Dr Fawad Kaiser
The extraordinary popularity of interpersonal media, such as social network sites (SNSs), raises set of questions, in reference to the terrorist threats. The decision to suspend instant messaging and voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) applications such as Skype, Whatsapp, Tango and Viber in Moharram adds to the overall impact of the threat. Unlike mass media content, SNS content is both produced by the media users and also features them as protagonists. I do not intend to write about the threat incumbent from the terrorists by their use of SNS. There are people who are doing a much better job at that. What we have to do is to analyze how exposure to social media content that centres around the users themselves and their identity, interests, and social connectivity affect subsequent perceptions and behaviors? 
Facebook, Viber, Tango and Whatsapp sites center on the profile, which for users is ‘a representation of their selves to others. It is made with the intention of contacting or being contacted by others. Warnings about monitoring the time spent on services like Facebook are oft given due to the steady increase in what some psychologists are calling Facebook Addiction Disorder. It is when people are afraid to disconnect from social network sites because they think they are going to miss something important. The disorder, which is not a clinical diagnosis yet and is not yet recognized by the broader medical community, is attracting widespread attention.
Different generations use social media in different ways. While older groups may be using it to see and share pictures of family members or brag about their latest accomplishments, younger generations are oft blamed to use it to gossip around. Gossip, people-curiosity and small talk, all of which are seemingly non-functional and are often popularly understood as mere distraction or deviation, are in essence the human version of social grooming in primates. It is an activity that is essential to forging bonds, affirming relationships, displaying bonds, and asserting and learning about hierarchies and alliances. 
Dunbar suggests that our seemingly insatiable appetite for gossip is neither a random, irrelevant fact, nor simply a construction of a singular culture. While the particular forms of gossip are entangled in culturally shaped constructions. It ranges from celebrity gossip in our mediated mass culture to daily chatting around the village well in a peasant society. Gossip in general can be seen as a corollary of our disposition towards sociality, which integrally involves figuring out where we and all others stand in relation to each other.
Social networking sites [SNS] replicate many of the functions of gossip or social grooming: users display their own bonds and observe those of others through profile ‘friends’, leave semi-public messages for each other (which serve mainly as acknowledgement), present a public self for their community, and watch and participate as others engage in these activities in an interlocked dance of community formation. At their core, these sites are about mutual acknowledgement, status verification and relationship confirmation. Much of the activity on an SNS can also be conceptualized as a form of presentation of the self, in the sense of Goffman “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.”Dunbar’s notion of social grooming and Goffman’s concepts of the presentation of the self and impression management are complementary aspects of the construction of the social self. It is through social interaction and socially embedded public or semi-public action that we affirm our relations, construct our status and ultimately produce the social ‘me’ in the sense proposed by Mead.
Interestingly, non-users confessed to disinterest in and bafflement by social networking activities. The same was demonstrated in the quantitative analysis. Non-users might understand why one might sit in a sidewalk café with a friend and chat, but not comprehend why one would spend hours there simply to watch people go by and observe how others interact among themselves. It was as if the non-users were people without a sense of smell, wondering why others buy expensive water with which to squirt themselves. Why waste so much money? People must like the shape of the bottle, they might imagine.
Students tend to use their real names and engage in high levels of self-disclosure, especially on Facebook. Facebook allows users to ‘tag’ individuals on photographs uploaded to the site, which means identifying the person in the photograph and thereby linking the picture to that person’s profile. It thus creates a searchable digital trail of a person’s social activities. All of this activity is framed by semi-public comments people leave on each other’s profiles – short salutations, humorous repartee and more. A profile on an SNS is not a static entity; rather, it is a locus of social interaction that evolves and changes to reflect various dynamics within social networks and communities.
Facebook profiles typically contain a mixture of self-generated content and other-generated information posted by friends. In traditional face-to-face settings, self-presentation has been generally operationalized as self-generated information. However, in the Facebook profile context, it can be argued that both self- and other-generated content posted on the profile constitute self-presentation. Profile owners, in fact, exercise a substantial amount of control over information contributed by friends, by monitoring and deleting it if they view it as undesirable and allowing only a select group of people to post on their profiles, typically those who have been invited to be Facebook “friends.”
The highly controllable online self-presentation has been dubbed selective self-presentation, because it can be more aligned with self-presentational goals than its face-to-face counterpart. Self-presentation in computer-mediated communication is selective and Facebook users’ motivation to craft self-presentations may be honest but is desirable in order to impress the audience. This is consistent with the claims that Facebook profiles are self-enhancing in the sense that they portray the self positively but leaves them vulnerable in other aspects.
Self –affirmation theory is predicated on the premise that people have a fundamental need for self-worth and self-integrity. They have the need for seeing themselves as good, appropriate, worthy, and valuable. This need is satisfied by pursuing activities that boost and protect the self. One such activity is self-affirmation, or unconsciously attending to information in the environment that captures essential aspects of the self-concept (i.e., social roles, meaningful personal relationships, values). Self-affirmation satisfies the fundamental need for self-worth because it reminds people of who they are, what is important to them, and what makes them valuable. A notable side effect of self-affirmation is that it switches off other self-protective strategies (e.g., defence mechanisms); because self-affirmed individuals already feel secure in their self-worth and no longer need to boost it in other ways. 
As the above analysis shows, Facebook profiles are self-affirming because they represent a flattering yet honest version of self. An added consideration is that Facebook profiles, by design, capture and visibly display social connectivity with friends and family. These personal relationships have been shown to be the most potent source of self-affirmation. Following exposure to this carefully crafted, optimized version of self, Facebook users should experience a boost in state self-esteem.
As Internet access has become global, earlier concerns regarding a digital divide have mostly faded out. Yet looking at Internet use in a fine-grained manner, disaggregating specific modalities of practice, does reveal persistent divisions and differences. The specific character of Internet use by the terrorists can still influence violent outcomes, even after suspending a ban on social networking sites use. What is important and would be helpful when announcing social networking sites bans is to remember that it is not just the Internet but what you do with it –as well as who and what kind of person you are.
The writer can be reached at fawad_shifa@yahoo.com
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