Which Came First – The Feeling or the Feed?
by Amanda Montei

For frequent tweeters and facebookers, status updates loom in our minds every day. A public announcement that our day is one to be relished can give us a new lease on life, and a flood of responses to a gleeful anecdote can make us feel like the most well-liked person around. An old boyfriend’s chipper one-liner can conjure up ancient pains and leave us feeling like our insides are melting. The amount of time networking sites occupy in our lives is one thing, but what status updates are doing to us psychologically is an entirely new question.

“Twitter is unlike any other previous human experience with technology,” psychologist John Grohol writes in ‘The Psychology of Twitter.’  “There’s never been a time in human existence where people could be in a group, socializing, and at the same time, actively socializing with an entirely different group of people who were not in the room.”

How does this dual and dueling socializing change how we process the every day and how we make sense of our world?  Tweeting and FBing may seem harmless enough, but the more the fad catches on, the more it appears to be changing the way our minds work.

We use statuses as revenge on exes, we use them to gloat about productivity (often as a means for revenge on exes), we post quotes that make sense of the strange happenings of a particular day, we publicize our most private thoughts in the hopes that someone will give us a little thumbs up or express interest in our existence.

Status update compulsion creates the mentality that success, achievement and experience is defined by how others perceive us. It creates a heightened double consciousness, where we view ourselves based on the awareness our internet communities have of what we do. Status updates are creating a regression into the huffy-puffy reaction we all used to have to the school day saying that the reward for hard work is a feeling of satisfaction.  More than that, we are left with the feeling that you have not actually done anything at all until somebody knows about it.

Increasingly, Twitter and other sites are being used for business purposes.  But for young people, they are a public display of psychological evolution (and frequently devolution).  They are the way in which we define, present and understand ourselves, and it seems not too farfetched that this may be stunting our spiritual and emotional maturity.  More often than not, for those of us in our twenties, our status updates celebrate long nights, whine about long days, attempt to substantiate recovery from broken relationships and outline our newest beliefs and interests. Whether we are digging at someone who has wronged us or flaunting a cryptic inside joke, there is a common thread: we are now publicly mapping out our personalities.

There is our flesh life and what we make of it on the internet.  And yet, it seems for many young people, it is increasingly hard to tell which came first—the feeling or the feed. Status updates are turning the process of self-actualization into cyber-actualization. The question is whether this is opening up our minds and relationships, or damaging them by discouraging introspection and a relationship with the self.  Either way, the phenomenon will have huge psychological implications for generations to come.

For now, I have to go update my status so everyone on Twitter knows I’m writing about Twitter.

Tweet tweet.

facebook, john grohol, psychology, self-actualization, status, status update, twitter