The Psychology Behind Social Media: The Unwritten Code Of Behavior
Social networks are a means of social communication that focuses on establishing contact with other members through the Internet. This technological advance has given us the opportunity to forge new relationships that sometimes end up becoming important friendships in our lives.
We go back to the mid-90s when AOL (America Online) and BBS (Bulletin Board System) appeared, the first two social websites in the history of the Internet. The first of them has been in the doldrums for years, or as we would say on social networks, “it has gone out of fashion.” And in this changing world, few are going to last more than a decade.
The second is a system that once allowed the first forums to be created and is still used today by millions of people, even though it has been surpassed in functionality by its competitors.
The fact that we all use social networks leads us to think that first, If you don’t use them you are different from the rest We can all see that in class we have had that classmate who does not have any social profile and we look at him as the “weirdo”, since he is not up to date, but really perhaps he does not have the need or has not had the opportunity, however This leads us to judge him when sometimes we don’t even know him.
Social networks today are used for more than two hours on average per person, that means that we have stopped doing things to dedicate our time interacting and creating communities on the Internet What has changed and what motivations have led us to do such a thing?
The motivations we have when giving “Like”
How many times has it happened to us that we have clicked “Like”, “Share” or “Re-Tweet” someone for the mere fact that we want them to remember us or to return the interaction when we upload a photo or Let’s share a state?
Let’s not fool ourselves, we’ve all done it more than once.
This fact is due to the fact that Social networks feed our ego and our self-esteem and in this world where there are more and more individuals, we need to satisfy our needs in some way and stand out from the average to achieve “be someone.”
Social networks give us the opportunity to put on a mask and be someone else (or pretend to be someone we are not) or, for example, to create anonymous or fake profiles and make new friends. All these opportunities are used to socialize, an objective that is still the original goal of social networks.
Is being “popular” on social media equivalent to being popular in real life?
A computer engineer carried out an experiment a little over a year ago, creating a computer program that performed the “Like” action on each photo that appeared in his “feed” on Instagram.
That experiment made:
But the most surprising thing that supports the aforementioned theory is that His friends asked him to upload more photos because they felt obliged to return these “Likes” that he had been giving in an automated way and without judgment.
Human beings are social animals by nature and in many cases we feel obliged to return the actions received on networks.
We can see this same effect applied on Twitter, where people use the technique of massively following other users, hoping that these users, without knowing them at all, will return the interaction, and that works quite well since the ratio is quite high.
Following random users on Twitter has a return on following of between 10 and 30% depending on the users’ interests. There is the data.
Conclusions
Social networks help increase (or decrease) the ego and self-esteem of their users. Many of these users They feel indebted to the people who have followed them or interacted with them creating a “code of behavior” that is not written anywhere but has spread on social networks and is accepted by the vast majority of users.
The popularity of people on social networks is nowadays transmitted to reality, giving them more power to influence others.
As last insightwe can say that the online world (Internet, Social networks…) and the offline world (real life) are becoming more and more united and will end up being treated as a single entity.
