The Cyber Effect (24 page)

I think we should consider adding a fourth aspect of “self” to Rogers's list. In the age of technology, identity appears to be increasingly
developed through the gateway of a different self, a less tangible one, a digital creation.

Let's call this “
the cyber self”—or who you are in a digital context. This is the idealized self, the person you wish to be, and therefore an important aspect of self-concept. It is a potential new you that now manifests in a new environment, cyberspace. To an increasing extent, it is the virtual self that today's teenager is busy assembling, creating, and experimenting with. Each year, as technology becomes a more dominant factor in the lives of teens, the cyber self is what interacts with others, needs a bigger time investment, and has the promise of becoming an overnight viral celebrity. The selfie is the frontline cyber self, a highly manipulated artifact that has been created and curated for public consumption.

But how do we explain that weird, vacant, unmistakable expression on the faces of many selfie subjects? The eyes look out but the mind is elsewhere.

The virtual mirror could be socially isolating, except for one thing. The selfie can't exist in a vacuum. The selfie needs feedback. A cyberpsychologist might say that's the whole point of a selfie.

Selfies ask a question of their audience:
Like me like this?

To understand feedback more deeply, we need to go way back to the work of sociologist Charles Horton Cooley in 1900, decades before the advent of the Internet or when monkeys were stuck in front of mirrors. Cooley came up with what he called
the looking-glass theory
. (
Looking glass
is an archaic English term for mirror.) Cooley used the concept of a person studying his or her own reflection as a way to describe how individuals come to see or know themselves.

In the case of Cooley's looking glass, the information that we use to learn about ourselves isn't provided in a mirror's reflection. It is provided by others—their comments about us, the way they treat us, and things they say. In the looking-glass self, a person views himself or herself through others' eyes and in turn gains identity. In other words, he argued, the human self-concept was dependent upon social feedback.
Philosopher William James, the so-called father of psychology, expanded this idea by pointing out that individuals become different people, and express their identity in different ways, depending on whom they are with. He argued that we could potentially have
as many “selves” as we have friends, family members, and colleagues who know us.

Now let's fast-forward to the next century and do the math—and consider the psychology of this effect in cyberspace. If you have a repertoire of many selves—potentially as many as people who know you—social media could exponentially expand the number of selves you create. Is your “self” environment-specific? Are you the same person on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat, and LinkedIn? Does this new explosion of selves cause a splintering of identity or, particularly for young teenagers who are going through critical stages of identity formation, cause developmental problems? And what about critical feedback?

Presenting yourself to the world is a risky business. It's hard to imagine an individual alive who hasn't experienced some form of rejection, subtle or strong, embarrassing or humiliating. But you can also be accepted for the self you present—and feel rewarded by pleasant feelings of pride and affection.

Let's imagine you have just turned thirteen. The five years ahead of you are a natural time for questioning and seeking. You'll be trying new clothes, mannerisms, friends, interests, and pastimes. You'll probably begin experimenting with what you think of as adult behavior. This helps you make sense of the self within, as you unconsciously piece together an identity, like a collage. You are working to create a constant, steady, reliable, knowable, and familiar self.

What kind of information—or feedback—is the virtual mirror going to give you? In this regard, the cyber environment may be much more overwhelming than the real world. To begin with, the sheer number of “friends” has grown, and therefore the volume of feedback will be far greater. Prior to the Internet, a teenager would have a limited number of social groups to juggle—family and extended family, schoolmates, maybe neighbors. Now the number of social groups is potentially limitless. How would you begin to interpret, filter, and process that vast amount of information coming from so many different quadrants?

Imagine how confusing and potentially unsettling it could be. A virtual tsunami of feedback to process.

Now factor this in: The cyber self is always under construction, psychologically and digitally. Even while the real you is sleeping, the cyber you continues to exist. It is “always on”—evolving, updating, making friends, making connections, gaining followers, getting “likes,” and being tagged. This can create a feeling of urgency, a continuous feedback loop, a sense of needing to invest more and more time in order to keep the virtual self current, relevant, and popular.

This may explain the obsessive interest among teens in curating their selfies. When the process of identity formation in real life becomes confusing and difficult to control, as it is for most teenagers at some point, what could be more satisfying than being able to perfectly calibrate and manage the portrait that the online world sees? To some extent, we all engage in image management, but it now begins at an earlier age, and in some cases before identity has been properly formed. This may lead to identity confusion.

After all, which matters the most: your real-world self or the one you've created online?

Probably the one with greater visibility.

Narcissism
, a tendency found in teenagers during their identity-formation years, is a term taken from Greek mythology, after
Narcissus, a very handsome young man with a fantastic physique. One day he wanders into the woods and discovers a pond. When he leans down to drink water, he sees his own reflection and falls in love with himself. Realizing that the love he seeks is impossible, he despairs. Unable to leave the pond and his own reflection, he dies.

An individual with extreme narcissism demonstrates preoccupation with self and how he or she is perceived by others. Lack of empathy and selfishness are both traits. A normal developing child displays what looks like narcissistic and self-centered behavior. A toddler who will not share toys is self-centered. A child who thinks the world revolves around them is also rarely interested in the adults around, or doesn't
show curiosity or empathy for others. For them, others don't really exist, except to serve the needs of the child.

There's even a study by Piaget to prove this, the famous
three mountains task
. In the study, a child is taken to stand on one side of a table where a model of a mountain range has been placed. On the opposite side of the table, a doll sits in a chair. The child is shown sets of drawings and asked to pick out the scene that shows the mountain scene the way the child sees it. Nearly all kids can do this without difficulty.

The child is then asked to pick out the drawing that shows how the doll sees the mountain scene. Most children can't do this. They will pick the drawing that shows their own view. This experiment is used to demonstrate how young children have difficulty imagining the perspective of others.

Over time, self-centeredness lessens. By preadolescence, children have learned to be more other-directed, courteous, kind, and empathetic. They have been reminded—by example, by parents, and by other figures of authority—that others exist in the world and others matter.

Once they are teenagers, though, they can become more self-centered again. This comes with their developmental preoccupation with creating their identity. Erik Erikson described this period of development between ages twelve and eighteen as a stage of
identity versus role confusion
, when individuals become fascinated with their appearance because their bodies and faces are changing so dramatically. Once this stage of development is finished, the self becomes reintegrated—and wants to act in the world, and get out of “self.” The discomfort about appearance fades away. Usually by the late teens, individuals become more self-accepting.

Narcissistic behavior, in other words, is considered a natural part of development and is usually outgrown. But according to recent studies of young adults, it would seem that fewer of them are moving on beyond their narcissistic behavior. A study of U.S. college students found
a significant increase in scores on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory between 1982 and 2006. It's pretty interesting that this change coincides with the rise of the Internet.

Of course, there could be lots of contributing factors for the rise in narcissism. It could be caused by a generation of indulgent
parents who
have overpraised their children. (A study done by Ohio State University suggests that constantly praising kids for their tiniest of accomplishments may have the unintended side effect of developing an overinflated ego.) The predominance of narcissism could have occurred alongside the rise of a more individualistic society. The “dark side” of self-reliance and individualism is an increase in self-regard.

Social-networking sites encourage the sharing of personal information, which can result in a preoccupation with self. Certainly, there has never been a time in history when people were expected to show off their accomplishments, their travel photos, their new clothes and hairstyles, and every restaurant meal, to such an extent. The social pressure for young people is tremendous to create and share photos—and participate in this hyper-celebration of self. It's interesting to think about how humans have colonized the Internet and turned it from a platform of sharing into a platform for self-promotion.

Some amount of narcissism is considered healthy, as I've said. But I wouldn't want to overstate how healthy. There is a line between feeling good about yourself and grandiosity, which can interfere with relationships and become dysfunctional. Being high on the narcissism spectrum is a tough, usually problematic way to go through life. Like the eponymous Narcissus, securing a lasting and rewarding relationship with another human being often eludes these individuals. Sometimes they resort to marrying another narcissist and forming a “mutual admiration society” (the marriage in the Netflix show
House of Cards
is a perfect example of this), although these relationships are often volatile and rarely last.

I will explore this a bit more in the next chapter, about cyber-relationships, but the term “narcissistic relationship” may qualify as an oxymoron. Let's hope today's teenagers aren't on this path. But since they've been hanging out in cyberspace during their developmental years, it is too early to tell.

In Oscar Wilde's philosophical novel
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, an impossibly beautiful young man, Dorian Gray, has his full-length portrait
painted in oil by a famous artist. The portrait is so lovely, it saddens Dorian to think that in his real life, day by day, he will age and become an old man while the portrait remains spellbinding. It will stay perfect and always remind him of what he's lost. Devastated by this thought, he makes a wish—something like a deal with the devil. He wishes that the painting would grow old instead of him.

As the years pass, Dorian descends into hedonism and immoral behavior to the point of depravity (the kind of stuff I covered in
chapter 1
, “The Normalization of a Fetish,” which you may still be trying to get out of your head). But his wish comes true. He never appears to age. Only his portrait shows the ravages of time and the effects of his corruption. You would think this might be an ideal situation, but his eternally young and beautiful appearance leaves him isolated from real life—from love, the effects of time, and eventually morality. His portrait grows uglier and more sinister every day, reflecting Dorian's inner reality. The painting becomes so horrific that he decides to put it in a locked room where nobody can see it.

Thanks to technology, Dorian's story can now happen in reverse: The cyber self gets better with each year—filtered, Photoshopped, and, most important, “liked”—while the real self can be parked in a locked room. The beauty industry has always relied on the insecurities and perfectionism of young women for a sizable percentage of its annual profits.
Now there's a plethora of apps designed to meet the same need, altering not the physical body but the virtual representation of it online. An app called PhotoWonder (with 100 million users in 218 countries) can make you appear slimmer and also give you a much-needed tan. With a little help from Facetune, you can appear taller and with blemish-free skin. The CreamCam app improves your skin tone, removes blemishes and oil “shine,” and can erase any flyaway hair around your face. And let's not forget Skinny Camera, which supplies an instant virtual weight loss of ten to twenty pounds. Anybody can be a supermodel online.

A subtler but no-less-telling aspect of curating a selfie and conveying status online is clothing. What a teenager wears, or doesn't wear, is full of information. There's an old saying that the human being is composed of three parts: soul, body, and clothes. More than one hundred
years ago, William James observed that this was more than just a joke—that the relationship between clothing and the self is intimate and deep. And let's not forget Oscar Wilde, who said, “It's superficial not to judge by appearances.” In forensic psychology, clothing is especially important, as it, or lack of it, is considered “behavioral evidence of intent.” In other words, clothing is an indication of what the wearer is about to do. When a woman is found dead in the mountains and she's wearing high heels, you know she didn't go there to hike.