The Whiplash Effect of Social Media

I have always maintained an arm’s length distance from social media. As someone who teaches digital media and who practices psychotherapy, I am acutely aware of how it affects my mental health.

We can see the impact of social media on mental health from a number of approaches: how doomscrolling immediately amplifies our sense of threat and doom in the world, how Instagram can easily activate our status anxiety through social comparison, or how smug and self-assured we can feel about piling on to a thread that reinforces our position and sense of self.

But let’s just stick with a dynamic that I borrow from Jungian psychology called inflation and alienation, a psychic-emotional phenomenon I believe aptly describes our personas online. Or, at the very least, it is a phenomenon that I have experienced in my short and infrequent attempts to post or accrue followers.

In a book called Ego and Archetype, Jungian psychologist Edward Edinger describes the experience of inflation as a natural process in human development. The young child, in most developmental models, experiences itself as centre of the universe–the object of doting family attention. At some point, however, the child experiences the opposite end of inflation, alienation.

Alienation appears in several ways: the child does something to anger their parents, they are disciplined in school, or their "special" status is challenged on the schoolyard by other children. This is all part of "normal" psychological development and something that, inevitably, we all learn in some way. The classic mythological example is that of Icarus, who flies too close to the sun (an almost literal act of inflation) only to come crashing down to earth.

The myth of Icarus embodies many of the psycho-emotional experiences of the push and pull of alienation and inflation we experience as children and adults, which manifests on social media in an amplified way.

I’ll take my own modest online contributions as a case study. I write or post something on Twitter or Facebook and get a lot of likes, shares, and comments. It feels amazing. It is instant validation and provides a huge dopamine hit. The hit is even greater if strangers post, and I forge new alliances, relationships, or encounters as a result. I have experienced this in two ways: as a personal validation of my self and life (when I post family photos, selfies, achievements posts, etc.); and as professional validation when it is related to my professional work, writing, practice, or credentials.

This validation and inflation get even more amplified when I, like many of us have been trained to, start to imagine this increased traffic as having a potential financial effect. Perhaps this will lead to passive revenue from YouTube. A product line, influencer status?

This is perhaps the double-whammy effect of what’s called platform capitalism. The psychological inflation of feeling validated, recognized, and temporarily like the kid who won the spelling bee is injected with secondary inflation of potential future financial grandiosity–can I leverage this post into a career? A career where I make money from just posting about my life, professional musings, and opinions, no less. Isn’t this the fundamental lure or siren call of social media–to be recognized and paid for living and posting as “our selves”?

Most of us know that the idea of lucrative income as an influencer is a myth, but it is a myth that we all easily or temporarily can get sucked into. The crash comes, of course, when we shift away from the centre of our feed and recognize the thousands or hundreds of thousands of others doing the same thing. (In my case, seeing how many blogs, posts, and tips there are from other online therapists..) This is where we experience the pain of alienation and the addictive lure of returning to inflation.

So how do we manage this potentially fatal dynamic between inflation and alienation? Part of managing this requires a degree of media literacy–recognizing how platforms work, sustaining our attention, and building in a sense of self-centeredness. We are the sun around which everything else orbits on social media. There is an inflated structure to how social media works that promises and lures us with fantasies of influencer power and potential. The promise of a demi-god is reinforced by the oft-repeated narratives of average folk like us who made it big, streaming from their basements.

The tough pill to swallow, therapeutically, is that whatever our insights, opinions, talents, and special statuses, we are one among many. We are common. We are like so many others. We are human and not gods. This truth hurts, but it is the truth. And more importantly, this truth can help mitigate our neurotic attachments and even addictions to our streams, posts, and followers.

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Recognizing our "good-enough" status (as many psychologists now speak about) helps to manage and mitigate our inflation and hedge against the crash of alienation. We had a nice post, a clever comment that got some traction, and a cutely ironic photo. But so did 7000 others. This recognition is not meant to minimize our work and our social media contributions (like all work and contributions) but bring them down to earth a little to soften the inevitable fall.