Social Media Use and the College Experience
I recently received a request from an undergraduate student at FSU:
I am working on an article pertaining to how social media and the internet has impacted the college experience, and I would appreciate any insight you may be able to provide, given your expertise in how social media impacts education and professional spheres.
Here is my response:
Any time we talk about a technology, social media included, we need to consider both the possibilities and the perils. Social media can absolutely affect the college experience in positive ways, through social contagion—when I see my friends are happy, I get happy too; when I see they’re sad, I feel it too and reach out to them. Social media also create opportunities for social scholarship, or ways to engage with a broad range of ideas and promote values such as open science. But, unfortunately, social media use also, regularly, invites social comparison, such as unhealthy self-comfort of feeling good about myself because I’m doing better than someone else, or feeling bad about myself because I can’t live up to impossible standards of happy perfection that the curated moments on social media display. And instead of social scholarship and open science, too often social media use sets up and reinforces echo chambers where I just hear what I want to hear and already agree with.
One other key for thinking about social media and the college experience is to be a critical, even skeptical, consumer. Social media platforms are not your friends (even when they connect you to your friends). They are companies trying to make a product and profit. And, while we expect to be able to use social media for free, as the saying goes: if you’re not paying for a product, you are the product. Using a tool for free means that I’m not the customer, someone else is—on social media, usually advertisers are the customer and my attention is the product being sold to advertisers. There are more and less ethical ways to do this. A while back, Facebook admitted to tweaking their algorithms to show us all content that would make us mad, because when I’m mad, I engage more.
Again, my point is that social media present us all with possibilities and with perils. We should absolutely pursue the possibilities, but we also need to become wiser about the perils.