The Psychology of Social Media: Or “Why Twitter is so darn addictive”

When people talk about social media, you often hear it described as addictive. “I’m addicted to Twitter/Facebook/StumbleUpon.” One reason people lose track of time when posting on various social media sites, such as blogs, forums, news engines, and social networks, is because such participation actually is highly addictive.

I’m not being metaphorical here. I really do believe that addiction theory applies quite well to social media.

To get into greater depth, we have to look at the work of Eric Berne, 20th century psychologist and father of the branch of psychology known as Transactional Analysis. While Berne’s work was controversial at the time, and has been oversimplified ad infinitum in pop psychology books like I’m OK, You’re OK, the foundational principles behind transactional analysis are generally recognized to be a decent working model of how people relate to one another, and many practicing therapists implement transactional analysis principles in their work.

There’s an excellent online tutorial in the basics of Transactional Analysis here, but the quick and dirty version is that human behavior resembles an economic structure. The basic currency of exchange in this “relationship economy” is called a “stroke.” A stroke is any human interaction. Strokes range in value based on intensity. The greeting you exchange with the barista at Starbucks is a relatively low-value Ritual. Rituals are repetitive, predictable exchanges of low intensity strokes. Up at the higher end of the stroke economy, you have Intimacy (which we’re not touching with a ten foot pole for the purposes of this post) and Games, which are closely associated with the idea of Drama.

Anyone who participates in the blogosphere or other social media should immediately get a mental radar ping from that word, because we all know what Drama means in that sense, and that there’s an abundance of it in social media. (more…)