Review
"Your book is accessible and valuable and at the same time rigorous academically - it is a very important contribution to your field and beyond." (Karen Key, Humane Technology Community)
"Ciarán Mc Mahon provides a much-needed call for action by questioning how much we really know about the influence of social media services and platforms on society and social relations in the modern world. His writing is lyrical, approachable and easily accessible... Creating a work that is concise and effective stems from choosing examples with unique precision and being able to narrate for impact articulately. In this, the author demonstrates mastery and delivers a product of what is clearly extensive and exhaustive reflection and translation into a hard-hitting and widely informative must-read." (Dr Shawn Day, Lecturer in Digital Humanities at University College Cork)
From the Author
There is something slightly preposterous about writing a book with this title. Psychology and social media are such hard to define topics I often felt like I was trying to catch two clouds with one sieve.
Conceivably, the whole of human experience could have been included,along with the most popular technologies the world has ever seen. More to thepoint, both psychology and social media are topics about which practicallyevery reader would have pre-conceived theories.
In that regard, I hope you will appreciate how I have workedto make scientific research on psychology and social media both accessible andinteresting. This research, and hence this book, is ultimately about you, afterall: your psychology, and your use of social media.
As a result, it was important for me to achieve a number of aimswith this book. Firstly, I was at pains in the opening chapter to clarify preciselywhat it is about. So, I spent some time distinguishing 'social media' from'social networking site' and 'social network'. I also took the time to explainwhy it is important to separate psychology the academic discipline from psychologyits subject matter - the psychology of psychology, as it were.
Secondly, I had to be clear that, given it was to be no morethan 30,000 words long, this book was not going to be definitive. Any book onpsychology or social media is necessarily going to be a kind of personal perspective,but particularly so in a short one. Hence, this was going to be a tasting menu,not a feast, and many dishes were left off the menu.
Whilst I am confident that I managed to fit in most of social media's major concepts, I'm sure keen eyes may note omissions. I managed to cover identity construction, self-presentation, social capital, hyperpersonal communication, the privacy paradox, the Panopticon, Dunbar's number, context collapse, online disinhibition, and presence. But I didn't get to examine identity demarginalisation, Metcalfe's law, the small world problem, nor emotional contagion.
Similarly, while I covered #FreeAmina, the ice bucket challenge, the Twitter Joke Trial and 'Weinergate' as case studies, there were others I would have loved to include. I couldn't find a place for the famous 'Ed Balls' tweet nor #hasJustinelandedyet nor indeed Samaritans Radar, nor the 2013 hack of the Associated Press' Twitter account.
I did manage to talk about many concepts from internet culture, such as FOMO, subtweeting, fraping and memes. And while I discussed research on Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, Last.FM, YouTube, 4chan, Instagram, VK, Periscope, WeChat, and WhatsApp, I couldn't find a place for LinkedIn or Second Life. I also thought that it was important to cover defunct social media services too, so I managed to cover Orkut, Friendster, Shox, and Meerkat, but would have liked to mention services like GeoCities, Vine, or App.net.
Which brings me to my third aim with this book. While writing it, I've tried to implicitly make the point that despite the fact that it's been around for well over a decade, social media still feels 'new'. It seems we have a shallow cultural memory, and hence little active learning from its history - such as what happened with dead social media services. Forexample, I think we can learn a lot about selfies and Instagram from the study of the defunct Israeli website I report in chapter 5, Media.
Similarly, I would have loved to draw out what we can learn from comparing phenomena - such as the ice bucket challenge and the Momo challenge. Somehow, the summer of 2014 seems like centuries ago when compared to the social media of 2019. Essentially, I believe that we can learn a lot about social media - and our selves - by studying its history. And there is a lot of research that needs to be done there - which will have to wait until my next book!
Finally, another aspect of writing a brief book for a general audience is that you don't really get a chance to develop a main argument. But I'd like to think that in the final chapter, Values, that I get close enough to this.
I remain convinced that the best way to understand social media psychologically is as a kind of self-help, a 'technology of the self', if you will. Throughout history, people have used various tools or techniques to try to put some kind of order on their lives, whether it be prayer, mediation, therapy or simply keeping a diary.
What makes social media different is primarily how public they are, but also the fact that they are run by profit-making corporations. Moreover, these corporations claim to be ideology-free, but they do have a particular assumption about human nature - that it can be accurately described using a variety of quantitative measures.
To a social media service, you are essentially a probability calculation - the likelihood that you know this or that person, the likelihood that you live here or there, but fundamentally, the likelihood that you willclick on a given advertisement. That is a clever way to run an advertisingplatform, but a fairly coarse ideology on which to base psychological practice.The question then becomes one of how we value our selves. Deep down, are youjust a number?
Naturally, this has implications within the context of 'psychographic' advertisement targeting which emerged in the aftermath of the 2016 US Presidential election and the Brexit referendum, thanks to Cambridge Analytica. Not forgetting of course issues like bots, censorship, and fake accounts. How authentic is our psychology in such an environment?
Ultimately what I was trying to achieve with this book is a kind a of public address. I wanted to explain the concepts that underly psychology and social media, but not conclusively. I wanted to push readers into a place where they would start reflecting on their personal use of social media, but then leave them to decide what to do next.
So now, over to you!
Note: this piece first appeared on Routledge's 'The Psychology of Everything' website.
About the Author
Dr Ciarán Mc Mahon is a director of the Institute of Cyber Security, editor of Psychological Insights for Understanding COVID-19 and Media and Technology (Routledge) and co-author of Cyber Security ABCs: Delivering Awareness, Behaviours and Culture Change (British Computer Society).
