The Happiness Effect

by Donna Freitas

  8.In their article “Research Note—Why Following Friends Can Hurt You: An Exploratory Investigation of the Effects of Envy on Social Networking Sites among College-Age Users,” Information Systems Research 26, no. 3 (2015): 585–605, Hanna Krasnova and colleagues look at survey responses from 1,193 college-age Facebook users to investigate the role of envy in the social networking site context as a potential contributor to undesirable outcomes such as depressive symptoms and anxiety. The authors’ results showed that envy is associated with reduced cognitive and affective well-being as well as increased reactive self-enhancement. In “Friend Networking Sites and Their Relationship to Adolescents’ Well-Being and Social Self-Esteem,” CyberPsychology & Behavior 9, no. 5 (2006): 584–590, Patti M. Valkenburg, Jochen Peter, and Alexander P. Schouten describe a survey they administered to 881 adolescents, aged ten to nineteen, who had an online profile. The survey results showed that the frequency with which adolescents used the site had an indirect effect on their social self-esteem and well-being. The use of the friend networking site stimulated the number of relationships formed on the site, the frequency with which adolescents received feedback on their profiles, and the tone of this feedback. Positive feedback on their profiles enhanced adolescents’ social self-esteem and well-being, whereas negative feedback decreased their self-esteem and well-being.

  9.A total of 738 students responded to this optional survey question.

  10.A total of 738 students responded to this optional survey question.

  Chapter 2

  1.In “First Thought, Worst Thought,” New Yorker, January 13, 2014, Mark O’Connell muses on the act of writing something regrettable on social media, as well as on the swift consequences such a mistake can bring. One of the most publicized examples of this occurred in 2013, when Justine Sacco, a public relations executive, boarded a plane for South Africa and tweeted, “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding! I’m white.” O’Connell notes that in the twelve hours she spent en route to Cape Town, Sacco became the unknowing subject of “a kind of ruinous flash-fame” as her tweet went viral, drawing anger and derision from thousands, which ultimately ended in her swift and public firing from her job. See also nonfiction author Jon Ronson’s article about Justine Sacco, “How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, February 12, 2015. This article was excerpted from Ronson’s book on the same subject: So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (New York: Riverhead, 2015).

  2.In her article “Beware: Potential Employers See the Dumb Thing You Do Online: The Spread of Social Media Has Given Hiring Companies a Whole New List of Gaffes to Look For,” Wall Street Journal, Eastern Edition, October 29, 2012, B8, Leslie Kwoh details how employers are increasingly scouring social media to vet potential employees. Data show that in 2012, two in five companies used social networking sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to screen candidates. Social media “gaffes” that hiring managers reported as raising red flags included disparaging a former employer, using inappropriate language, offering excessive personal information, and exhibiting racist or sexist behavior, as well as any illicit activity such as drinking and driving or using illegal drugs. Kwoh notes that Millennials are especially vulnerable to these mistakes because they have a greater presence on social media and have grown up sharing their thoughts and feelings online. Then, in “10 Social Media Blunders That Cost a Millennial a Job—or Worse,” Time, September 5, 2014, Susie Poppick reports that upwards of 93 percent of recruiters now check out social media profiles of prospective employees. Poppick provides a list of the ten most egregious mistakes job seekers can make on social media, including drinking in a photo, complaining about an old job, making fun of clients or donors, and sexual oversharing. Also, in his article “The 7 Social Media Mistakes Most Likely to Cost You a Job,” Time, October 16, 2014, Jacob Davidson looks at a 2014 survey by the recruiting platform Jobvite, which shows that 93 percent of hiring managers are now likely to review a candidate’s social profile before making a hiring decision. The survey shows that 55 percent of hiring managers have taken a second look at a candidate based on what they find, with 61 percent of these second looks being negative. Davidson notes that job seekers should refrain from making references to illegal drugs, posting messages or photos of a sexual nature, using profanity, or posting about guns or alcohol. Posting one’s political affiliation and having poor grammar were also turnoffs for many hiring managers. Aspects of social media profiles that hiring managers found favorable included information about volunteering or donating to charity. Finally, in a survey of 2,303 hiring managers and human resource professionals conducted in 2012, results showed that 37 percent of employers use social networks to screen potential job candidates. Of those employers that utilized social networks, 65 percent said they did so to see if potential employees presented themselves professionally, 51 percent wanted to know if the candidate was a good fit with the company culture, and 45 percent did so to learn more about the candidate’s qualifications. Roughly a third (34 percent) of employers using social networks stated that information found on a candidate’s social media profile caused them to not hire the candidate; specific red flags included inappropriate photos, evidence of drinking or drug use, poor communication skills, bad-mouthing former employers, and discriminatory comments related to gender, race, or religion. See Jacquelyn Smith, “How Social Media Can Help (or Hurt) You in Your Job Search,” Forbes, April 16, 2013.

  3.In his article “College Admissions Officials Turn to Facebook to Research Students,” U.S. News & World Report, October 10, 2011, Ryan Lytle notes that college admissions officials are beginning to check social media profiles, such as applicants’ Facebook pages, when making admissions decisions. In a Kaplan Test Prep survey of admissions officials at 359 colleges and universities, 12 percent of respondents noted that the use of vulgar language in a status update or depictions of alcohol consumption in photos negatively impacted a prospective student’s admissions chances. Lytle suggests that college-bound Facebook users not only be cognizant of the potentially negative aspects of their social media profiles but also take advantage of the fact that college admissions officers will be checking their profile by posting projects, research, and writing as a way of showcasing their strengths and achievements.

  4.Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 201. This connection between Foucault’s “panopticism” and this project I owe to a serendipitously timed reading of Discipline and Punish and lecture about it by Ann Burlein, a philosophy professor colleague at Hofstra, for a course we were team-teaching in the Honors College.

  5.See Daniel Trottier, Social Media as Surveillance: Rethinking Visibility in a Converging World, (London: Routledge, 2012). For more information on university officials scrutinizing their students’ social media activity, see Daniel Trottier’s article, “Mutual Transparency or Mundane Transgressions? Institutional Creeping on Facebook,” Surveillance and Society Vol. 9, Issue ½ (2011): 17–30.

  6.danah boyd, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, (New Haven, CT: Yale Univerity Press), 54–59.

  7.In “How to Clean Up Your Social Media for College Applications,” Huffington Post, November 19, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/19/social-media-college-applications_n_4303319.html, Megan Shuffleton discusses the need for Millennials who are preparing for college to clean up their social media profiles. Suggested steps to take include monitoring one’s privacy settings, deleting any pictures that could be embarrassing or deemed inappropriate, looking over one’s “liked” pages, and even changing one’s username or Twitter handle to one that is more professional.

  8.Howard Gardner and Katie Davis, The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 66. See pp. 61–76 for the entire discussion of the “polished self” and the “packaged self.”

  9.Ibid., 67.

>   10.This is the case, despite such famous political moments in history as the example of the Arab Spring. Social media played a key role in the Arab Spring uprisings that began in 2011. In his report “Social Media in the Arab World: Leading Up to the Uprisings of 2011” (Washington, DC: Center for International Media Assistance, February 2, 2011), Jeffrey Ghannam details the awakening of free expression (largely via social media) that helped to break down the stranglehold of state-sponsored media and information monopolies in many Arab countries. While much of this free expression has been politically motivated, Ghannam notes that political and even more general forms of personal expression in many Arab countries have religious undertones, considering that hundreds of activists, writers, and journalists have been arrested and imprisoned for challenging government authority and insulting Islam. For more on the role of social media in the Arab Spring uprisings, see Philip N. Howard et al., “Opening Closed Regimes: What Was the Role of Social Media during the Arab Spring?,” Social Science Research Network, 2011, and Habibul Haque Khondker, “Role of the New Media in the Arab Spring,” Globalizations 8, no. 5 (2011): 675–679.

  11.A total of 735 students responded to this optional survey question. Also, in a separate survey question about instruction and advice they’ve received from mentors, teachers, and parents about their behavior on social media, 123 of 568 respondents (23 percent) mentioned the importance of considering “future employers” every time they post as the main advice they received about using it. An additional 19 students said something to the effect of “Watch what you post if you ever want to get a job” as the only advice they received, and 10 other students said they were told (more or less) to always “keep things professional.” Sixteen students mentioned that someone made sure to instill in them the knowledge that “I am a brand” (as one student put it), and 3 of these students went on to talk about “keeping things professional” and “future employers” in their same answers. This brings to 170 (30 percent) the total number of students who identified professionally related advice as the only social media advice they’ve been given.

  Chapter 3

  1.For more on the notion of social media as a space for “performance” and “exhibition” of self, see Xuan Zhao, Niloufar Salehi, Sasha Naranjit, Sara Alwaalan, Stephen Voida, and Dan Cosley, “The Many Faces of Facebook: Experiencing Social Media as Performance, Exhibition, and Personal archive,” in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–10. ACM, 2013. See also José Van Dijck’s fascinating exploration of “online self-presentation” through her comparative look at this subject on LinkedIn versus Facebook in her article, “‘You Have One Identity’: Performing the Self on Facebook and LinkedIn,” Media, Culture & Society 35, no. 2 (2013): 199–215. And finally, see Zizi Papacharissi’s chapter (12) on subject of “identity performance,” “A Networked Self Identity Performance and Sociability on Social Network Sites,” from Francis Lap Fung Lee, ed., Frontiers in new media research, Vol. 15, (London: Routledge, 2013), 207–221.

  2.A total of 233 students chose to answer this essay question.

  3.I’ve already mentioned Sherry Turkle’s fascinating book on our experience of connectivity (or the lack of it) because of new technologies, but I find her latest book mentioned here in this chapter even more illuminating on this same subject and beyond. For anyone interested in social media and the way new technologies are changing our world, relationships, identities, and lives, both of Turkle’s books in their entirety are essential reading, in my opinion. But for a look at Turkle’s discussion of the ways we “edit” our speech because of technology in particular, see Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (New York: Penguin, 2015), 22–23.

  4.And it is, indeed, a business—a profitable one—for many young adults today. For an eye-opening look at this, and the notion of “microcelebrities” (the new “influencers” in our society who have a certain amount of social media fame,” see Taffy Brodesser Akner’s article “Turning Microcelebrity Into a Big Business,” from The New York Times Sunday Magazine (September 19, 2014).

  5.Take Essenia O’Neill, the Australian teen, social media star, and “name brand” who amassed nearly a million followers to her Instagram account, largely by posting attractive bikini photos and shots of herself in designer digs that highlighted her Barbie-like features and body. O’Neill became even more famous when the pressures to post and to look perfect and happy got to be too much and she retagged her photos with “the truth” about all the terrible things she was thinking and feeling while taking them, as well as posting teary videos explaining why she was doing away with all her accounts. For more on O’Neill, see Jonah Bromwich, “Essenia O’Neill, Instagram Star, Recaptures Her Life,” New York Times, November 3, 2015.

  CHAPTER 4

  1.Many people agree with this student’s assessment that lots of selfie-takers have gone too far. Making fun of selfies and those who take them has become a regular sport on television and in the media, especially those people whose selfies have become famous—or rather infamous—because of their extreme riskiness. We’ve all heard of those people who’ve done crazy (and crazy stupid) things like trying to take a selfie with a bear (and provoking the US Forest Service to release a statement warning tourists against doing just this) or taking a selfie during the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona (while actually running with the bulls), which is also prohibited by Spanish authorities for obvious reasons. For more on the bull-selfie, and the Spanish authorities’ hunt for the culprit, see Jessica Durando, “Man Takes Selfie during Bull-Run Festival in Spain,” USA Today, July 14, 2014, http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2014/07/13/selfie-runner-spain-festival-bulls/12594815/. Some people have died while taking selfies because they just can’t resist taking that photo even in the most dangerous and precarious of situations—a lot of people apparently. See Jennifer Newton, “Selfies Kill More People Than Sharks as People Try to Impress Friends Online,” Daily Mail, September 23, 2015, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3244939/More-people-died-taking-selfies-killed-sharks-far-year-people-come-dangerous-way-impress-friends-online.html.

  For more on incidents in which taking selfies has resulted in injuries or even death, see Reuters, “Selfie Madness: Too Many Dying to Get the Picture,” New York Times, September 3, 2015; Jessica Durando,“Police: Man Killed While Taking Instagram Selfie with Gun,” USA Today, September 2, 2015, ; Jessica Mendoza, “Woman Hurt While Taking Photo with Bison: Why Can’t People Resist Selfies?,” Christian Science Monitor, July 26, 2015; and Kiran Moodley, “Couple Fall to Their Death Whilst Attempting Cliff Face Selfie,” Independent, August 11, 2014.

  2.In her book Seeing Ourselves through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Jill Walker Rettberg looks at how selfies, blogs, and other life-logging tools and applications have become important ways through which we understand ourselves. Rettberg’s analysis presents these tools and applications as three intertwined modes of self-representation: visual, written, and quantitative. For more on selfies as a form of identity performance, see Gabriel Fleur, “Sexting, Selfies, and Self-Harm: Young People, Social Media, and the Performance of Self-Development,” Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy 151 (May 2014): 104–112. Here, Fleur argues that selfies are one of the many ways that young people consciously, visibly, and deliberately perform their identity online, and that social media and the structures of performative display are a way to reconceptualize youth and the relationship between social media and young people’s self-development. Then, Haje Jan Kamps, in his book Selfies: Self-Portrait Photography with Attitude (Blue Ash, OH: How Books, 2014), celebrates the culture of social networking, in particular the art of taking selfies. In “Notable and Quotable: Selfie Hermeneutics,” Wall Street Journal, August 17, 2015, A11, Tanya Abrams, Raul Alcantar, and Andrew Good discuss the University of Southern California’s #SelfieClass, where freshmen stu
dents examine society’s influence on self-identity and how selfies reflect and affect the global culture in which we live. The authors note that in class discussions and individual interviews, students admit that their selfies often reveal subconscious feelings about their own sexuality or ethnicity, and that they have used selfies to distance themselves from one group in the hopes of being accepted by another. Finally, in his article “Notes to Self: The Visual Culture of Selfies in the Age of Social Media,” Consumption Markets & Culture, Taylor & Francis Online, July 3, 2015, 1–27, Derek Conrad Murray explores the cultural fascination with selfies with a specific interest in the self-imaging strategies of young women in their teens and early twenties. Murray explores the political urgency at the heart of the selfie phenomenon and contemplates whether the urge to compulsively produce and share self-images is mere narcissism or a politically oppositional and aesthetic form of resistance.