Cover Story: About Face(book)

Dr. Jim Sorrell

Let’s get right to it: Facebook is 5 years old now and it’s grown to become arguably the most universally popular entity the world. But why? Just how did we get to this point, where Facebook is the world’s most dominant cultural force?

Just peruse the headlines: “I Got a Divorce Thanks to Facebook.” “OMG! My Parents Are On Facebook – Help!” “My friend committed suicide – on Facebook, but still!”

As Facebook cements its way deeper into people’s lives the psychology behind the social networking site and the decisions people make regarding the way they use it, how much they use it, and why they use it is becoming downright fascinating.

With that in mind we thought it’d be fun to pepper our partner at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, psychiatrist Dr. Jim Sorrell, with some questions regarding these interesting issues. Sorrell is UNMC’s Associate Professor and Director of the Division of University Psychiatric Sciences and also hosts a radio show called “Shrink Rap” on 94.1. Here’s what transpired:

Facebook is in the throes of celebrating its fifth year in existence. Give me your overall thoughts on this phenomenon…
It’s an interesting phenomenon; I’ve been impressed with the media’s coverage of it. And being so dramatic with it and kind of overblowing it.

And here we are piling on, right?
I think you’re putting a little perspective on it. I think that, to put it in perspective, you know, what did teenagers do 30 years ago? They were on the phone for four hours a night. So the point of the popularity of all these social networking sites isn’t that surprising at all. That’s what (teenagers) are hungry for; they’re hungry for social connectedness. And also, for, you know, novel ways of reaching those that are exclusive of adults and the rest of the world.

The trouble that they get into is they misunderstand the notions of privacy. So I think that it’s never surprising, it never surprises me that when there’s a new technology, any new sort of new media, people find ways to make themselves miserable with it. Because we … people are just miserable. They have miserable lives, they have to take terrible risks, they find themselves, you know, dragging themselves and all their problems into whatever they do, right? The capacity for human suffering is enormous.

So, of course people go off the deep end. But I would try to make a distinction between Facebook’s popularity and uses among teens and young adults versus the experiences of the people that are on it like the lawyer who is spending all of his day on Facebook. There’s probably something pathological going on there.

The other connection I make when people present questions like, “Is my kid doing too much?” or this or that or is this safe, I look at … Facebook and to some degree MySpace, they’re offline-online relationships. They are generally connecting online to people they have relationships with already, offline. And so, there is – as opposed to social networking sites that are strictly virtual, where people get on and have their avatars that are fantasy – those things are where you see more pathology. Because people are disconnecting entirely from their lived world.
   
Well when it comes to relating via Facebook, how much of it do you think is fantasy versus reality? Where does the line get blurred?
I think what people do is, or what you see is, age dependent. So the young teenagers will do a lot of … their MySpace page or their Facebook page, just by the very nature of it, they have to lie about their age. So they lie about things and that’s just part “trying things on” at that point. They take all kinds of risk because they don’t understand the consequences and they just create something new.

What you generally see developmentally is that people start to shape it more to fit in their life. They’re more aware that “hey, these people know me outside, I’ve got to have some consistency.”
   
So it’s a process?
Yeah, and the process is integrating more and more of yourself. So I think what happens on Facebook and MySpace profiles, when it comes to young adults and college-aged kids, what you see is an idealized self.

Sure. You’re putting out the you that you want the world to see.
Yeah, it’s the self, it’s the person who’s thoughtful and … if you look at the photographs they all over-represent their social life as being the center of something and being connected – things that people want to be. But you know, there’s so many obstacles in your real life that these profiles don’t represent who you really are. People don’t put a lot about their struggles in their Facebook.

And then you see … well, that can be helpful, too. If you put stuff out there, that same stuff may help shape what you’re doing in the rest of your world, right? You have to live up to your ideals. But one of the issues I deal with – I’m the Assistant Dean of Student Affairs (at UNMC) – so we occasionally are dealing with medical students who have all these pictures of themselves drunk at parties, right? Or saying negative things about patients or medicine. There’s those things that come up because people don’t understand the notion of privacy. They just don’t understand that it’s out there.

Why can’t people grasp that?
They don’t want to. It’s part of our narcissism. You mentioned the word, narcissism, this self-centeredness that imagines that we are just an island in the middle of an ocean reflecting ourselves. So people don’t think about those consequences, in some cases, at all.

It seems a lot of people still approach the Internet as a playground to just let it all out.
Yeah, and that there aren’t real-life consequences.

Do you think that’s because the Internet is relatively new?
Yeah, I think people will start to develop levels of sophistication with it. But it’s always going to be new, because people who are always discovering the social networking sites are going to be new waves of young people. So they’re going to continue to make the same mistakes because at that age there isn’t much you can learn from other people’s mistakes – you have to do it yourself.

One thing I wanted to ask you is, did you see this coming a couple years back? Not even the popularity of it necessarily but just how big of a role Facebook plays in people’s lives, where it’s being named as the cause of divorce, etc.?
Oh, of course. Because again, I’m just never surprised by people’s ability to wrap their problems and their desire for complicated and suffering lives into anything. And so that doesn’t surprise me at all.

You do see people who are absorbed by it. But the vast majority of people on Facebook seem to be reading other people’s content, right? They’re keeping up; they’re connecting. They’re extending their connections with people they know or reaching back or forward. But from a place where, “I’m interested in what’s going on with these other people.”

But then you see a couple other phenomena, which is people who are posting all the time. And, it’s clear that anytime you’re on, they’re on, too. You know, there was a recent study last year, it said that the average college student said they spend two-and-a-half hours a day on Facebook. That’s a lot. The study from two or three years ago showed they were spending about half an hour.

That sounds like a lot but won’t that be something that’s just considered normal in the future?
I think it already is. The question is that, you know, we have lives that are just continuously pressing in on us and we need things to protect ourselves from the things that are pressing in on us. That’s where procrastination and distraction come in. There are people who clearly are going to get seduced into looking at (Facebook).

But then we start to get in to addiction, and I don’t like to use the term when we’re not talking about pharmaceutical drugs. But clearly people do develop an excessive use or misuse of it. But then a lot of those people step away, or get burned out.

You talked about the term “virtual suicide” and that’s really interesting. What’s it mean? For a lot of people, it’s getting burned out. You see people with thousands of friends and it extends way beyond our physiological and psychological capacity. We really are meant to live in small groups. Real intimacy … if you look back at humans 50,000 years ago we were living in groups in primitive societies they often were of 20 to 30 people. People, by the time they were 7 years old, already knew everybody they were gonna know in life.
So people who have these huge networks of friends, that’s got to be narcissism and that’s when it turns into a popularity contest. But you realize that people really belong in smaller groups with people that we’re close to. People learn how to filter or if they get too extended they find that they have to check out completely.

But back to addiction, you know, only about one out of every five people who try heroin, who mainline heroin, get addicted. A lot of people step into that world but never get addicted. So even for people who are overusing Facebook wildly – something will happen … they’ll fall in love, they’ll get a new job … some other distraction will come along. Clearly, it does have the potential for addiction. There’s definitely something seductive about it.

Is it voyeurism?
Some voyeurism, sure. But I’m impressed that Facebook is sort of … it seems to be, when I look at MySpace and I look at Facebook, Facebook appears to be more grounded. People tend to carry on relationships that seem to be sustainable outside of the Internet. MySpace appears to be more about, you know, a band site, keeping up with entertainment. Facebook has come into its own; you see it’s extended beyond college kids. Obviously, you see families are on it.

Another topic I definitely wanted to broach is romantic relationships and all the potential pitfalls that lie there. Obviously, it’s fantastic for friendships but it can get messy, it seems with romantic relationships.
The whole issue about statuses is funny. I was with somebody recently who was just heartbroken because she found out that somebody changed their status to “not dating anyone.” And that’s how she found out they were broke up. And this was an adult, but it’s the type of thing that’s equivalent to having somebody pass a note to you instead of tell you face to face.

Some 3rd grade type stuff…
Absolutely, but it’s happening to an adult. I would say that these social networks and things are really adolescent in their origin. It probably encourages … well, it certainly doesn’t encourage or elevate people to do the best thing. Or the mature thing. You definitely see people exhibiting behaviors that they would never do in real life or face to face. There’s a regressive pull of how you handle things.

Frankly, there’s room in there for risk taking and to do things you wouldn’t normally do because you’re protected from the encounter of the face of the other person. There aren’t immediate repercussions so we can take bigger risks.

Do you ever think there will be a time in the future where we will have two lives – our Internet lives and our real lives? I mean, where you can almost get away with some of this stuff because it will be accepted to the point where people will say, “Ah, no big deal, they were just on the Internet…”
People have always done the thing where they had several different stories going about themselves at once. You know, and there is clearly – the Internet promotes that. And whether that‘s pathological or something else depends on how they tie it together.

The Internet is just a new and easier way to do it then.
Yeah. Right. But again, people are … I think there’s potential for people to become more integrated. For all my pessimism, I think there’s some potential in technology to advance our needs and psychological … it’s not all bad. Most of the criticism comes from people who don’t use the new technologies. They don’t understand it.

The one that’s still bizarre to me is Twitter. 

Yep, I wanted to broach Twitter. That’s all about narcissism, right?
People are – just the notion that somebody cares what you’re eating for lunch. I mean, this sort of dumbing down of culture that comes along with it.

It seems to be just this shallowness of what people are communicating about and connecting to. And then there’s the sense of “who cares?” It’s pretty … weird. And also people just surrendering their time alone. Nobody seems to be comfortable just being alone with their thoughts anymore. And I think that may be damaging for us human beings, culturally. When we surrender that solitude it’s … nobody’s alone anymore, thanks to cellphones. They are always connected. And connecting. And reaching out. That, I think, is potentially problematic.

You don’t have to go all “Space Odyssey 2001” on me here, but where do you think all of this
is heading?
There will always be room, a place, for young people in our culture to be experimenting with their sense of themselves and their relationships. We’ve got to give people their space to do that. People just need to chill out.

Doing it virtually as opposed to getting in to cars and driving around town all drunk, is an advantage and healthier. My sense of the future is that we honor that young people are going to have these technologies, this social networking.

We’re a culture that admires youth. We admire the things that they do. So we then create our culture around it. A Utopia would be that we have a place for kids to experiment and to take risks and have a healthy outlet to talk about their likes/dislikes/ideals.
   
Another topic that’s fascinating to me is, when I was on MySpace I had friends in my network or whatever that I would’ve never called on the phone in a million years. What does it say about those types of relationships? Were we “friends” strictly so we could just look in on what each other was doing?
Again, I think we settle in on … you’re experimenting when you’re younger with how big is my net going to be? You find your family, you find your peers that you’re comfortable with and you settle in, for better or worse. That’s what life’s about to some extent – losses, then settling in and moving on.

I would hope that we’ll get that way with Facebook, too.

How else has Facebook affected your work life?
Well, I experimented with MySpace for our radio show but I just couldn’t keep up. I kind of see the phone and the computer as my enemy, but that’s how I make my living or how I’m accountable to people. The phone rings or I get e-mail, and it’s about work. And so I’m not … I guess I’m an older guy who doesn’t quite get it. A bit of a dinosaur. But I think there’s going to be room down the road in mental health – there will be some really cool ways of doing things virtually.
   
You know I just read an article about a group of psychiatrists creating avatars to drop in on some video game so they can find people who are addicted or who need help. That’s weird.
Well, that’s sort of an invasion of privacy. That’d be sort of like going in to bars and trying to pick out the drunks who really need help and treatment.

There’s a heavy handedness in the healthcare community that we sort of think that everybody ought to … it should be a crime to not take care of yourself. Come on, let’s back off, let’s give everybody some freedom in this day and age.

But right now, the military is experimenting with using virtual reality video games to work with PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), for instance. They can modify these games to reflect the actual circumstances and settings that these soldiers were in so that they can re-expose them and guide them, offer them help. That’s really cool.

So as we get younger people coming up through medicine who dealt with these technologies their whole lives, we’ll see a lot more of it.

Do you see a lot of seminars popping up regarding Facebook or other social networking sites?
A lot of the stuff is just alarming. There’s a lot of research going on now that’s pretty sophisticated. You know, Facebook, is it pathological? Are people getting worse or better on it? Who’s interested in it? What do people say about themselves and learn about other people?

 But most of the stuff I see in the press is alarming. It’s just space and people are filling it, projecting on to it what their needs are. Social networking is created and popular because of the needs people have to be connected and to feel that intimacy and have room for self-experimentation.

 The problem is the distortion of what’s public vs. what’s private. That line used to be much, much clearer. What’s public space vs. what’s private space on the Internet is very tricky. It’s something that has changed historically and culturally over time, especially the way we treat our public figures and our celebrities.

You know, nobody used to know that Franklin Roosevelt was paralyzed and in a wheelchair because that was considered private. And nobody knew JFK was sleeping around – that was private.

So how are we going to develop in a context that doesn’t have clear boundaries?

Let’s wrap it up with you, personally, do you think Facebook is a good thing? Is it healthy?
I think it reflects the best and worse of us and magnifies it. It can distort and influence and shape. But what’s really happening is people are just being people … people can get jacked up and messed up in anything.