TILT – Therapeutic Innovations in Light of Technology
Research Review
Social Ne Psycholo E
ven three years ago, a long time in the fast moving world of technologically mediated communication, it was reported that more than 60% of adults maintained a profile on at least one social networking site, while 70% read blogs or tweets (Galagan, 2010). Mark Zuckerberg was proudly claiming 500 million people as Facebook users (Zuckerberg, 2010) and that about half of them would log-in on any given day. From something that barely existed less than 10 years previously (Facebook was launched in 2004), social networking continues to grow as a major force in the daily lives of a vast number of people and is here to stay. The following is a brief miscellany of research items, new and old, that have touched on the psychological implications of the tools that turned the Web into Web 2.0. Sun and Wu (2012) found that appearing to be agreeable, the need to belong, selfconsciousness and the need to present oneself as competent were important factors in how we actually present ourselves in social networking sites. However, a growing
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TILT MAGAZINE WINTER 2013
consensus of research has suggested that the way we seem to be – who and what we present ourselves as – may actually be accurately representative of our real selves, meaning that the actual characteristics of the account holder can be more accurately perceived by others than might be supposed, as previously reported in this column. Narcissism and extraversion are, perhaps, traits that one might expect to be noticeable, and indeed they are. Buffardi and Campbell (2008) found that narcissistic self-reports from a sample of Facebook users could be accurately predicted by independent raters. Narcissism was evident not only in raised social activity in social media but also through increased self-promotion, photograph styles and other factors. Extroverted people appear to make greater use of tools such as Facebook although such personality traits do not in themselves dictate whether they are used at all – introverts are likely to find social media something of a level playing field when it comes to social contacts, in other words (e.g. Litman, 2008, Ross et al, 2009).