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How Social Networking Shapes Relationships, Mental Health, and Personal Identity
Ethics in Technology · Chapter 3: When Technology Invades Personal Life: Privacy, Economics, and Online Commerce RisksSection 3.5 · lesson 12 of 11616 min · free with a free account
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In this lesson
Judge the activity, the person, and the evidence—not just hours online.
- Explain comparison and fear of missing out
- Distinguish association, effect size, and causation
- Assess identity and parasocial relationships
- Compare displacement with supportive connection
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Chapter 3
Social Networking, Relationships, and Identity
Social networking can shape comparison, attention, identity, and relationships in different ways for different people. That makes a single claim about all use an unreliable guide to the subject. We begin with social comparison, and why edited feeds change the available comparison pool. Fear of missing out adds a recurring desire to check what others are doing. Then we examine study designs, effect sizes, and the difference between association and causation. A small average association does not describe every person's experience. Serious harms can concentrate among particular people or activities, despite a small average. Online presentation can support identity exploration, while creating pressure to maintain a polished public self. Parasocial bonds can offer enjoyment and belonging, without becoming reciprocal friendships with a creator. Digital contact can sustain distant relationships, and can also interrupt nearby people or displace sleep. We will keep these possibilities together, rather than assuming one total of hours explains everything. The central judgment concerns what the activity does, and what the evidence can actually establish.
Social Comparison
The Same Comparison Can Produce Different Feelings
Leon Festinger described social comparison in nineteen fifty-four, long before contemporary social platforms existed. People compare themselves with others, especially when no clear objective standard answers how they are doing. Upward comparison means considering someone judged to be doing better, in the relevant part of life. If that person feels distant, the comparison can produce envy, discouragement, or lowered self-esteem. If their achievement feels reachable, it can instead provide inspiration and motivation. Downward comparison means considering someone judged to be doing worse, which can provide temporary relief. It can also create anxiety, if their difficulty looks like a situation you might experience. Platforms change the volume and selection of comparisons available to a viewer. They supply carefully chosen highlights, rather than each person's complete experience. Your own difficulties remain fully visible to you, while theirs may be missing from the feed. The comparison is consequently uneven, even when each individual post is sincere and reasonable. Its effect depends partly on interpretation, rather than every upward or downward comparison producing identical feelings.
Comparison Loop
Checking Can Keep the Feeling Alive
People often post their best moments, rather than every ordinary or difficult part of a day. Each choice can be reasonable, while the combined feed creates a distorted comparison pool. Feeling behind may prompt someone to contribute more highlights, continuing the same loop for other viewers. The distortion can therefore arise through aggregation, without any participant deliberately deceiving the audience. Ordinary disappointment concerns a particular missed event, such as an occasion you could not attend. Fear of missing out adds apprehension about rewarding experiences elsewhere, and a desire to remain connected. Its familiar abbreviation is FOMO, and its recurring nature matters more than a single disappointment. A feed always contains another experience, that the viewer did not share. Checking to relieve that feeling can supply more examples of missed experiences. Those examples can maintain the concern, rather than resolve it. The source links this pattern with reduced well-being, rather than treating duration as the whole explanation. Notice what prompts the session, and whether checking actually resolves the feeling it was meant to relieve.
Research Design
Different Studies Answer Different Questions
A cross-sectional survey measures use and well-being together, at one point in time. It can identify an association, without determining which condition influenced the other. A longitudinal study follows people, asking whether earlier use predicts later outcomes. Timing becomes clearer, without proving the relationship is causal. Sleep, family circumstances, or prior distress may influence both use and later outcomes. An experiment assigns a change in use, allowing a stronger comparison of outcomes under that intervention. Short duration, small samples, and awareness of the study can limit its wider interpretation. A natural experiment compares groups affected differently, by an external change such as a platform's arrival. Other changes and differences between groups can still make causal interpretation difficult. These limitations help explain why serious researchers can disagree, without any side simply ignoring all evidence. Distress may change platform use, and platform experiences may change distress, within a complicated relationship. Ask how the study was designed, before deciding whether its result supports a claim about causation.
Effect Size
A Significant Association Can Still Be Small
Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski published a widely cited analysis, in two thousand nineteen. It examined three large datasets, covering more than three hundred thousand adolescents in the United States and Britain. Their specification curve approach compared results, across many defensible ways of analyzing the same data. The reported technology association was negative but small, across these measures. It explained at most about zero point four percent of variation. That percentage describes variation in the studied well-being measures, rather than a percentage of people harmed. The lesson's figure uses screen use as a baseline, when comparing negative associations in the analysis. Cannabis use is shown at two point seven times, and bullying at four point three times that baseline. The source also notes roughly comparable associations for potatoes or corrective lenses, illustrating the need for perspective. Sleep and regular meals showed stronger positive associations, while analytic choices could change the apparent result. Statistical significance does not establish a large effect, or turn an association into a causal conclusion. Read the effect size and the method together, rather than treating a significant headline as sufficient evidence.
Evidence in Balance
Small Averages Do Not Dismiss Individual Harm
Small averages can conceal substantial harm to a subgroup, alongside mild benefit for other participants. The source identifies stronger negative associations in some adolescent girls, and young people already experiencing distress. Self-reported hours are also crude measures, combining supportive conversation with passive viewing of strangers. Rising population trends in distress coincide with several changes, so timing alone does not establish causation. Specific concerns include harassment, harmful content, unwanted adult contact, and the displacement of sleep. The pathway table separates comparison, displacement, feedback seeking, harassment, and exposure to harmful material. Public response counts can make self-worth contingent, while recommendations can intensify problematic content exposure. The National Academies reviewed this evidence, in two thousand twenty-four. Its account recognized potential benefits and harms, considering both sides together. It found insufficient evidence to establish that social media caused adolescent health changes, at population level. That conclusion does not deny individual harm, or require treating every platform design as harmless. Hold the general uncertainty and the specific risks together, when evaluating the evidence.
Precautionary Policy
Governments Can Act While Research Remains Unsettled
Australia's two thousand twenty-four minimum-age amendment illustrates a government acting before the scientific debate was settled. Its platform obligations took effect on December tenth, two thousand twenty-five. Age-restricted platforms must take reasonable steps, to prevent Australians under sixteen from creating or keeping accounts. The measure places responsibility on platforms, without penalties for the children or their parents. Early evaluation found reduced account ownership, after implementation. Many children retained accounts, so the restriction did not prevent all access. That means the existence of a restriction, does not establish complete prevention or its final effectiveness. The ethical argument concerns precaution, where potential harm is serious and younger users have limited protection. It also concerns proportionality, enforcement, and possible effects beyond the intended benefit. Restrictions can exclude supportive communities, or shift some activity toward less supervised alternatives. Those possibilities require evaluation, rather than assuming either success or failure from the policy's existence alone. Acting on a specific risk does not settle the separate question, of population-level causal effects.
Performed Self
Online Presentation Intensifies Ordinary Impression Management
Erving Goffman described everyday social life as performance, with people managing the impression they present. An observed front region differs from a less visible back region, where preparation or private activity occurs. This is ordinary impression management, rather than evidence that everyone is being dishonest. Online presentation intensifies impression management, through four features of the medium. The first is time to compose, rather than react immediately. Asynchronous communication allows reflection, instead of requiring an immediate reaction in the moment. Editability allows selection of the best attempt, while discarded versions remain unseen. Quantification makes audience reaction visible, through likes, comments, or other measurable responses. Persistence lets that selected presentation remain available, long after the original event. Together, these features make the performed self more controllable, while giving audience judgment a lasting form. Other people still see what was chosen, whereas you know your own full lived experience. Recognizing that asymmetry can change how you interpret, the polished accounts supplied by a feed.
Identity Development
Exploration Offers Support and Creates New Pressures
Adolescence often involves trying possible identities, making both the benefits and pressures of online presentation significant. Online spaces can support exploration, that would feel risky or isolating in a local setting. They can connect people with shared interests, conditions, backgrounds, or minority experiences across distance. Sharing creative work can provide encouraging feedback, from people who understand the activity. The same audience can make experimentation public, persistent, and harder to revise later. Communities may also reinforce harmful practices, rather than provide useful support or perspective. Visible response counts can turn a poorly received post, into a felt judgment of personal worth. A polished persona can become distant from the lived self, requiring continuing effort to maintain. The source calls that distance an authenticity gap, and reports associations between closer presentation and better well-being. That does not prove a universal cure, or mean every edited presentation is harmful. Consider whether the presentation supports exploration and connection, or creates exhausting pressure to maintain a distant version.
Parasocial Ties
Felt Closeness Does Not Establish Mutual Friendship
Donald Horton and Richard Wohl introduced the term parasocial, in nineteen fifty-six while studying broadcasting. It describes a one-sided bond, with someone unaware of the individual viewer's existence. The feeling of closeness can be real, without the other person sharing knowledge or personal obligations. Direct address, frequent updates, domestic settings, and personal disclosures can intensify that feeling online. Comments or live chats can suggest interaction, even when an individual message receives no personal response. Enjoying a creator's work can be healthy, alongside a clear understanding of the relationship. The concern grows when imagined mutual friendship replaces reciprocal ties, or becomes a source of personal grievance. Time and spending also matter, especially when they displace obligations or exceed what the viewer can afford. Disappointment when content stops need not be alarming, but extreme grief or hostility deserves attention. Creators can earn income legitimately, while carrying responsibility for how commercially valuable intimacy is encouraged. Keep the bond's actual nature visible, rather than assuming every warm presentation establishes a personal friendship.
Friendships and Family
Digital Contact Can Replace or Sustain Connection
The displacement account suggests digital activity replaces sleep, in-person contact, or time spent together. The stimulation account suggests useful communication adds contact, keeping existing relationships active between meetings. Evidence can support qualified versions of both, because messaging a friend differs from passive solitary scrolling. Online contact can sustain a distant friendship, family connection, or community around a rare condition. It may be less suited to ordinary shared presence, where closeness develops without a planned exchange. Phubbing describes attending to a phone, while another person is physically present. Technoference describes devices interrupting couple or family interaction, associated with relationship difficulties in some studies. The source also reports experiments linking a visible phone, with lower perceived closeness even without active use. Those findings need cautious interpretation, because effects, replication, and causal direction are not uniform. Active and passive use are useful distinctions, without being absolute rules about every person's outcome. Assess whether a particular activity sustains connection, displaces it, or repeatedly interrupts attention to someone nearby.
Practical and Ethical Judgment
Look at What the Use Does
A useful personal assessment examines the activity, feelings, content, contacts, and effects on sleep or relationships. Two people can spend the same duration online, while experiencing very different benefits and costs. Conversation with known people can support connection, while repeated comparison may leave someone feeling worse. Notice when checking is driven by anxiety, rather than an activity that actually meets a need. Keep distress and harassment reportable, instead of making disclosure itself lead automatically to punishment or exclusion. Duration can be part of a discussion, without replacing attention to the mechanisms actually causing concern. Creators should be honest about commercial relationships, and avoid converting imagined friendship into pressure to spend. Platforms also choose response counts, recommendation systems, notifications, and payment features that shape behavior. Those design choices create responsibilities, even while broad questions about population-level causation remain unsettled. The evidence supports real benefits, serious harms for some, and caution about sweeping claims for everyone. Carry that combined judgment forward, whenever a new technology arrives with dramatic claims about its effects.
About Ethics in Technology at UPI Study
Ethics in Technology (Computer Science 195) is a self-paced online course of 116 video lessons in 15 chapters, from cybersecurity basics, privacy and surveillance to big data, hacking, malware, network defense, intellectual property, cybercrime, encryption, emerging technology and digital citizenship. It carries a NCCRS credit recommendation for 3 semester credits.
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