What concerns Jazayeri most, from a psychologist’s perspective, is the danger of slipping too far into a virtual world and losing a sense of real life, real self, and real priorities.Ī 2011 clinical report on “The Impact of Social Media on Children, Adolescents and Families,” published in Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, was one of the first to raise the issue of “Facebook depression” among young people worried that they weren’t accumulating enough “friends” or “likes” to their status updates.Īround the same time, Dr. While each social media site has its own personality and purpose, the wildly popular Facebook and its estimated one billion active monthly users has gained the most attention from psychologists for the potential to distort an individual’s sense of self and sense of other people. As a result, I create a world that is not a true world because I imagine that everybody is happy in that world, except me.” But when I’m not happy I will consciously, or unconsciously, compare myself to others. People, when they are happy, post a lot of happy things. “Among other dangers that Facebook might possibly pose in our lives, such as lack of privacy, is this habit of always comparing ourselves to others. It’s a creation of people,” Jazayeri explains. The world that we see on Facebook and other social media sites is not a true and real world. “I definitely think that social media has had a very deep impact on our lives. Campus, thinks there are clear and present dangers that can’t be ignored.
#Warped reality fantasy professional#
Ali Jazayeri, associate professor of clinical psychology at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology’s L.A. But is it real? More importantly, is it healthy? Request info The Unreal Worldĭr. “In games where we expect to play an avatar, we end up being ourselves in the most revealing ways on social networking sites such as Facebook, we think we will be presenting ourselves, but our profile ends up as somebody else-often the fantasy of who we want to be,” Turkle writes. It’s where you post your prettiest pictures and tell all your best news. And while social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are powerful tools that have the potential to build communities, connect relatives in far-flung places, leverage careers, and even elect presidents of the United States, they are also unleashing a myriad of complex psychological issues that have altered our collective sense of reality.Ī virtual life is shiny and bright. Our real selves have split into online avatars and profile pictures and status updates. Our daily lives have been digitized, tracked, and tied up in metrics. The long-term psychological impact of social media on individuals and their individual sense of “self” remains to be seen.
#Warped reality fantasy series#
Founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, the book is the third in a series on the effects of technology on society and culminates 15 years of research on the digital terrain. Yet, suddenly, in the half-light of virtual community, we may feel utterly alone,” writes licensed clinical psychologist and MIT professor Sherry Turkle in her best-selling tome, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other. We re-create ourselves as online personae and give ourselves new bodies, homes, jobs, and romances.Ī virtual life is shiny and bright. We build a following on Facebook or MySpace and wonder to what degree our followers are friends. “Tethered to technology, we are shaken when that world ‘unplugged’ does not signify, does not satisfy. “I am linked, therefore I am,” he famously said, playing on Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am.” Little did Gergen know how dead-on his prediction would be.īecause as our society sits here more than 20 years later with our tablets and cell phones and electronic gadgets-seduced by the lure of the blue light glow-we have never been more linked, more connected, and more bound to a virtual reality that many of us can no longer live without. In social psychologist Kenneth Gergen’s 1991 book, The Saturated Self, he warned of an Orwellian world where technology might saturate human beings to the point of “multiphrenia,” a fragmented version of the self that is pulled in so many directions the individual would be lost.
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