The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [105]
Research by Sherri Grasmuck, a sociologist at Temple University, confirms Colding-Jorgensen’s hunch, revealing that Facebook users shape their online identities in implicit rather than explicit ways. That is, they believe that the kinds of Facebook campaigns and groups they join reveal more about them than whatever they put in the dull “about me” pages. Thus, many of them join Facebook groups not only or not so much because they support particular causes but because they believe it’s important to be seen by their online friends to care about such causes. In the past convincing themselves and, more important, their friends that they were indeed socially conscious enough to be changing the world required (at a minimum) getting off their sofas. Today, aspiring digital revolutionaries can stay on their sofas forever—or until their iPads’ batteries run out—and still be seen as heroes. In this world, it doesn’t really matter if the cause they are fighting for is real or not; as long as it is easy to find, join, and interpret, that’s enough. And if it impresses their friends, it’s a true gem.
Not surprisingly, psychologists have also noticed a correlation between the use of social networking and narcissism. A 2009 national poll of 1,068 U.S. college students conducted by researchers at San Diego State University (SDSU) found that 57 percent of them believe that their generation uses social networking sites for self-promotion, narcissism, and attention seeking, while almost 40 percent agreed with the statement that “being self-promoting, narcissistic, overconfident, and attention-seeking is helpful for succeeding in a competitive world.” Jean Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at SDSU who conducted the study and also author of The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement, believes that the very structure of social networking sites “rewards the skills of the narcissist, such as self-promotion, selecting flattering photographs of oneself, and having the most friends.” There’s nothing wrong with self-promotion per se, but it seems quite unlikely that such narcissistic campaigners would be able to develop true feelings of empathy or be prepared to make sacrifices that political life, especially political life in authoritarian states, requires.
Kandinsky and Vonnegut Are Now Friends!
Given how easy groups can form online, it is easy to mistake quantity for quality. Facebook is already facilitating the processes that do not really require much social glue to begin with. The truth is that it’s natural for people to form groups. Social psychologists have long understood that while it doesn’t take much to make a group of people feel they have a common identity, it is considerably harder to make them act in the interests of that community or make individual sacrifices in its name.
Beginning in the early 1970s much research in social psychology was dedicated to the so-called Minimal Group Paradigm, the minimal conditions that can foster a sense of group identity among complete strangers. It turns out that the fact of categorizing people into groups—using completely random, coin-tossing methods—already produces a strong feeling of group identity, enough to start discriminating against those who are not members of the group. This was first confirmed by a group of British researchers who showed a group of schoolboys pairs of highly abstract paintings by two artists, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, without identifying the authorship of each painting in the pair. Having solicited the boys’ preferences, they used this information to form two groups, the Klee lovers and the Kandinsky lovers, although some children were told