When I found out I’d been offered my first journalism job on this website three years ago, I did three things. I jumped up and down for approximately 15 minutes; I called my parents, and then I drafted a twitter post announcing my good news. Like this...
“It may have taken me months and months (and months) but I finally have journalism employment at Cosmopolitan!!” I wrote. “I cannot wait to be a real person in the world with a FULL-TIME JOB.”
The motivation for sharing my new employment status with my 900+ online ‘friends’, most of whom I hadn’t interacted with in real (or virtual) life?
So people could see I’d achieved something. I’d got my dream job, and I wanted to be congratulated for it in the form of likes & RTs
So people could see I’d achieved something. I’d got my dream job, and I wanted to be congratulated for it in the form of likes & RTs
It happened that on the evening of that same post, I had a first date. In fairness, she wasn’t really my type, but I specifically remember being more interested in the virtual likes that were rolling in than I was in the real-life approval of the real-life lady sitting next to me
But is there anything wrong with craving that virtual attention? Is it so different from the approval we seek in everyday life? We decided to find out how the ever-growing power of a like is really impacting us mentally and, perhaps more surprisingly, physically.
There’s a very simple reason a like on social media feels so good. It gives us a high - a real, physiological high - and it’s fundamentally the reason we keep going back to it.
“It’s a reward cycle, you get a squirt of dopamine every time you get a like or a positive response on social media,” explains psychologist Emma Kenny, who I cornered with my questions and concerns about what happens when the ‘likes’ game gets out of hand.
“It’s like a hit, similar to the way you feel when you have a drink. The social media like triggers that reward cycle and the more you get it, the more you want it,” she says of the theory that’s been scientifically researched in depth.
In fact, a recent study confirmed the same brain circuits that are activated by eating chocolate and winning money are also switched on when we see large numbers of likes.
Feeding into that, the study also showed that seeing likes on a stranger’s post made participants of the study engage more with it, in a ‘follow the crowd’ kind of mentality. It becomes a vicious cycle.
But it’s not just good news flooding our TL. What about the losses, the failures, the race to share the remarkably un-happy moments? With dopamine mainlining itself from phone to brain, some are just as keen to share the difficult sides of their life as they are the highlights.
For life events like grief, sharing it online can be an empathic experience.
By posting it online you don’t need to tell anybody else, everyone knows, and the people who care enough will get in contact. It can be really cathartic to have people reaching out and supporting you.
By posting it online you don’t need to tell anybody else, everyone knows, and the people who care enough will get in contact. It can be really cathartic to have people reaching out and supporting you.
That’s all well and good in certain times of need, but what happens when virtual likes become more important to a person than being liked in real life?
“I have, and often still do, delete pictures if they’re not popular enough,” Lucy admits.
Back in the days when Instagram used to list usernames as opposed to a number when a post received less than 11 likes, she recalls how she’d delete any picture that didn’t make it to 11.
Back in the days when Instagram used to list usernames as opposed to a number when a post received less than 11 likes, she recalls how she’d delete any picture that didn’t make it to 11.
For Lucy, it’s not whether she deems a picture to be good or not that determines whether it stays or goes. It’s all down to her followers’ r. “There was a time I uploaded a selfie three times and deleted each one. I thought my hair looked amazing but they clearly didn’t agree,”
Emma Kenny notes that behaviour like this comes about when a person starts believing that other people’s opinions are facts. “It’s worrying, because the whole point of being happy is about being happy in your moment, with your life, with your truth,”
“If you believe that other people’s opinions are facts, your esteem will be low, your confidence will be terrible and you’ll constantly seek approval. If you’re somebody who deletes posts because they’re not getting the reinforcement, that plays into all of those negatives,”
Lucy recognises this in herself. “Ultimately it comes down to what other people think of me and how they see me,” she admits. “I just want to be liked. But really, I don’t think anybody cares about what I post as much as I do.”
Lucy makes a good point; how much does anyone really care about what they ‘like’ on Twitter and Instagram? How much attention do we actually pay to the content we’re virtually appreciating?
“If you’re feeling vulnerable or are spending too much time on social media, it might be worth taking a break for a bit or set aside some time each day to do something else like reading a book or doing some physical exercise.”
