by Mary Aiken
Eighty years ago, the American philosopher and social psychologist George Herbert Mead had something very relevant to say about how we think about ourselves—and express who we are. Like William James before him, Mead studied the use of first-person pronouns as a basis for describing the process of self-reflection. How we use I and me demonstrates how we think of self and identity.
A child learning English has to master the distinction between I and me and know when to use them.
The self-referential pronoun I is appropriate only when speaking for yourself, from yourself, delivering authentic expressions subjectively. The objective pronoun me is appropriate only when the child is talking about himself or herself as the object. Mead showed that these two pronouns point to two complementary views that each person has of the self.
There is I.
And there is me.
By using I, a child shows that he or she has a conscious understanding of the self on some level. When using I, the child speaks directly from that self. The use of me requires the child to have an understanding of himself or herself as a social object. To use me means figuratively leaving one’s body and being a separate object.
Where is the I in contemporary times? It is the authentic subjective and conscious real-world self. The selfie, the frontline cyberspace expression of the cyber self, is all me. It is an object—a social artifact that has no deep layer. This may explain why the expressions on the faces of selfie subjects seem so empty. There is no consciousness. The digital photo is a superficial cyber self.
It’s also interesting to note how me as a self-referential pronoun has expanded its hold on language, despite grammatical rules otherwise. The overuse of me has spread like wildfire. Teenagers, teachers, even broadcasters on TV, can be heard saying, “Me and my BFF” or “Me and my mom…”
A teenager may think he or she is creating a better “self,” a better object, with each selfie. But I would argue that every selfie taken, and improved upon, causes an erosion or dismissal of the true self. With each selfie taken, and invested in, the true self is diminished. In a way, it reminds me of the aboriginal cultures that believe each portrait photograph robs the soul. And when I think of cyberbullying and read accounts of the self-harm associated with it, I can’t help but wonder if the cyber self isn’t punishing the real one.
In the late nineteenth century, the pioneering American psychologist G. Stanley Hall, sometimes called “the father of adolescence,” argued that the teenage years are a natural period of Sturm und Drang, or “storm and stress,” during which kids will often experience mood swings, fight with parents, and engage in risky or dangerous behavior. We can’t blame the Internet for that. But we can wake up and see that it’s even more important to protect them there.
I think it’s finally time for what I call pro-techno-social initiatives—that is, technology developments for the greater good. It is time for the tech industry to step up and pay attention to social problems associated with use of its products. Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have pledged to donate 99 percent of their Facebook shares to the cause of human advancement. That represents about $45 billion at Facebook’s current valuation. I would respectfully suggest that all of this money be directed toward human problems associated with social media.
There are also things that parents can do—starting today. To begin with, remember that it is your child’s real self that wants and needs to be loved, accepted, and nurtured. Do what you can to pull kids back to I and not let them drift to me. This is strengthened by conversation.
• Ask them about their real-world day, and don’t forget to ask them about what’s happening in their cyber life.
• Tell them about risks in the real world, accompanied by real stories—then tell them about evolving risks online, and how to not show vulnerability.
• Talk about identity formation and what it means—distinguishing between the real-world self and the cyber self.
• Talk about body dysmorphia, eating disorders, body image, and self-esteem—and the ways their technology use may not be constructive.
• Tell your girls not to allow themselves to become a sex object—and tell your boys not to treat girls as objects online—or anywhere else.
And, parents of teenagers, if you find a sext, sit down and talk about it. Resist the urge to shut down or confiscate all your son’s or daughter’s devices. The point at which you banish your teenager to his or her bedroom—hating themselves, hating you, and hating their lives—and take away their phone and computer, you are depriving them of their entire support system. That can be too hard. They need to vent. They need to reach out to friends. Let them. And finally, if anything goes wrong in their cyber life, tell them not to try to handle it on their own. That’s what parents of teenagers are for.
CHAPTER 6
Cyber Romance
One of the timeless principles of all great love stories is that intimacy provides the spark of love, but separation is what causes it to ignite and become a blaze. Consider how the classic romances play out, whether it is Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, Scarlett and Rhett, or Rick and Ilsa. Ties between two individuals are created in small and subtle moments as they come to know and trust each other. Romantic love and passion are fanned and fueled when obstacles are encountered.
Obstacles are romantic, in other words. They can be situational—misunderstandings, mistaken identities, bad timing, physical upheaval, prior commitments, lack of reciprocity, geographical separation, or unavailability due to marital status. The importance of obstacles explains why “playing hard to get” can escalate the emotion of the other partner in an affair and why, for some, a romantic prospect who is unavailable, physically or emotionally, can provoke the most urgent feelings.
Obstacles and intimacy work in tandem, a push and pull that preoccupy two people as they head toward an intimate union of some kind, whether it is a missed opportunity, a sexual encounter, a walk down the aisle, or something in between. A succinct definition of intimacy is “close familiarity or friendship,” but it is often a euphemism for “sexual intercourse.” For psychologists, it is a complex construct particularly at a point in time when human-to-human contact and the courtship process are increasingly mediated by technology.
How has intimacy—or sex—been changed? Couples find and sustain relationships in different ways—often facilitated by webcams, proximity apps, texting, sexting, and social media. But has this made things better, more satisfying, more rewarding? This chapter looks at the ways cyber effects are shifting mating rituals and romance. And the story has a twist: Even though love turns out to be easier to find online—just a swipe right away—is it really love?
Stranger on the Train Syndrome
Way back in 1996, at the dawn of the Internet age, communications expert Joseph Walther coined the term hyperpersonal interaction to describe the way individuals tend to communicate online. According to Walther, the reason that things turn intimate so quickly online is due to the lack of visual cues, which is another way of talking about the effects of invisibility. Since two people who meet online are initially unable to see each other in most cases, their relationship begins differently. Invisibility has a substantial impact. While online, you are hidden—either partially or completely—particularly if you are communicating on a visually lean platform without Skype or live streaming—and therefore trust is created almost solely by self-disclosure.
Trust is essential to intimacy. In the real world, we know how to assess the trustworthiness of other people. Everything from a handshake to facial expression, eye contact, tone of voice, posture, and language come into play and inform our overall opinion of a person. We might approach a person we find attractive and test the water with jokes or flattery. We learn quickly, by his or her reaction, if they are interested in more.
On traditional dating sites like Match.com and eHarmony, this meet-and-greet process is initially more laborious. You are required to fill out a form and supply
personal information, details such as job, age, birthplace, education level, income range, and even your favorite books and movies. After creating a personal profile on a dating site, there is a quiet period of mutual examination as individuals who have been introduced to each other by the algorithm decide whether they find each other’s profile photographs attractive (a very important part of mating). If there are “sparks,” things begin to take off.
And “sparks” is a good way to describe it. Many significant regions of the human brain literally light up on MRI scans when an individual is experiencing feelings of romantic love. Chinese researchers studying the “science of love” have found that the left dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) becomes active, as well as the insula, caudate, amygdala, nucleus accumbens, temporo-parietal junction, posterior cingulate cortex, medial prefrontal cortex, inferior parietal lobule, precuneus, and temporal lobe.
Pretty impressive! Although I have to acknowledge this is probably more so to a scientist than a die-hard romantic.
Online, the courtship ritual continues in an exchange of texts, email, or chat-room posts, each more intimate than the last—which can make cyberspace dating feel like a journey to the confessional box. This is because in order to establish trust online—and form a bond—you need to say more, and reveal more, and describe more. In many ways this is standard in traditional dating; once it is decided that two people might be interested in each other, they try to establish ties and trust, and (like all love affairs) there is the added value of getting a chance to self-reflect and see yourself through another person’s eyes. People who fall in love don’t just learn a lot about another person; they learn a lot about themselves, in the form of feedback. We look out into the eyes of another and see our own images reflected back. In psychology, this is known as Cooley’s classic looking-glass self, as discussed in chapter 5.
But there’s one huge difference: Traditional dating relationships can take months to develop to the same level of intimacy that is reached almost instantly online.
Let’s stop for a second and contemplate this escalated and amplified mating dance—the baring of your soul to people you don’t know. This paradox is sometimes called the stranger on the train syndrome, because it is a proven reality that people can feel more comfortable disclosing personal information to someone that they may never meet again (a great boon to spies, counterintelligence agents, investigative journalists, emergency room doctors, priests, and con artists). Other factors come into play too—namely the cyber effects of online disinhibition and anonymity. We feel less at risk of being hurt by a partner who has not seen us in real life. And in an urgent wish to form a bond, we disclose the intimate details of our lives without much hesitation.
But is it smart to disclose so much?
No. And this has been proven again and again. Telling perfect strangers intimate details of your life is guaranteed to make you more vulnerable—to criticism, to charges of narcissism and self-involvement, and, most troublingly, to fraudsters and criminals who are (I’m sorry to report) lurking and lingering online, searching for new ways to take advantage of you. Here’s another reason why it’s not smart: Our human instincts, which are driving us toward self-disclosure in order to form bonds, work differently online. We feel compelled to overshare and confess, but revealing too much personal information with a potential love interest online doesn’t help to predict compatibility, the way it might in the real world.
Here’s one reason: Hyperpersonal communication online, as described by Walther, is a process by which participants eagerly seek commonality and harmony. The getting-to-know-you experience is thrown off-kilter. The two individuals—total strangers, really—seek similarities with each other rather than achieving a more secure bond that will allow for blunt honesty or clear-eyed perspective. This explains why online support groups can be so therapeutic and nurturing. Online, judgment is suspended and people come to the support group with altruistic intentions of harmony and helpfulness. And these are easier to maintain if relationships remain in cyberspace. Why? Because when we are in a real-world support group, we can’t help but react to real-world cues—facial expressions, posture, dress, body language, smell, tone—that might cause us to become self-conscious and wary of the judgment of others. We hold back. But when we are online, free of face-to-face contact, we can feel less vulnerable and not “judged.” This can be truly liberating.
But for individuals using online dating sites or apps, the same conditions can lead to trouble. Similarities are magnified, differences are not considered, and this distortion becomes self-perpetuating. In the 1990s, Walther discovered that when people meet in a technology-mediated environment, if an initial impression of someone is positive, then the subsequent blanks in the communication—unknown variables, lack of information, or separations—are filled in automatically with suitably positive and even totally idealized information. I would argue this isn’t dissimilar from the way the human eye fills in gaps in the visual field to compensate for our natural blind spots. Connecting the dots in this way is called the Gestalt principle of good continuation. Online, you do the same thing as you build an impression of someone. Mentally, you begin filling in details about their personality, looks, and character to make a stranger more three-dimensional—and knowable.
If you’re familiar with Freud, or psychoanalysis, then you probably know about the psychological effects of transference and projection—which cause us to unconsciously imbue others with traits or characteristics of people we’ve previously known—and you know how powerful this “filling in the blanks” process can be. (Hence the notorious exclamation, “You sound just like my mother!”) The human imagination works with memories and impressions of people we’ve known in our past, which explains why the characters of so many great novels are usually based in part on real people the author knows or once knew. Transference is even more amplified in cyberspace.
Does this mean that the person you meet online is essentially a fiction, a partial fantasy of your own creation? I’m afraid so. Now add in the fact that on a dating site, it isn’t even two “real” selves who are trying to meet and mate, but two “virtual” selves, two cyber artifacts, self-consciously constructed and curated for a particular effect. Authenticity is sorely missing. Princess Diana once said of her marriage that it was “a bit crowded” because there were three people in it. Even the standard experience of dating online involves four selves—two real-world selves and two cyber ones.
As two people online try to establish ties, they use their real-world instincts to determine whether they can trust each other or not. This sets them up for a real-world letdown and even a crash in self-esteem. (It isn’t fun to suddenly sense that the instincts you use every day, in every way, are way off base.) Far worse, relying on their real-world instincts can lead vulnerable individuals into true danger. A woman who meets a man in a bar might never consider accepting a ride with him after only one encounter. Yet that same woman, after a few days of interacting through email and texts with a man she’s met on an online dating site, may give out her home address because she feels such a strong connection with him.
This may partially explain a recent report, in February 2016, by the U.K. National Crime Agency (NCA), of a sixfold increase in online-dating-related rape offenses over the previous five years. A team that analyzed the findings presented potential explanations, including that people feel disinhibited online and engage in conversations that quickly become sexual in nature, which can lead to “misdirected expectations” on the first date. Seventy-one percent of these rapes took place on the first date and in either the victim’s or offender’s residence. What alarmed me most in this report was the apparent mutation of behavior. The perpetrators of these online date-rape crimes did not seem to fit the usual profile of a sex offender; that is, a person with a criminal history or previous conviction. This means we don’t fully understand the complexity of online dating and associated sexual assault. But the cyber effects of syndica
tion and disinhibition are clearly important factors.
The NCA does offer some helpful advice for online dating:
• Meet in public, stay in public.
• Get to know the person, not the profile.
• Not going well? Make excuses and leave.
• If you are sexually assaulted, get help immediately.
With all such risks and dangers, how do we explain the surge in popularity of online dating sites and apps? One of the drivers of online dating has to do with results: People who meet online are quicker and more likely to marry. When it’s right, it’s right. And with such a large number of people participating in online dating, the odds of finding a suitable mate only increase. In a survey of more than nineteen thousand people who married between 2005 and 2012, those who met on the Internet described their relationship as happier and more stable than couples who began their romance offline.
Another sign of success: The industry was profitable almost immediately. By 2007, online dating was bringing in $500 million annually in the United States, and that figure had risen to $2.2 billion by 2015, when Match.com turned twenty years old. By then, the website claimed to have helped create 517,000 relationships and 92,000 marriages and 1 million babies.
The sense of instant trust, or “instamacy,” that comes with meeting in the cyber environment will be likely heightened in the future, when virtual-dating technology includes use of a full-sensory VR headset, DNA screening, and other subtle but significant information to make the matches. “Smart” glasses or contact lenses may track what types of individuals the wearer finds particularly attractive and factor this in to the matching technology. By all accounts, this is around the corner—perhaps a decade away. The future, in other words, looks heavy on science but a little light on love.