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Research Survey Launched: Social Media and Influence of Photos on Body Image

August 4, 2010 By Dr. Pamela Rutledge 2 Comments
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Social media has changed how people get information and communicate in many ways. We are not just consumers of media. With social media and new technology and tools, we also can easily make, change, and share media.

There are images everywhere generated by commercial activity and a wealth of research looking at the impact of mass media on body image of men and women.  Since the advent of social media, however, we now have access to a wealth of images that are predominantly not professionally produced.  There are over 2 billion YouTube videos, 500 million Facebook profile photos, and 70 million LinkedIn profiles and that doesn’t include the images you see on Twitter, Flickr, and a host of other social network sites.

One of the tenets of social media is that you can’t control your message, you can only participate in the conversation.  Has the flood of “real” images from social media influenced the conversation about body image and what we view as social norms?  Help us find out.

This study looks at the influence of the many media images on how people see and present themselves. Please participate!
Click here to take the Social Media Survey

Filed Under: Cognition, Social Media & Networks Tagged With: , , ,

Media Psychology: What It Is and Why You Should Care

June 15, 2010 By Dr. Pamela Rutledge 5 Comments
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Media Psychology is a new and emerging field, so the early entrants have the excitement and burden of defining the path.

What is media psychology? It’s a field with no consensus definition, no clearly-defined career paths, and no easy answers. In spite of that, it can add value anywhere human behavior intersects media technologies. Here’s why:

  1. Media technologies are everywhere
  2. People of all ages use media technologies a lot
  3. Young people use them most
  4. Older people worry about younger people
  5. Technology is not going away
  6. We all worry if this is good or bad or somewhere in-between
  7. Psychology is the study of people of all ages

Media psychology is using #7 to answer #6 because of #1 through #5

Psychology is key to understanding the implications of technology. Consequently, it seems like it should be pretty straightforward to define media psychology. For some reason, though, it’s not. I have had discussions with colleagues for hours (or at least it seems like it) about what constitutes media, mediated communication, and technology and what we mean by psychology in the context of media—and we’re not even philosophers. In this and the following two posts, I will discuss my definition of media psychology and why I think media psychology is so important.

Both media and psychology have made major contributions to western culture throughout the 20th century. Can you imagine The New Yorker without Freudian references or Jason Bourne without operant conditioning? The term “media,” however, used to be confinable to a bucket labeled “mass media.” Our awareness of media, however, has reached the collective consciousness, as if we all woke up yesterday, awakened by our programmable alarm with the iPod attachment, and over our coffee made automatically by our coffeemaker, checked our blackberry for emails and headline news and then looked up shocked to see that our kids are doing much the same. This awareness is leaving people clamoring for a new level of understanding. There is an infiltration of media applications and information technologies into nearly every aspect of our lives. What does it all MEAN? Just like Mighty Mouse (or maybe Underdog), media psychology emerged in a time of need.

The goal of media psychologists is to try to answer those questions by combining an understanding of human behavior, cognition, and emotions with an equal understanding of media technologies. Unlike some types of media studies, media psychology is not just concerned with content. Media psychology looks at the whole system. There is no beginning and no end. It is a continual loop including the technology developer, content producer, content perceptions, and user response. Just as Bandera describes social cognitive theory as the reciprocal action between environment, behavior, and cognition, so does media psychology evaluate the interactive process of the system. There is no chicken, no egg to this system. They all coexist and coevolve with each other.

There is no consensus among academicians and practitioners as to the definition or scope of media psychology. This is because the field must be representative of not only the work currently being done, but also the work that needs to be done. This is a field that changes every time iTunes releases a new mobile app.

The interests of the person doing the defining often drive definitions of a field. However the fact that both ‘media’ and ‘psychology’ are themselves broad and prone to misconception contributes to the definitional confusion. In spite of our awareness of media everywhere, when someone mentions media the metaphor we fall back on is often mass media. It’s a field where you must continually define your terms. Does ‘media’ mean television or does ‘media’ include computer interfaces that facilitate information management and distribution? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Psychology, Social Media & Networks Tagged With: ,

Online Safety: Educate not Legislate

May 27, 2010 By Dr. Pamela Rutledge 3 Comments
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Previously published in Psychology Today “Positively Media.”

Facebook’s recent privacy control changes have triggered a big response of concern, indignation, and pages of analysis. One thing you have to love about social media, when people are ticked off, you find out pretty fast. Facebook is doing some rhetorical back-pedaling but when people are angry, they demand solutions—often in haste and not often rationally. This has added fuel to the political fire to regulate social networking sites like Facebook. It’s time to take a deep breath and realize that we need a longer view to achieve a solution that is both effective and sustainable. That solution is education, not legislation. We need to redefine media literacy to include understanding how media technologies work and how they are used, not focus on content. We need to elevate media literacy to media citizenship.

Facebook violated a social contract with its users. People are rightfully frustrated when they sign up for something and the rules change. But for Facebook users, this is more than that. The changes to privacy controls violate cultural expectations and cross a psychological boundary, not just the fine print. The sense of betrayal is heightened because of the personal investment, not to mention exposure, people have in an online identity, experience, friends, and community. There is a danger, though, that these emotions will cloud people’s vision about the longer-term and the more fundamental principles at stake. Short-term fixes won’t address longer-term issues.

Whatever the core issues are—and not everyone agrees—the problems are not unique to Facebook. We are all grappling with the implications of a digitally connected world and what this means for a myriad of issues. The solution, however, is not in lawsuits or regulation. Both are a waste of resources and neither will achieve a positive objective: making people safe and effective navigators of the continually evolving digital landscape. The solution is in education.

It’s time we admitted that we are a technology-rich society and redefined media literacy to include understanding how media technologies work, not just what’s in them. We need to elevate media literacy to media citizenship. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Culture & Society, Education, Social Media & Networks Tagged With: , , ,

Social Media Addiction: Engage Brain Before Believing

May 23, 2010 By Dr. Pamela Rutledge 2 Comments
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Previously published in Psychology Today “Positively Media.”

When you see the headlines about social media addiction, take a deep breath. Exhale. I know this sounds radical, but don’t go by the news articles. Find the actual study and read it. Don’t just read the results; see how the researchers define what they are measuring. This is important because 1) sometimes studies just don’t make sense, 2) sometimes things that are only correlated get reported as being a ’cause’, and, 3) the people writing the articles don’t always read the actual studies before they write—even whey they are real journalists.

Psychologists, parents, educators and politicians frequently talk about how important it is to teach kids media literacy so they can critically use, produce and evaluate media. Evidence suggests that this is not a skill that should be reserved for the young.

There has been a little flurry of news articles and blogs recently about social media addiction. First of all, it concerns me that, as a society, we are very cavalier tossing around the concept of ‘addiction.’ Addiction is a serious psychological diagnosis based on specific and seriously life-impairing criteria. (PT Blogger Allen Frances has a good discussion of behavioral addictions as compulsively driven behavior with negative consequences and the problems of getting too loose with clinical diagnoses.) Identifying an addiction of any kind is important.  To my knowledge, however, a college student saying “I’m addicted to Facebook” is not adequate diagnostic criteria for addiction any more than someone saying they are addicted to chocolate or American Idol.

Of course, as a writer, if you can get the word ‘addiction’ in a headline it will draw eyeballs to your copy because it targets people’s fears. (Did it get you to read this?) Since we are all biologically wired to notice danger, especially where kids are concerned, this is a sure-fire way to get someone to read your stuff. I know journalists are all freaking out about the competition from new media. I get the conflict. But this isn’t the time to compromise journalistic standards, it’s the time to shore them up to prove your point about training and objectivity.

One of the recent studies discussed in the reports about social media addiction was an interesting outgrowth of a class assignment in a journalism course, not an empirically designed research project. The web-published results were a thoughtful qualitative analysis by a team headed by University of Maryland professor Dr. Susan Moeller. (An acknowledged limitation is that this is a population of college students particularly interested in and engaged with media.) The homework assignment was to go without media for 24 hours and then write about it.

The results of the analysis of student submissions (along with some notes on methodology) were published online. They included quotes from students that were illustrative of their experience. That is how qualitative studies are done. A quote is not meant to be a common denominator and it is not accompanied by a frequency distribution; it is local color. The report on the website describes how students experienced a new appreciation for how they used media. Some students even used the word ‘addiction’ in their submissions. However, most comments, judging from the data published on the report’s site, were reflective of different types of new media use, the shift in the students’ reliance on new media relative to traditional forms, and the students’ desire to stay connected to friends, family and world events.

The conclusion had nothing to do with addiction, but made important points about the way social media technologies have been integrated into students’ lives, their expectations about frequency of contact, and how that impacts how they relate to the world.  From the site:

The major conclusion of this study is that the portability of all that media stuff has changed students’ relationship not just to news and information, but to family and friends — it has, in other words, caused them to make different and distinctive social, and arguably moral, decisions.  (ICMPA, 2010, ¶3)

The headlines in several news articles reporting on the study focused entirely on social media addiction, extrapolated from student comments not the analysis, and did not mention the profound, albeit conceptual, shifts in behavior and expectations. Thus when various reporters/writers polled experts for their articles, they were asked about the topic of social media addiction, not the other implications of the study. One article had a particularly good quote came from fellow PT blogger and media psychologist Stuart Fischoff, who reasonably and articulately pointed out that,

“All these technologies have potential for terrific use and for terrific abuse…Everyone is a potential addict – they’re just waiting for their drug of choice to come along, whether heroin, running, junk food or social media. All those substances can be streetcars of desire…”

His remarks, evoking some cool imagery and media references, basically said there is potential for addiction for with many behaviors. Exactly.

Fischoff’s great quote got picked up by WiredPRNews.com when they decided to cover the story about the Maryland study, only now the headline said “Study shows social media withdrawal can occur” and starts out, “A recent study suggests individuals may go through withdrawal symptoms from abstaining from social media for long periods.” The writer then cites the Maryland study as the source for Fischoff’s quote. (At least he still got credit for saying it, even if he hadn’t been in the study.) Does this remind anyone of the old “telephone” or “whisper” game?

Another recently quoted report was published online by Retrevo Gadgetology, entitled “Is Social Media a New Addiction?” This is a marketing report by a consumer electronics marketplace. As an academic piece, it has some serious methodological issues, such as in how the questions are structured, particularly if you are drawing conclusions about addiction. (None of the criteria for diagnosing addiction were included in the survey.)

That wasn’t Retrevo’s intention and, to their credit, if you read the actual report you see they responsibly qualify their remarks, are conversational and speculative about their conclusion, and do not declare outright an epidemic of social media addiction as the headline might imply:

We’re not qualified to declare a societal, social media crisis but when almost half of social media users say they check FaceBook or Twitter sometime during the night or when they first wake up, you have to wonder if these people aren’t suffering from some sort of addiction to social media. From this study, it also appears that social media may have begun to replace more conventional sources for news with many social media users saying tweets trump TVs for that morning cup of news. (Retrevo, 2010, ¶7)

For marketers, the take-away here is the shift from TVs to social media for late-breaking news. However, by the time the study got to Media Post, it is labeled “Social Addiction” and reports that the study concludes that social media can be habit forming. Not very useful to marketers nor helpful to society at large.

We live in a world where information abounds.  Information is no longer the purview of the privileged few, but neither is having an opinion.  This is a tremendous freedom and opportunity.  With it comes responsibility.  There is no way to maintain freedom and have someone else vet all the material you read.  You have to do it yourself.  Think of it like defensive driving.  This is a big onus, but in my mind a price worth paying.

However, we can’t be lazy or blinded by what we  believe instead of engaging our gray matter.  If we blithely forward ‘facts’ based on our innate biases and “it seems right to me” conclusions, pull the most sensational quotes to use as headlines, and, as consumers, believe what we see rather than thinking critically and reading original sources, then we will not be able to identify the real issues we need to tackle nor will we be able to see our way to the positive potential these tools can bring.

As Fischoff said in his quote, there is no shortage of things to be addicted to.  Social media is just one of many.  But just because something is new and having a profound impact on how people behave doesn’t by definition mean that it is bad or harmful.  Believe it or not, there is actual research that talks about the postive side of social media, too, but they don’t make very good headlines.

—

ICMPA (2010). A Day Without Media. Research Project, University of Maryland, Phillip Merrill College of Journalism. Retrieved May 20, 2010 http://withoutmedia.wordpress.com/

Retrevo (2010). Is Social Media a New Addiction? Retrevo Studies. Retrieved May 20, 2010 http://www.retrevo.com/content/blog/2010/03/social-media-new-addiction%3F

Filed Under: Cognition, Education, Emerging Technologies, Social Media & Networks

Social Media: The Media We Love to Hate

May 22, 2010 By Dr. Pamela Rutledge Leave a Comment
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Published Previously on Psychology Today “Positively Media”

What is the media we love to hate? Right now, it’s social media. As a society, we hate pretty much anything new or that we don’t understand. I’m sure the mass media execs and video game developers are beside themselves with glee to see so much attention on reports of social media addiction and controversy surrounding Facebook’s privacy issues. Yesterday’s devil-child is eager to jump on the bandwagon and skewer the next guy.

Social Media is an easy target. Not only is it new, it’s acceptance varies widely by age.  The enthusiastic adoption of social media technologies and tools by young people worries older people who don’t really get it. The digital immigrants are not willing to trust the judgment of digital natives; just like most generational belief schisms. You can just hear the collective digital immigrant response: “That isn’t the way I did it.” That point of view leaves only two alternatives: There’s either something wrong with the people who are doing something differently or there’s something wrong with our own worldview. Surely it can’t be that!

When people process information that challenges their view of the world, many lose the ability to think critically. They seek cognitive consonance and comfort. When things fit with their beliefs, they jump right on board.  Some recent studies have received media coverage that highlights how social media is addicting. (I will discuss some of this coverage in my next post.)  When you read stuff like that, do you find the studies in question and read them or are do you say to yourself,  “See, I KNEW all this media stuff kids do is bad for them.” Just like dime novels, comic books, short skirts, Elvis Presley and Rock and Roll. The rap on Socrates was that he was corrupting youth, too. It’s a wonder any of us survived!

New media is not a crisis. It is a fact of life. Get used to it. Don’t make the mistake of the Bergen County, New Jersey middle school principal who must have destroyed a great deal of his social capital with his middle school population when he emailed the entire parent body saying: “There is absolutely, positively no reason for any middle school student to be a part of a social networking site!”

I urge all of you parents and caring adults out there to learn about new technologies so that you can make judgments that are contextually relevant and so that you can provide guidelines that make sense to kids in THEIR world, not yours.  That is, in fact, where they have to live.  In their world, if you don’t know how to use technology you are at a severe disadvantage–and not just socially.  The 21st century skills that our kids will need include technological and media literacy and I mean that in the broadest sense.  Media literacy today is not just the ability to think critically about content.  It is the ability to think critically about use and production in a networked society.

But the real issue is that kids use technology differently than their parents do. First of all, kids can still see the screen and keys on their mobile devices without their glasses so it’s easier for them. They also think about the whole process of connection and communication differently. They aren’t thinking of Facebook or texting as a replacement for some other means of communication. They aren’t angsting over the qualitative differences between voice, face to face, or text. It is just how they communicate. They didn’t have to unlearn some other behavior to learn this one. And keep in mind that just about the time you adjust to Facebook, they’ll be off and running on the next thing. They aren’t in this for the tools. They’re in it for the social connection.

Filed Under: Cognition, Culture & Society, Social Media & Networks Tagged With: , ,
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