The Illusionists

Social Media Platforms were built to bring us closer together. They are connecting us with our geographical distant friends and enable us to share our experiences and other (valuable) content to a huge audience. The recent developments of social networks however made it obvious that they don't have as many positive impacts as we thought and that they do can have some huge negative implication. To combat the current social network crises, Mark Zuckerberg announced at the beginning of 2018 the initiative "time well spend", which aims to bring the valuable content back to your newsfeed. But despite the good intended efforts, I believe that social networks won′t make us necessarily happier in our lives.

To understand this point of view, I want to look at content providers and content consumers separately. For the person who provides content one like in the virtual space can be awesome – I mean hey, somebody liked what you did – however 10 likes are of course better, and 100 Likes are amazing. And still, one or two negative comments can ruin every positive feedback you have gotten so far. Why is that? To understand the psychology behind the currency of attention, some underlying principles of Prospect Theory seem to provide a good starting point. These principles tell us that a monetarily gain always has diminishing returns. The person who receives 20 Euros doesn't feel twice as happy as the person who receives 10 Euros (this is of course individualistic). On the other end of the spectrum, a lose feels always worse than a possible gain of the same amount. These principles can also be adapted to returns (especially appreciation) you receive online. You don't fell twice as happy when receiving 20 instead of 10 likes, and a 10 percent increase in likes or positive comments don't make you 10 percent happier and the negative comments can easily exceed the pleasure you derive from an equal or even higher amount of positive comments. Furthermore, the desire for virtual appreciation can end up in a constant battle to set the bar higher each time you post something. But by trying to outperform yourself every time, you end up putting a lot of pressure on yourself. The job as an Influencer therefore might not be as good as it sounds, in fact, quite a few Influencer are exactly experiencing this sort of higher-faster-better pressure. But follower and “sponsors” expect a growing growth rate and not fulfilling these expectations can quickly cost a lot of the accumulated appreciation. As with trust, which is tediously earned and quickly destroyed, so is it with virtual appreciation. Providing content therefore is always a two-edged sword and while I see many positive aspects of it, it′s clear that it easily can be used against you.

Now what about the content consumer, after all the consumer is almost never confronted with negative comments or any other kind of personal critique? For the content consumer it is in my opinion not negative but the constant positive user-generated content which can be toxic. Nowadays the consumer is exposed to an increasing amount of content by people who try to present themselves in the best possible light. I am not refereeing to filters, but to the overall impression, you might get when constantly seeing how awesome the life of your friends or role models you follow apparently is. One of your friends might be in Bali, the other just posted pictures from skydiving and the next posted a selfie in a new red dress. And you? You are sitting in your office, scrolling down the Instagram feed and see how happy everyone else seems to be. Of course, this content can be highly motivational and can make you happy for your friends but being confronted with this every day might be a mood killer because compared to your friends, your life seems more miserably. Also, the content you consume from all over the world can lead to the impression that you don't have to do anything anymore because you feel that you have seen everything already. After seeing Bali countless times in your newsfeed you start questioning if it′s still worth to visit since every secret of this place seems to be discovered and every destination explored. You might either than end up in the higher-better-faster arms race, which means you try to do things others haven't done before or in losing your overall motivation and stop doing it at all.  

How absurd the hunt for the perfect picture can be, is captured in an interesting photo project by Laurence Stephens (https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2018/jul/31/bored-tourists-in-pictures-laurence-stephens-photography). He shows that the wish to capture a perfect moment in a picture destroys the passion of the moment and often just tells the recipient an illusion of the experience. And while you can argue now that postcards also often just present the perfect illusion, I believe that writing good old postcards can be more rewarding, less stressful and truly a time well spend.

As always, thanks for paying attention.