Friends: Virtual vs. “Real”

Don’t Feel So Guilty about Social Media

William Sundwick

Since the recent revelation of theft of personal data from Facebook, we are especially sensitive to privacy concerns in our interconnected world. And, while we can easily see the psychology of social media addiction and associated behavioral disorders, defending the omnipresent nature of our digital lives is harder. But, the truth is social media facilitate communication among people who may not otherwise be connected.

We know that Facebook’s all-powerful secret algorithm tracks all our behavior on the platform, and other platforms if we let it, sorting it into data packets that can be “weaponized” by advertisers and others. But, one consistent feature of Facebook, since its origin (2004), has been that you must enter a fair amount of personal information to establish an account. Other social media platforms have allowed easier anonymity, especially in the earlier generation of chat rooms and bulletin boards. In those late-20^th century and early -21^st century environments, you really didn’t know if the person you were talking with was anybody in real life (IRL). Today, Facebook is tougher than Twitter in this regard. Bots can easily prowl the Twitter platform -- I think bots may be my principal followers there. Twitter is probably as good as Facebook for news feeds, but its 280-character limit for tweets does constrain freedom of expression some – especially for writers. We resort to the tweetstorm for a solution.

Although Facebook tries to stifle “catfish” (assumed false identities, usually for illicit romantic escapades), it can do nothing to prevent users from adopting a social media “avatar” (persona) which reveals only what the user wants to reveal about themselves to their friends. But, isn’t that what we all do with our friends and acquaintances IRL, anyway?

So, how do we select friends in the virtual world? Different approaches seem to suit different social media users. Some consider their online friends to be the same folks they know IRL. The social media platform is simply another way of communicating with them – when voice and in-person meetings are not possible. This essentially relegates the social media platform to nothing more than email. I have heard of people who will “unfriend” any Facebook friend whom they haven’t spoken with IRL in more than a year. On the other hand, many social media users find the digital world to be an entirely different realm than the IRL world. Their Facebook friends may not have any overlap with their “real world” friends. Most of us fall somewhere in the middle between these two extremes. Of course, caution is required in accepting Facebook friend requests, but we’re usually willing to do some diligence for unsolicited requests.

Online friendships are important to some people. They may be socially isolated in their real-world environment, through no fault of their own. Perhaps they live in a very hostile social milieu, and don’t have the means to move away. Perhaps there are subjects which cannot be broached IRL within their circle; but online, anything goes. Geography can play a role as well. It may be too difficult to travel to friends. Perhaps you live in a wasteland, where there just aren’t many people – at least not many who share common interests. Disabilities can inhibit one’s ability to get out or navigate difficult terrain. This may include poverty or psychological deficit in communication skills. Online platforms can mitigate many of these problems, hence become one’s primary “neighborhood” for social interaction.

But, can you rely on virtual friends the same way you can on a “real” friend? It depends on what kind of success you feel you’ve had with those IRL friends. With most of us, there is a sliding scale of how “good a friend” someone is – and, it’s usually unknown where they fall on that scale until they’re tested. That test, whatever it is, can also be applied to virtual friends. Do they give you emotional support? Will they come to your aid when you need it? Are they loyal? None of these things requires physical presence – except maybe hugs (or physical intimacy). Facebook, at least, has expanded its collection of emojis to express “virtual hugs and kisses.” And, as a writer, I can vouch for the power of written language, when applied skillfully, to provide succor – as easy online as on paper.

Of course, the classic excuse for a friendship, even more than “loyalty,” is mutual interest. The online world is fine for sharing common interests. But if the interests involve physical manipulation of objects in the real world (like crafts), eventually people with the same interest will probably want to meet-up. They also want to meet-up just to experience dimensions of intimacy precluded from an online conversation – including innocent stuff, like body language, as well as romantic encounters.

If your philosophy of virtual friendships leans more toward viewing the online world as an extension of IRL social networks, then meet-ups are already part of the rules. Your virtual friends are already granted the same privileges and access as the IRL friends – they’re the same people. If you prefer to maintain strict separation of the virtual from the real world, you’re probably seeing the virtual milieu as a refuge from the IRL world. The corollary here is that your virtual friends have more privileges and access to you than your real-world friends – you may be more reticent to express feelings with the IRL friends. Meet-ups may be forbidden or purely accidental.

Meet-ups may not be all that you had hoped, in the case of trying to make plans online for an encounter. Perhaps physical meet-ups work better in the first case, where they’re conditions of the friendship from the outset, or accidental encounters for the latter case. I have not had such an experience with a digital-only friend, although I have many virtual friends, some in my local geographic area (I live in a major metro area, common interests might very well accidentally bring us together). But, the prospect does bring an air of excitement to my virtual life.

Technology helps provide solutions to the boundary problem with virtual friends. Both Facebook and Twitter allow use of photographs and videos. (And Instagram is built entirely around shared photos). Since most of us carry our phones/cameras in our pockets, visual and audio sharing is frequently part of the social media experience. Some research suggests that comparative behavior of your personal sense of self with what you see of your friends online may contribute to depression, but the other side of the coin is that you are communicating much better using a picture of yourself -- and voice if its a video -- than by using written words alone. The problem is that you may impose a level of intimacy on somebody who’s not willing to accept it! One should avoid online bullying, in any form, even if it amounts to nothing more than bragging about, or advertising, your life. 

I may experiment with more audio-visual communication in my Facebook net, but I will be sure to ask permission first.

So, if you want to own your online experience with virtual friends, and this should be everybody’s goal, you should feel that meet-ups are optional, not required. You always have the agency to decide what you want to share with your virtual friends. Your avatar is under your control. But, you must maintain respect for your friends’ feelings – don’t force anything on them that they may not want – just as in real life.

Remember to give lots of positive reinforcement to your online friends – we all crave “narcissistic supply.” On Facebook, those reaction emojis go a long way, but comments go even further. Despite his secret algorithm, Mark Zuckerberg’s famous “manifesto” of 2017 seems to encourage this. Avoid trolls, unfriend and block them as necessary – and stay away from Facebook Discussion Groups that don’t adequately police trolling. Nobody has time for the negative stuff. And, walking away is invisible online.

Let’s have fun out there!

Life on the Internet: No Fear, No Shame

Why All the Fuss?

William Sundwick

Why are so many people so afraid of sharing “personal information” with the world, anyway? Lately, especially with Facebook, it has verged on mass paranoia. Warp and Woof, the blog, was launched on Groundhog Day 2017. It is now 15 months old. And, I have been an active Facebook user for at least four years. Twitter about the same (but less active). Before I retired three years ago from the federal government, I was already well-acquainted with the public nature of the Internet, especially security risks – it was part of my job.

Let’s explore some of the risks of online presence in a cool, rational manner. As always, bad experiences can color a person’s feelings. But, I submit, so can positive experiences!

Fear and resentment of powers unseen manipulating you are a large part of the bad feelings people have. But, the only difference between what advertising and propaganda have always sought to do and what modern data analysis can do is something called “narrowcasting.” The more data that can be harvested about you, personally, the more precisely advertising can be directed at you. The hope of the advertisers is that this targeting will diminish your resistance to the message. The product being sold will appear to be custom-designed for you, even though it may just be the advertising message that is so customized.

The recent revelation about Cambridge Analytica stealing Facebook user data for political advertising reinforces the concept that there is a great conspiracy to manipulate your consumer behavior. There is, but it’s not new. True, social media together with “big data” can potentially be much more effective than the older “broadcast” methods of advertising. But, to think that you are less able to resist a narrowcast message is to admit weakness and defeat. Maybe it’s really all the “other people” and their ability to resist that concerns you? Hence, politics.

Then, there is identity theft – the idea that personal information can be used as a key to enable burglary. It has happened to some people.  But, again, the digital world has plenty of entry points for this kind of intrusion. Point-of-sale equipment has historically been the most common. And, Internet purchases via credit card certainly add to the risk. That’s hacking. Best defense: don’t ever buy anything with a credit card! (And, don’t use online banking or brokerage services.)

Perhaps even more compelling than either the manipulation risk or the identity theft risk, for many, is the fear of hurtful trolling – or, even physical harm. It’s likely because of bad experiences in the past, either online or in some other form of bullying, that many will foreswear social media altogether, and would never consider publishing an open blog. They also would not want to comment on anybody’s open blog, unless they could remain anonymous. Even then, they may let their fears of losing that anonymity consume them.

While most of us claim we want to be respectful of other’s feelings, it seems there are more than enough nasty trolls out there who are looking for an opportunity to demean and bully. What they engage in is a concerted attack on free speech. It can be either selfish (it makes them feel good, like the schoolyard bully), or strategic (they’re trying to suppress dissent). In either case, it seems that resistance is incumbent upon us. It may be that “resistance is futile” for privacy advocates, and we surely should support cybersecurity efforts to protect us from identity theft (businesses have good reasons to protect their customers), but to abandon participation in the digital world is tantamount to surrender to malevolent forces. Living “off the grid” means you have been defeated, no matter how refreshing it may feel as a vacation. Nobody wants to admit defeat!

Of course, it is possible to mitigate the potential harm of online conversations. Regarding social media, choose your Facebook friends wisely, and if discussion groups get abusive, go away for a while. I’ve reduced my Twitter activity for that reason. The other Digital Golden Rule is: don’t be stingy with the good stuff – there can never be too many compliments and validations. They likely will be returned in kind. My Writer’s Group knows this rule well. Congratulations to all, we self-enforce.

And, remember, if you publish online (including micro-blogging in social media) and your readers lose respect for you, it’s on you! The final judge of the value in your posts should be you. It’s helpful to keep your purpose and audience in mind – and write well. Sometimes, ruffling feathers is your objective. Don’t be shy if it fits your larger purpose. Just be deliberate.

To recapitulate, we need to be mindful of scams like phishing schemes, but psychological manipulation and identity theft pre-date the current state of the Internet – i.e., social media -- by many years. A more powerful fear for many seems to involve possible damage to their egos. Not to minimize real physical threats, but reasonable prudence about revealing our location, and being deliberate about what we say online, should alleviate most of those fears. Again, it’s not so different from the way life has always been. There have always been bullies. There have always been haters. And, it’s always better to confront a bully than to run away. You also confront by ignoring the bully.

Clearly, if I allowed myself to be consumed by these fears, I would not have started my blog. While my motivation for the blog is not to sell anything, I will admit to a desire to give something to my readers. Unfortunately, I can’t determine how successful I am unless I get feedback. Blogger stats are available which show me page views by article, by date, by operating system, and break it down geographically. But, page views do not necessarily equate to readers.

I promote Warp & Woof on Facebook, via email, in person to friends, and to my Writers Group. But, the responses, while always favorable, come back to me in the medium I used for the promotion – Facebook comments, email replies, in-person confirmations of reading or “seeing” the blog. Nobody makes comments in Blogger, itself (unless I beg them). That’s no fun. It’s true that the platform doesn’t allow for anonymous comments – but, I can anonymize the comment before I publish it, by making the comment myself, and quoting an anonymous reader. Perhaps that’s something I should promote, separately. Consider it done here. You must trust me, though.

So, consider this an invitation to follow Warp & Woof. Comment freely, I will anonymize before I publish your comments. It’s a blog with only one contributor (so far) – me! It contains my thoughts and expresses my interests. But, I’m interested in your thoughts as well. Help make it a conversation.

Long form piece from Wired gives entire history of Facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg's, struggles over last two years. Reference: "My Struggle with Facebook Addiction" from December. I, for one, have not yet seen any change in my Facebook news feed since the famous manifesto promising "time well spent" with the platform. Still dominated by mindless memes and videos, seems to me.

WaPo article supports argument from my December post: "My Struggle with Facebook Addiction" -- FOMO is a big deal, here focusing on students, but the rest of us, I maintain, can also be so afflicted!

  My Struggle with Facebook Addiction

Not a Teenager, But a Senior

William Sundwick

In Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World (1932), the World State exercised control over its population by administering a “soma” drug to them. It was a psychoactive drug, producing states of euphoria, and general happiness. It was addictive, and the state monopolized its distribution.

Substitute the amorphously managed “Internet” for the World State, and Facebook, a publicly held corporation in Silicon Valley, could well be the administering entity for soma in the 21^st century. When Mark Zuckerberg invented the social media platform at the beginning of the century, he built it around the idea that people universally wanted to be liked. They would always respond to positive feedback. Much like B.F. Skinner’s rats, they would continually come back to press the lever for more pellets of reinforcement.

If Zuckerberg could package content in such a way that his customers could share it, with some chance of positive intermittent feedback, he might build a giant marketing machine from his platform. Some think the idea sprang from his own personal need to be liked. He was incredibly successful. But, Facebook may have discovered a darker side to its success, as well. Apparently, users are just as likely to come back for more feedback from feelings of anger or sadness as from more conventional “feel good” vibes. The recent controversy over “fake news” planted by Russian intelligence operatives is an example.

It turns out that intermittent reinforcement is a very strong motivator, regardless of the emotional content of the initial behavior. Add the clever opportunities for self-expression on the Facebook platform, and you have the makings of a serious psychological addiction problem. Some studies have even shown physiological changes in subjects that use social media platforms extensively.

When social media are used for active self-expression, it appears that people’s mental health may benefit. Those who post and comment more on the platform are often happier than they were before Facebook. But, passive scrolling through news feeds and over-use of reaction emojis are mostly associated with greater levels of depression and poorer mental health. Also, comparative behavior tends to promote feelings of inadequacy, and perceived social isolation – Instagram is especially bad here -- but, all those shared Facebook photos of happy families and status updates about vacation adventures don’t help.

Facebook does allow you a high degree of control over what you see in your feeds. It would be worthwhile for any heavy Facebook user to explore the updated prioritizing tools for news feeds. You do determine what you see, and you can block things you don’t want to see. Close friends’ posts are now always prioritized ahead of anything commercial. Some say Facebook gives you too much control over news – leading to insulation in bubbles of like-minded screeds.

My own predilection for expressing myself in writing, even short quips in a comment, strikes me as a positive interaction with the platform. Is it really interaction with my friends, though? I sometimes ask myself, “does anybody care?” Of course, the intermittent feedback is largely to blame here. For my part, I try to react to anything my friends post that I feel expresses themselves well – but, there’s a judgmental quality to this. I intentionally fail to react when I do not feel they are expressing themselves well, or when I’m simply not interested in the content they are sharing. And, of course, I impute similar judgement calls to their reactions, or lack thereof, on my posts. Hence, I fall victim to the comparative trap that supposedly haunts teenage girls. Am I not good enough, or clever enough, to be interesting to my friends? Or perhaps to some friends, but not others? And, I’m 70 years old!

A disclaimer is warranted regarding my peculiar usage of Facebook. None (or few) of my friends are people with whom I have a day-to-day relationship IRL (In Real Life). As my immersion in the platform has grown, some friends are mere friends-of-friends whom I’ve never even met IRL. This does not fit the profile of the beneficial social capital some users gain from the platform. It appears that my social media avatar is literally the only me that my Facebook friends know. This is probably not a healthy social milieu! It’s acting. It’s a personal fantasy of who I want to be. Does it smack of narcissism?

With all these potential negatives, it may seem wise to take a break from the platform now and again. You should consider this when Facebook grows boring, when it seems too commercial, when you see too many news feeds whose authenticity you doubt, or when friends’ posts are too closely connected to their personal lives – and not you! 

Breaks can feel good, allowing you to “recharge.” Facebook even facilitates blocking feeds from certain sources (“hiding” them, or “snoozing” them for 30 days if they just get too intense). You can always “unfriend” people (highly recommended for exes), and all these things can be undone when you want to jump back in. Limiting your feedback to others also serves a purpose: I never pick fights, and often refrain even from giving positive feedback when I fear it might spin out of control (discussion groups are notorious for that). Purposeful restraint in use of reaction emojis and making comments can sometimes increase your control over Facebook’s algorithm, too. The platform keeps the details secret, but if you’re good, you may even be able to beat Facebook at its own game.

Dealing with the withdrawal symptoms is best handled by increasing your IRL interaction with people – try email for folks too far away to see in person. Facetime and Skype? For self-expression, try writing a blog (like me), or art? music?

And, do a reality check on that Facebook avatar – it’s dangerous when you start believing it yourself. Don’t delude yourself into depression because you can’t get the feedback you crave. It’s just narcissistic supply, after all. Since you invented the avatar in the first place, you can always tweak it as necessary. Once you focus your self-expression needs on real creativity, it may be time to re-enter the social media world – cleverness and effort should get you more positive feedback. Use Facebook to feel better about yourself, not worse.

There are plenty of tools provided by Facebook (and Twitter) allowing you to take control of the platform, if you’re willing to use your agency. Nobody needs to be a Facebook addict – the platform is not smarter than you! You are your own soma.

10% isn't nearly enough, but it is a renewable energy milestone. Could be much greater with federal incentives -- not likely in a Trump administration (despite Rick Perry's history as a wind farm promoter in TX)

Not sure a "non-human" language is necessarily bad ... especially if it improves negotiating skills of robots!