Social Media as a Gratification Marketplace

For the purposes of this blog entry, I'll only be talking about the oh-so prevalent Snapchat and Instagram. What I'm mainly intent on theorizing about these platforms and their relationship to many folks is how they serve as sites of exchange for questionable "human" gratification. I don't have a problem with gratification—if anything, I'm a firm believer in it and think it is something we all generally welcome and appreciate especially when we feel like we need some sort of indication that we're navigating through our lives just fine. The problem for me comes when intentional seeking and hunting of it gets to become such an inseparable aspect of everything that we do—and social media makes it so easy for us to prioritize and adopt this into our ways of thinking about ourselves and our happiness. That happened to me with both Snapchat and Instagram. Until recently, I expended copious amounts of energy worrying about the attention I received after posting something on these apps. Both afford users convenient, ready-at-hand ways to check who had engaged with your shared content. This ease of accessibility is great for the creators of the apps, but poses imminent dangers to users because it can become so unhealthily habitual, factoring into the well-known urges to whip out the phone and check it even one didn't get a notification.

The dangers are all the more real for young people, who are most likely the target market for the apps. At the highly impressionable age of 12-13, all I wanted to do was see notification bubbles because I created meaning for those icons—the number of those received translated into popularity, favorability, or just gratification in general. The creation of that meaning was in large part, I assume, because there was an overwhelming culture surrounding the use of these apps. The technology was changing the way we interacted with each other and with ourselves. The technology took human gratification and turned it into a quantifiable item that we can exchange with other users through these applications. Much like the idea of "Retail Therapy" which presumably happens when our ego is depleted, many people spend their energy posting things and consistently checking those things with the hopes of getting other people's reduced (reduced as in less meaningful as in-person exchanges) acts of gratification by viewing, liking, replying, and commenting. The technology took acts that are seemingly inherent to our human nature and completely changed the way we perform them.

Just as much as I want to believe that I am reverting back to a time in which I had none of these worries about my presence on social media, I know that the technology has caused an arguably permanent change in the way I operate in the world today because I still rely on it for so many things. The good news is that I am caring less and less about receiving artificial gratification from others on social media. I deleted Snapchat a couple months ago and it literally felt like a massive burden was lifted from my shoulders because I never felt good using it and eventually saw no point in continuing to. My Instagram in increasingly becoming catered to my own interests, instead of posting what I think others want to see from me and picking on the nitty gritty of what ~looks~ good. Among other things, though, I can't deny that the notification bubbles on Instagram (any other application for that matter—even LinkedIn) still have the ability to boost my ego. Ultimately, I think these apps have their upsides, but as with anything that holds such powerful capabilities, it's up to the users to moderate their use.