01.02 People Go Online for Social Reasons - Page 4

It was once said, "We read to know that we’re not alone." I believe that this is the primary social motivation that draws people online. We want to know that we’re not alone. Before the Internet, an individual was but an indistinguishable drop in the sea of humanity. It was rare that a sole individual would ever be noticed, let alone have a voice that could be heard across the continents. What’s more, social mores have caused many people to feel socially stifled. Most people have had very few opportunities to express their most real and uninhibited thoughts, perspectives, and feelings within their existing social network because of fear of misunderstanding or outright rejection. Because of the Internet, this is not the case today.

01.02.01 We go online to fulfill the social desire to find people, places, and things with which we can identify.

The reason is that we as people have a strong internal need to reinforce our sense of self. We feel drawn to things that we can identify with because it makes us feel like we’re okay and that somehow we fit into the bigger picture. In their book The Media Equation, Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass state:

"People like to interact with personalities that resemble their own. In psychology, this is known as the ‘law of similarity-attraction.’ Despite the folk wisdom that opposites attract, there is strong empirical support for attraction based on similarity."

In his book A Cognitive Psychology of Mass Communication, Richard Harris sheds further light:

"The emotional involvement that we have [interacting with media] depends in part on how much we identify with the character (i.e., mentally compare ourselves to and imagine ourselves to be the lead character). It is easier to identify with characters with whom we have more in common.

"When we have the ability to understand and feel what another feels, we experience empathy. Empathy may be seen as emotional identification, and it is a very important factor in the enjoyment of media."

The desire we have to identify with others has intellectual, ideological, and emotional dimensions.

01.02.02 We seek intellectual identification in a quest to answer these questions: "Is there anyone out there who thinks the way I do? Am I intellectually alone?"

The intellect has to do with our rational mind, our self-directed thinking. This is the part of our mind that seeks to define reality. It wants to know what the facts are by reasoning with the evidence. Part of how we develop our intellect is by absorbing the ideas of others and by reflecting upon and restructuring what we understand those ideas to be. By doing this we channel the original thinking of others through our own experiential filters and reformulate our perception of their thoughts into our own knowledge structures. This process happens throughout our lives as we observe our parents, our friends, our teachers, and even the media.

Our exposure to the input of others is what stimulates our thinking the most. Until the Internet came along, however, we were very restricted in terms of the times, places, and ways that we were able to expose ourselves to the thinking of people outside our everyday circles. Even though books and other printed literature have always been available to us in modern times, discovering material that has deep personal significance was often a lengthy and frustrating process. Most of us often didn’t have a clue as to what material to look for in pursuit of expanding our intellectual identity or where to look for it, if in fact we had an inkling as to what our undiscovered interests were. In many instances, our success with finding these influences has been the result of chance. Consequently, society has by and large taken the role of choosing when and how our intellectual frameworks were to be cultivated by default:

• We went to school at a certain time and learned what the school board decided we should learn.
• We watched the programming on TV that the networks decided we should watch and when they decided we should watch it.
• We learned the values that our parents wanted us to believe.

Although we chose some of our own friends and would sometimes have "deep" conversations, those discussions were limited to the combined knowledge of people who were from similar circles and who had similar experiences. This is not the case today.

The Web has given people the opportunity to dig deep into their thoughts and interests at any time, any place, and in an almost limitless fashion–and this within the safe confines of anonymity, which the Web affords them. Even a very young person–and this most certainly can be a danger–can take the initiative to learn about advanced topics in a self-directed and self-paced manner. Those people who learn to take advantage of these unlimited opportunities gain exposure to some of the greatest thinking on any subject.

01.02.03 We seek ideological identification in a quest to answer these questions: "Is there anyone out there who believes the way I do? Am I ideologically alone?"

Our ideology is our response to what we reason the world to be. The intellect tells us what the world is and what its challenges are. Our ideology directs us in our interpretation of life’s facts, and it tells us how to respond to them. Our ideas, doctrines, and beliefs are all manifestations of our ideology.

One of the things that I often find most interesting when I read the writing of other people is how far apart some of them are on important issues. These disparities represent the ideological differences between these individuals. Interestingly, when we want to develop or reinforce our own ideologies, it’s often more beneficial to interact with those of differing ideologies than it is to interact with those of similar ideologies. The reason is that interacting with people who disagree with us is more likely to sharpen our thinking than interacting with people who agree with us. Although we take solace and draw encouragement from those who live in our own camp, we gain our strength and intellectual agility by going head to head with our opponents. As Nietzsche said–"What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger!"

Newsgroups, chats, message boards, and special interest online resources have offered many new avenues for people seeking to develop and/or reinforce their ideologies. If it weren’t for issues-forums related to politics, religions, and other professional and social issues, the Internet would probably never have gotten off the ground in the first place, let alone entered into the mainstream.

01.02.04 We seek emotional identification in a quest to answer these questions: "Is there anyone out there who feels the way I do? Am I emotionally alone?"

Emotion is our spontaneous, involuntary combination of physiological and cognitive responses that are automatically activated when we’re confronted with a stimulus. When we’re seeking to emotionally identify with others, what we’re seeking is the people "out there" who are similarly affected by what they think about or believe in.

When Princess Diana died on August 31, 1997, thousands of people flocked online to chat about and deal with their emotions related to her death. Many people had developed a parasocial relationship with her and felt as if they had lost a member of their own family. The Web provided an outlet for emotions that, at least in non-Western European cultures, would not have been fully received or understood.

The Internet offered an alternative way for people to seek out others with whom they could emotionally identify and with whom they could go through the grieving process in ways that circumvented the disinterested social mores of non-Western European cultures. In this sense, the Internet was offering a social outlet and a release that otherwise would not have been possible for these individuals. A Web enterprise that succeeds in helping its patrons relate to itself and to each other on an emotional level in this way goes a long way toward winning their loyalty.

01.02.05 We seek social interaction and acceptance in a quest to answer this question: "How will the world embrace my intellectual, ideological, and emotional uniqueness?"

We all seek acceptance. Acceptance occurs as a result of being embraced by those with whom we identify. People don’t generally care if someone outside their group doesn’t care for them, but if the people inside their group don’t care for them, this becomes a really big problem. This is further complicated by a dynamic known as group-think.

Group-think is the process by which a group of people come to a common equilibrium that tends to represent a moderate overall averaging of opinions among its members. The problem is that the outliers of the group–those who don’t fit within the norm–can often feel unable to express their true feelings for fear of social rejection and isolation. Not surprisingly, we all have a sense of being on the outside of the norm in some area of our lives. These are the areas that we are most likely to repress our feelings in. The need to release these feelings is something that applies to everybody.

One of the motivations that people have in going online is to find opportunities where they can identify with others while at the same time maintain their own sense of identity. Specifically, because of the inherent anonymity of the Internet, people are willing to take more risks in terms of expressing their true inner feelings within the membership of an online community. The cost of social faux pas seems low enough to the average person that they’re willing to accept social failure more often than in "real life." What’s often gained in the online community is a sense of social interaction and acceptance that’s unmatched in unmediated social equivalents.

01.01 People Go Online to Consume - Page 3
Train of Thoughts - Designing the Effective Web Experience
01.03 People Go Online for Emotional Reasons - Page 5