Social Media – Perception vs Reality

Over coffee with a friend yesterday, the topic of social media fakeness came up. We were discussion about a mutual friend and she said,  ‘I see her posts on FB about her frequent travels to exotic locations, so she must be doing great’. A couple days later I learned this friend we were discussing wasn’t doing great, and in fact had been dealing with some serious personal crisis. But you would never guess that from her posts. And that’s just one person. I have seen many others, who constantly complain to about their significant others, siblings and friends, while posting about how much they love them and are so lucky to have them. Why do we do this to ourselves?

I tend to question it because when you over exaggerate your own happiness especially on social media, the chances are that you are trying to convince yourself. If you are so happy, why brag on social media? Why not tell your loved ones you love them and not through FB? Who are you trying to convince?

After posting something on the wall, most keep checking the statistics of the post in terms of views, number of likes, number of comments and the kind of comments etc – it is the curious to know what they feel about you. 

This obsession with likes and comments is another common trait among attention seekers on social media. It’s a form of external validation. Each like or comment is a virtual nod of approval, a sign that people are noticing them and appreciating their posts. We crave the attention, it’s hard-wired into us, and social media is happy to supply us with it. They love to manipulate these primal human traits.

Of all the ways social media can be bad for us, one of the worst, according to science, is the ability to induce envy. You see your friends posting smiling selfies at exotic destinations and writing about their professional and personal accomplishments, and you end up thinking your own life doesn't measure up. Of course, intellectually we all know that our real life and our highly curated ones differ hugely, but it's still easy to fall into the trap of letting other people's perfect social-media profiles convince us that we are somehow falling short.

But if you look at the other side of the coin, the reason for this behaviour and expression through social media is supposed to be a very positive cognitive-behavioural process - it is the desire to connect and feeds into the intrinsic primal need for our need to belong.

It is important to remember this as we navigate our online spaces. Behind every post, every image, every status update is a person seeking some form of connection. We also need to remember ‘Different people = Different Experiences’, but with the same photo filters.

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