Facebook as self-validation

Today in class, two questions were posed: Who does Facebook encourage us to be? What role does Facebook play in shaping our lives? Especially with the addition of the Timeline layout in recent years, Facebook has encouraged us to become a society that documents even the most banal events of our life, and to seek validation through these events. Facebook encourages us to write our own autobiographies, asking us about every aspect of our lives. Some people have wholeheartedly embraced this aspect of the social media site, documenting not only their weddings and the births of their children but also what movie they’re watching or what they had for lunch. 

Essentially, Facebook has encouraged us to be a society that relies on validation. From photos of your wedding to photos of your lunch, you feel validated by the number of “likes” and the number of comments these posts generate. The action of “liking” or commenting on a post signals to you that what you did was important. Within the past few years, Facebook has added a feature called Year in Review that highlights the “biggest moments” of your year on Facebook. When I looked at this feature on my timeline from last year, what I noticed was that the events Facebook had selected for me was not based on the significance of the event, but by how many “likes” each post had generated. In fact, the majority of “big moments” in my Year in review were merely articles I had found interesting and had shared, or photos I had shared from my connecting Instagram account. I would not have selected any of these events as being the most important events of my past year, but Facebook took the liberty of doing this for me based on others’ validation of my activities. 

Often people feel as though things aren’t really real until posted on Facebook and have garnered the expected validation through “likes.” A classic example of this is in romantic relationships. How many times have you heard the phrase “Facebook official”? People feel that unless their status, whether it be romantic or otherwise, is broadcasted on social media, it doesn’t exist because others don’t know about it. People need validation through others. Even the act of having a Facebook account is validating — not having Facebook is almost taboo in this day in age. How are others supposed to know you exist? How are they supposed to know about your life? Having recently deactivated my own Facebook account, I noticed the social networking site’s attempt to get me to stay. It reminded me of the people who will “miss me” without an account. As mentioned in class, it encourages a sense of anxiety that others will be unaware of your life via social media. A fellow blogger on facebookdetox.com asks, “Have you left [Facebook], later to find out that your life has progressed since leaving [it] behind?”  One will find that even though the validation that Facebook provides is no longer present after deleting Facebook, life does progress as normal. 

We need to be aware of this consuming need for self-validation that Facebook creates. The driving factor in anyone’s life should not be how many “likes” or comments something is going to generate on a social media site. We need to become more ware of our intentions for doing things, and start to move back to doing things because we want to do them, not with the intention for social media self-validation.