Reading Analysis:
Roy F. Baumeister and Debra G. Hutton, Self-Presentation Theory: Self Construction and Audience Pleasing, Theories of Group Behavior.
This article explains how self-presentation is how one conveys what they show of themselves to other people to usually be perceived in a positive light. Usually, people are motivated through the evaluative process of others. There are two “motivations” of self-presentation. The first motivation is matching self-presentation to your peers/audience’s expectations and norms and the other is comparing yourself to someone or something you aspire to be, your true perfect self. Sometimes, our behaviors that are preferred by different audiences can be contradictory and that, in turn, could cause confusion in yourself of your true identity and/or overtime, our ideas could become uniform among audiences. People can present themselves in a number of ways for the means of usefulness to them. An example of this is indirectly implying that you are crazy in an attempt to fend off a potential attacker. All self-presentation techniques are usually used for the motivation of the self-presenter.
Bruce Feiler, For the Love of Being ‘Liked’, The New York Times.
This article talks about how we social media for personal satisfaction and social interaction. When nobody engages with our social media post, we tend to sometimes wait and wait for someone to respond so we can gain the personal satisfaction of someone agreeing with our “well thought out” social media post. If nobody responds to our social media post, we tend to get the opposite side of satisfaction, social isolation and usually, a brief period of sadness. In the social media age, we tend to care less about making true connections with friends and more concerned with attention seeking and measuring our self worth by the number of likes we receive on a social media post. Social media has been around long enough to where we start to notice patterns of what becomes viral and “post worthy” and what does not. Social media praise also tends to shape how we act and has influence on what we do outside of the social media world. An example of this would be buying something or doing something for the purpose of taking a picture and posting about it for the sake of views or likes.
Tim Rayner, Foucault and social media: life in a virtual panopticon, Philosophy For Change.
French philosopher Michael Foucault died before the internet but his finding and commentary on social interaction and conditioning can still be applied to our social interactions offline and online. Sharing is an important way to convey ideas among audiences. Sharing is done both offline and online and usually with an audience. Sharing is a performance and usually conveys our values and what we think is the best of the best. So we take the time to talk about it among our peers. We share as an aim to impress and please. We are sharing behavior that we want accepted by the population.
Episode & Article Application:
In the Black Mirror episode, “Nosedive”, our main protagonist is constantly rating every interaction she has and is given a rating based on how she is perceived. There are certain luxuries that are achieved when you reach a high rating, such as discounts on fancy estates and express lanes for treatments and airplane rides. If you are of a high rating, you receive special prioritization among those with lower scores. Our protagonist is constantly trying to put on her best behavior as her self-presentation is very important to her. She not only needs her high rating for the positive motivation and approval of others, she needs the high rating to have a “model” life and to get things “easier” in life. In the beginning, we notice that she is constantly keeping up with her socials. Her main objective is to make a perfect post that can get her praise. When she posts something online, she immediately waits and waits for the personal satisfaction. When it does not come right away, she frowns. But, right on cue, the five stars pour in as it starts to confirm her behavior.
In other attempts to spike up her rating for her personal gain of a nice place to herself, she offers her elevator buddy a pastry. The lady takes this as “fake behavior” or that she is “trying to hard” and rates her rather poorly. This is the ascension to deescalation. She stops talking to one of her coworkers when she finds out that her other coworkers no longer speak to him. These ratings are modeling behavior. When her old friend from Art Camp asks her to be the Maid of Honor at her wedding with a guest list of highly rated people, she jumps at the chance. The main motive is not because they are close friends. They drifted apart and the bride to be was very nasty to her. The reason she is making the Maid of Honor speech for is for “The Numbers Game”. This is an attempt to boost her score to get the discount on the estate she looked at. Our protagonist’s brother is one of the voices of reason. When she practices the speech he calls it what it is… “a performance”. Everything that our main character does and shares is a performance to gain personal satisfaction and can be utilized to get to where she wants to be.
Her true feelings come out at the airport, where she misses a flight and starts to get rightfully upset, which is frowned upon immediately by her surrounding citizens. Life gets harder and harder as her score nosedives lower and lower. At the end, with the knowledge and “escape plan” of the experienced truck driver, she has the therapeutic process of giving her modified speech to the wedding-goers, which was not perceived well. In the clear jail cell with nothing else to lose, you can see our main character and another man in a cell hurling insults at each other, because they can.
Discussion Questions:
- Do the negative impacts of positive reassurance on social media outweigh the pros? Why and how?
- How many online “personas” do you show online? Which social media do you use for what persona?
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