How intense engagement with Facebook is linked to low self-esteem – The new online platform that removes all numeric notifications from the social networking medium and its goal
Artist and composer Benjamin Grosser , who focuses on the political, social, and cultural impacts of the internet, describes himself as a “long-time and strong” Facebook.
A few years ago, he concluded something disturbing about the way we perceive how the platform works. He realized that we were more interested in the number of likes and comments than in the content of the conversation we had uploaded to the online space in question.
About 1.3 billion Facebook users make over 3 million likes and comments every day. Research has shown that every time we receive a like, the reward center of our brain is stimulated.
The more intense the engagement of each user with Facebook, the more likes and comments they receive, and therefore the greater the reward they feel. However, the fact that intense engagement with Facebook is associated with low self-esteem proves that the praise of likes does not actually contribute to our personal well-being.
By anxiously watching the number of likes and our online friends, we begin to perceive friendship in quantitative terms. How many friends do I have? How many liked the text I wrote?
Grosser therefore decided to investigate how the large red numbers on Facebook affect the way we use the platform and what would happen if those numbers disappeared.
So he created "Facebook Demetricator," an online platform that removes all numerical notifications from Facebook.
Users no longer see the number of likes and comments they have. They only see the expression «liked by people». O Grosser stated that his purpose was to intervene in a system with the aim of examining how this system changes who we are and how we function.
This service was created in 2012 and so far has attracted 1000 users. This work of Grosser, which has been characterized as «creative political disobedience in the political era» demonstrates, according to his statements, that Facebook encourages us to participate in a game of «social accumulation». In other words, when they ask us how many friends we have, we are subconsciously encouraged to increase the number even more. When the red notification «+1» appears, we feel that we excel in sociability compared to others.
Source: protothema.gr
