales from our eyes about the disruptive liberation promised to us in the utopian prophecies of digital enthusiasts.
Right now we may be on the verge of a shift. Since technology develops through social shaping – that is, through a relational process between developers and users – we may start seeing a change in our relationship to the ownership of our data. As people become more informed and sophisticated about what they are giving away, so the rules may be redrawn. That said, a whole generation of horses have already escaped from that stable.
In the light of all these concerns, marketing via social media is still less of a concern to our psychological and emotional wellbeing than the growing possibility that we believe in the hype of our curated selves. This way certain dissatisfaction lies – because our will to share makes visible only parts of the self, while diminishing all those other parts that we find more difficult to share, or think others won’t like.
Authentic recognition includes these complex sticky parts, whereas validation does not, and an emotionally healthy self requires well-rounded witnessing of all its parts – not just the bits our egos want to brag about. The will to share as motivated by the ego and abetted by technology reveals only a partial aspect of the self at the expense of the whole – and you ignore those other parts at your peril.
Aaron Balick, PhD, is a psychotherapist and author of The Psychodynamics of Social Networking: connected-up instantaneous culture and the self.
people.io is a free service that offers users the opportunity to earn credits by responding to questions and engaging with brands of their choice, while retaining full control of how their data is used.
