Social Media, Identity, and Careful Culture: How Online Social Networks Limit Identity, Amplify Difference, and Diminish Social Cohesion

ABSTRACT

Almost a decade after the publication of The Psychodynamics of Social Networking, this article develops its thesis further by addressing the socio-cultural frame in which social media is embedded. The ways in which identity is expressed online are deeply tied to powerful undercurrents of culture change and development. The architecture of social media serves to limit the expression of identity by fragmenting users into disparate online identity-based communities that enforce in-group norms, amplify differences between groups, and inhibit productive dialogue, empathy, and understanding. This creates a “careful culture” where certainty is amplified at the expense of ambivalence, uncertainty, and open exploration and dialogue. Real life examples from social media are utilized to illustrate the underlying dynamics that activate them.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• psychoanalysis
• social networking
• Twitter
• digital culture
• technology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Full disclosure: this is an essay in the formal sense, that is, a tentative attempt to grasp and unpick what I am seeing. I hope you will forgive the unorthodox approach of relying on idiosyncratic data that I have come across – but in my favor – this is indeed representative of the unique ways in which we all access our social media landscapes.

² Our audiences are both real and imagined. My italics.

³ My use of Self (with the capital S) refers to the entirety of the psyche of which narrative identity, associated with the ego, is only a part.

⁴ In 2020 Twitter, identifying that news stories were being shared widely without being read first, added functionality that prompted those sharing news stories to read them before re-tweeting them.

⁵ Calling out biased reporting, politicians, or policies on social media, as these writers have done, is a much more direct response.

⁶ A corollary may be the causes or charities we support. One may support a cancer charity because they lost a loved one to cancer, but this doesn’t mean that one does not care about diabetes.

⁷ One might imagine an alternative scenario where the gesture of support is seen as a teachable moment, for example, “I see you are concerned about Ukraine. I wonder if you are aware of a similar situation happening in X?” The reason why this rarely happens is that the functioning of social media mitigates against it, pulling for tetchy binaries in lieu of productive dialogue.

⁸ Frances is highlighting some spooky resonances between social media and psychiatry that include the lack of nuance within them and the business motives behind them (e.g., big pharma and the American private health insurance system). Though too much to explore here, both may be symptoms of late-stage capitalism.

⁹ In very much the same way that “queer” has been reclaimed as a badge of pride.

¹⁰ I want to stress that I am not critical of the relationship between identity and diagnostics per se, I am focussing exclusively here on the way in which social media serves to fix and ossify them in unhelpful and limiting ways.

¹¹ Study conducted on U.S.A.-based adults.

¹² I make the important distinction that validation is the low complexity version of the more complex and nourishing recognition we get from close interpersonal relationships.

¹³ Okay, that definition is still redolent of an asshole.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Aaron Balick

Aaron Balick, Ph.D., a psychotherapist, cultural theorist, and author, is an honorary senior lecturer at the Department for Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex (UK) and the author of The Psychodynamics of Social Networking: Connected-up Instantaneous Culture and the Self. He speaks widely on the subject of psychology and technology and produces regular educational content for parents and children for the BBC.