Me my selfie and I | Dr Linda Papadpoulos | TEDxWhitehallWomen

you hi there well I've been a practicing psychologist for many years now but I've been noticing this trend recently when people come in to see me and speak about their problems not just sitting down and talking the way they used to increasingly they're bringing in their mobile phones and talking about their online identities so they'll show me a Facebook post or their show me a Twitter argument if they're having a relationship issue they might bring in an email and and try and analyze this or the meanings behind the language used or the amount of X's used to sign off with emojis I've been looking at a lot of smiley faces and trying to analyze those come to the conclusion that basically you can say anything you want online as long as you put a smiley face all seems to be forgiving but there is this really kind of shift in the way that we see ourselves and I think it's because we're always aware of how visible we are online so we're kind of standing outside ourselves and relating to ourselves in the third person so I do a lot of work with body image disorders and whereas before and you know the conversations are very much about being a certain size or a certain way now people are bringing in their Instagram posting saying look hashtag bikini bridge hashtag box Gap hashtag thigh gap these are literally terms describing things like either the hollowness between legs or the way that bikinis sit on your hips and they don't actually sit on your stomach so all of a sudden the opinions of others matter now they've always mattered of course but now what's different now we have access to those opinions in a way like we've never had before and this got me thinking that's therefore the way that we see ourselves online the way that we create our identities online affect the way that we see ourselves offline as well now identity is this really interesting thing from a psychological perspective it's actually core to our sense of emotional well-being when we have a strong sense of who we are we take more risks who come out of our comfort zone we stand up from what we believe in it gives us a sense of entitlement over who we are but it also gives us a sense of affiliation and that's the interesting thing because identities at the same time the thing that makes us unique and the things that binds us together with others and the interesting thing is is that for identity to really work it needs to be recognized and confirmed by those around us the issue is these days those around us aren't just people that know us there's this wider social circle online that are able to feed back to us without have any knowledge of who we are now in terms of how we construct identity and its basis form we look at who we are and then we look to the world around us we look to our parents and our communities we look to celebrities we look to structures like race and religion and their norms and we devise who we want to be and once we've done that we hold it up for people to see and up until now who are we holding up these identities to two people that knew us to our friends to our families to our communities and they kind of acted like mirrors right so they'd reflect back on us inkay I see who you are because I know who you are and I see what you're trying to construct him and this is what I'm reflecting back to you so it resulting the kind of affirmation of identity now our social worlds have expanded dramatically someone doesn't need to know you to feed back to you on what they think of your identity some of those needs have ever met you come in contact with you now because of the online world it's like having a global focus group commenting on every step you make every move every decision and as a consequence this sense of self-awareness is very evident and I did some work a few years ago for the Home Office on the sexual ization of young people I spoke to some brilliant researchers that were looking at the webpages of young people and they were saying to me do you know what Linda it's so strange because all the girls pages look almost identical and all the boys do it's as if they have these scripts of how they should act so the boys pages they were very kind of hyper-masculine very kind of emotionally distant for girls extremely hyper sexualized all about the need to look a certain way it's like these kids weren't saying this is me it's like they were trying the aunt to answer the question who do I need to be to be liked by you so identity seems to be moving from something that's internally driven this is me this is who I am this is what matters to me to something externally driven this is what I think I ought to be this is what I think matters to you and as a consequence whereas it was something that people went through during their teens and early twenties I'm now seeing these issues with identity construction affecting people in their 20s and 30s and beyond now because so much of identity is cultivated online the feedback that we get online it's actually extremely powerful and I'll give you an example I'm actually the press this week a few months ago if you'll remember three young girls left London to join Isis now I'm sure the decisions were very complex but I think the concept of identity is very relevant here they went from establishing an identity that was based on family cohesion on academic achievement they were often described as to grade a student's uh career aspirations to seemingly this complete shift where they shunned all that and all of a sudden they didn't want to be close to family they didn't want to be anywhere near the same country they didn't want to perhaps validate and gain value through education they wanted to be jihadi brides they wanted to align themselves with this political cause now this is something we've seen with kind of neo-nazi groups for years and I understand the appeal I think for young people these sort of off-the-shelf identities that come with this warped sense of political conviction or or or moral justification they're sexy they're even sanctioned by God but what's different now now not only are they taking them off the shelf from the online world but there's a whole group of people to say you are making the right choice and if we accept that a lot of identity is about satisfying other people making sure that we're valued and validated then then that's a recipe for disaster because these identities are getting derived and validated from the same place young malleable minds look for identities to try on look for causes to relate to and then given how their identities and their beliefs are valued or validated or not it the either take root or they're disregarded and given the fact that so much of this happens online we're seeing not cultivation a grooming of identity and sadly grade A students aren't exempt now you can't really talk identity in this world without talking body image it's an area that I've worked in for a long time and body image has always been very much about me seeing myself in the third person but I think now because of the proliferation of how many times we see ourselves we are producing more pictures of ourselves than any other time in modern history furthermore we're editing those pictures more than we ever would have in the past so we're constantly feel like we have to self-promote and if posting those pictures on facebook or on instagram is like self-promotion and what do we do to do next we need to do market research right we need to see how are being perceived at any one time I was just on YouTube there are in the region of 23,000 videos asking am i pretty in Google the search terms am I pretty or similar am i ugly am i fat getting the region of 20,000 hits a month so in effect we have a generation of people asking for permission to accept themselves there they're establishing an identity while running a separate campaign to feel accepted the wonder the self and the self you're becoming so confused and of course there's a big worry that we're never going to feel like we can live up to ourselves it selves that we're creating I think one of the the other interesting things about how we sort of perceive ourselves now is we're so aware of the other of a I'm a I'm a Greek so I grew up with my mom saying things a lot like what will they say if you wear that what are they gonna say if you do your hair like that and the thing that I think protected both me and my mom is that they couldn't tell us they couldn't really they was just sort of a morphus blob out there so they didn't really have the ability to tell me or my mom what they thought of me now they exist now they follow us on Twitter and they friend us on Facebook and they heard our pictures Instagram they are no longer the same orifice mass they have a voice and they comment and they describe what they think of you we have zero control of what people say to us but because they not what they're saying is visible it affects how we see ourselves in fact it's even more complicated than that because now they are commercial groups there's some really complex algorithms designed by some really clever people that understand human behavior granted many of them psychologists that that actually look at how you surf online look at how you know what you're buying what you're watching and then they come back and they say oh hi Mary well this is what you're doing them this is what you need to be you watch one movie about dogs you need to watch lots of movies about dogs you buy this kind of book you need to always buy this kind of book there's a sense that it's no longer people that know us that are reflecting back to us what we are you know who we are it's people who have a vested interest in us becoming consumers and in managing those decisions that we make and and the kind of information that they give us I think this is interesting too you know we are deconstructing ourselves online like I was saying these kind of a little bits and pieces of ourselves and putting them up but the feedback that we get is pretty binary right it's very thumbs up thumbs down like retweet no wonder emojis are so important I had a patient a brilliant young woman a few months ago she's a writer and she said to me Linda do you know what I'm much more likely to get a like on Facebook if I put up a picture of a cute puppy then if I write something deeper about what I'm feeling she said you learn very quickly online who you need to be if people are going to like you I think that's the thing if my visibility is something that I can't control and if what other people think about me matters so much then maybe there will never come a place where I can firmly say this is Who I am if I'm so aware of what other people's opinions are if there's always another another like another follow another retweet to chase maybe I get to the point where I don't have the to say this is who I am and I get stuck thinking about this ad infinitum you know this is something I used to see with my clients that were in the public eye my celebrity clients if they'd feel this constant sense of self-awareness now I'm seeing it across the board it's like we're all these mini celebrities just without the great wardrobes and the limos so all of a sudden were very self-aware and we begin to compare now comparisons are interesting whatever side of the social networking argument you fall on whether you think it's good for you or not you'll probably find several studies to bolster your argument but if you look at those studies that say social networking doesn't make you feel great they all point to comparing now psychologists have known for years that comparing can either make you feel really good or really bad depending on how you do it when you compare downwards that is to look at someone who's less fortunate you feel better about yourself you think I'm very lucky when you do upward social comparisons on the other hand you tend to feel less than and we've known for years looking at glossy magazines makes us feel less than well what are we looking at online we are looking at the superlatives of each other's lives when we post online we don't post leftovers we post Michelin star meals we don't post hand-me-downs we post our most beautiful designer frocks we are posting edited versions of our lives and we're going on and comparing and we're constantly feeling less than so all of a sudden there's this amplified self-awareness it's like we're standing outside ourselves editing and re editing and trying to gain information about what everyone else thinks to make sure that we live up to some I'd argue arbitrary unrealistic standard and this is the worry if we don't have a strong sense of identity if we're waiting for they or Amazon or Netflix to tell us who we are then actually that can have a profound effect on our mental health and our emotional health it can lead to things like depression which interestingly enough some psychodynamic theorists call the difference between the feeling of Who I am and who I'm supposed to be it can lead to anxiety this hyper inflated sense that we're not living up to some ideal of beauty or success even to things like obsession and perfectionism because we feel so out of control over who we are that we begin to control the minutia so what do we do well I think firstly we need to take a page out of what we've done with body image we know for years and getting people to sit down and look at glossy magazines makes them feel terrible about themselves unless we tell them these aren't real they've been airbrushed we know once you say that that people actually see these magazines in a different way we need to begin to look at Facebook and all the other online social networking pages the same way these are press releases these are superlatives of each other's lives so comparing is unfair we need to think about the source you know anyone can tell you what they think I think online chat rooms not very different - kind of big old bathroom doors right those bathroom doors people would scribble on we're like digital bathroom doors anybody can have a say the idea that you would internalize that is so unfair on your ability to genuinely express who you are we need to construct identity via relationships not expectations through people that know us we need to reflect back you know my little girl she's 12 now and ever since she's been growing up when people have said isn't she pretty I'd say yeah but you know what she's really amazing at judo and fantastic at math and I do that for two reasons number one from a body image point of view I'm at her to know that you know what looks are not the most interesting thing about you and it's not something that to invest in invest in who you are but also from an identity perspective I wanted her to know that even when people can't see what's the coolest thing about you it's still there and you need to remember what that is so speak to those kids to those sisters to those friends hold up those mirrors telling them who they are I think ultimately the problem with identity is that once it's something that's outside of ourselves it begins to be something that we can't control that can be easily manipulated and don't get me wrong I'm I'm all for social networking I don't think it's an evil thing but I do you think sometimes we need to disconnect from these constructed selves we're creating to give ourselves the freedom to give ourselves permission to be who we want to be I hope that all of you hope that all of us are able to let go enough so we can come I guess the most wonderful fabulist imperfect version of ourselves rather than chasing those 2d selfies thanks very much

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 55,297

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United Kingdom, Business, Psychology

Id: lAdOeP6d3pQ

Length: 16min 14sec (974 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 04 2015