Several posts back we were discussing whether using technology to communicate influences, for better or worse, our ability to think on our feet in face-to-face situations.
Today I read an article that broadens that concern to whether the personas young people develop online has an impact on how they communicate. The article pertains to teenage girls, but we might reasonably suspect that the effects are longer term than just adolescence.
If you have a teenage daughter, you may be familiar with the 1,000 friends and hundreds if not over 1,000 photos posted on social media. Research indicates that most of this is to show how much fun, appealing and sexy they are as little is usually posted about their intelligence and accomplishments. This is particularly unsettling compared to most adults:
“What’s also different, researchers say, is that teens tend to view their social-media profile as a brand they’re creating out of this amalgam of photos and posts. That online persona becomes part of their identity and, for better or for worse, could have an impact on how they see themselves in real life.”
In short, as psychologist Daryl Bem wrote many years ago, what we see ourselves doing influences who we think we are. As girls rationalize what they write about themselves on social media, they formulate attitudes about themselves consistent with the behaviors they’ve been exhibiting online.
What does this mean for communication? Potentially a great deal. If a girl, or a young woman, defines herself socially rather than intellectually because that’s more cool, than the way she responds in person is likely to be consistent with her social self-perception. Her comebacks are likely to be fun, cool and sexy. And that doesn’t bode well if she hasn’t learned to save that repertoire for her friends and to develop a different one for college interviews, college and/or work.
This isn’t just a girl thing either. Boys use social media too. And from what I’ve observed their social media personas present an equally challenging situation if they are heavy users.
In Comebacks at Work, we write about how not developing ways of communicating and experimenting with those can lead us to living our lives in URPS — unwanted repetitive episodes. These are patterns we get into because we have not trained ourselves to see that conversations are made up of choice points where we can alter the direction. If we don’t learn cues to when these choice points occur, which is more of a problem with heave use of social technology, we can’t know when or how to relate in ways that facilitate desired communication outcomes and foster good relationships.
It’s worth having discussions with children about the effects of social media on their self perceptions and communication. And it wouldn’t hurt to encourage those who use it all the time to either set limits for themselves or work with a parent to negotiate such constraints.
We should look at our own usage too. You can’t develop good relationships at work or anywhere if technology is being used too often and for the wrong purposes. Think of how life would be with URPS happening via technology too. In that case, we probably don’t even know because there are no nonverbal cues to tell us that we just said the wrong thing.
Comebacks at Work: Using Conversation to Master Confrontation can be found here
P.S. A really excellent comment over on Huffpo in response to my blog that I thought I’d share here. It was written by author and teacher Christopher Bowen:
“As a teacher, here’s a way I’ve seen social media alter how kids interact. When I was a kid, the drama of the day was just that —- drama for a day. Not always, but usually everyone would go home and it was over. Some new drama would take center stage the next morning. Now, the drama never ends. A small, mildly embarrassing moment that might have been over at three o’clock goes home with the kids. They text about it. Talk about it. Email about it. If there are pictures of it, those photos will be sent to everyone. The snowball picks up speed and it’s now huge. Instantly. The drama down here in the trenches has gotten much more intense over the last several years due to kids having so many options and so much unsupervised technology time. It’s as if every kid has a twenty-four hour news cycle that they’ve got to fill. Makes the job a lot harder.”
Chris Bowen
Author of, “Our Kids: Building Relationships in the Classroom“
