The Happiness Effect

by Donna Freitas

  Rob is not the first student to mention the word “audience” when referring to social media. Many students mention their awareness that they have an “audience” and that they have to be cognizant of what they post for that audience and who might think what about them. Often they are imagining future employers who might be watching for missteps. But many students, like Rob, also play to an audience of their peers.

  When Rob calls getting “likes” one “big pointless game,” it prompts me to press whether he really feels that way. It sounds like he made this comment because he felt that he should, even though he’s obviously spent a lot of time thinking about how to “game” the system he believes is operating on social media. Rob answers with a tremendous degree of ambivalence and keeps laughing nervously as he talks. “I mean, I guess [getting ‘likes’ is] fun,” he says. “It makes me feel better, but it really has no point. Like, what’s the point of Facebook? To keep up with your friends and stay involved in people’s lives that you left at home when you went to college, but other than that, what’s the point of posting a status saying a joke? Who cares? I mean, when I read people’s jokes, even if they’re funny and I ‘like’ it, I don’t care.”

  Rob wishes so intensely that he didn’t care, but he always ends up admitting that he cares a lot. He tells me he resisted getting on Facebook until he was sixteen, which he considers almost ancient for getting an account. He was pretty anti-Facebook at first. But then he shakes his head. “And now I use it the most! I can’t give you a great answer for why I do it. I don’t want to say it’s an ego boost, but it kind of is. It’s reinforcement for acting a certain way. I like to be really social and like to tell jokes to people and like having a good time, and getting ‘likes’ on Facebook for that same kind of material reinforces acting that way in public around those people.”

  Our interview soon moves on to other topics, but it isn’t long before Rob cycles back to his theory on the centrality of getting “likes” and also which posts—and who—get the most “likes” of all. Whenever Rob thinks of making a post, he wonders to himself, is it worth saying? In other words, will people “like” it? If his answer to this question is no, then, “It’s not even worth putting on there,” Rob claims. “There’s no point in saying, ‘Oh, the sky is blue.’ No one’s going to care, so why write that down? I try to do stuff that will get positive feedback or at least get some ‘likes.’ ”

  Rob feels the deck is stacked against him in the competition for “likes.” Women always get more “likes,” he thinks. His frustration about this is evident. He thinks it’s mystifying and also unfair. “A girl just posts a random picture in her room laying down on a bed, and it gets a hundred ‘likes’! … .I think it’s interesting that some girls don’t even need to try just because they’re female.” Rob mimics them, saying, “Like, ‘I can lay on my bed and take a picture!’ ” and rolling his eyes. He envies girls’ ease in deciding what to post.

  In theory, Rob can accept that he’s not going to get “a hundred ‘likes,’ ” but he cannot accept the disparity of “likes” by gender. “I actually go on a cruise to Bermuda, you know, the clear water ocean, on a cliff, with the water in the background—it was a cool picture. It gets thirty ‘likes.’ Girls standing in a dark room, sitting in a dark room on a bed, just reading a book—a hundred ‘likes’!” Rob thinks the disparity has to do with “sexual stuff.” Guys like pretty girls, and when guys go on Facebook, they’ll simply “like” girls’ pictures but won’t “like” the pictures of other guys as much. So guys start off with a disadvantage in the “likes” department. But Rob also suspects that girls are gaming the system, too, and are better at it than guys are.

  “I think a lot of girls re-upload their pictures,” he explains. “Like, I post it once, and then after a certain time, people stop seeing it because, unless they go on my profile, it doesn’t pop up on the newsfeed. While girls sometimes upload their picture and then, later on, they re-upload it, so it shows up again but the ‘likes’ [they got from the first upload] stay there.” How does Rob know that “likes” stay attached to the photo even if you upload it again? Well, he tried this once himself, he admits very sheepishly. Actually, more than once. He got a couple more “likes” but did not see the kind of success that he thinks women achieve when they employ this strategy. Rob thinks women do this all the time. He’s also bitter about his suspicion that if he changed his relationship status to “In a relationship” on Facebook, he’d only get “five people” to like it, whereas a woman would probably get “a hundred ‘likes.’ ”

  Rob’s worst fear seems to be getting no “likes” at all. The thought that one of his posts would be completely unimportant to people fills him with shame, which is why he’s spent so much time theorizing about which posts get the most “likes” and why.

  Overall, Rob feels like social media is “a mix of a popularity contest and an ego boost contest,” he says. “Like, who can get the biggest ego on Facebook.” Rob thinks, for instance, that people will accept any friend request, just so they can increase their number of friends. He thinks people don’t care if their friends on Facebook are “fake friends” because all that matters is “looking more popular.” Rob is sounding more and more cynical as we speak. But then he lights up and tells me he has eight hundred friends on Facebook, and that he accepts random friend requests from people because he “might as well,” he says. “It will look better if I do than if I don’t. But in reality it doesn’t really matter. Well, I guess it matters to me,” he adds, with that now familiar nervous laugh.

  When Rob gets a lot of “likes” on Facebook, he says, “it just confirms your beliefs about yourself.” If people affirm his posts with “likes,” it helps him to believe that the things he does in life (cross-country, for example) matter. When he doesn’t get “likes,” it confirms which things don’t matter. In other words, Rob judges his actions, his choices, his endeavors, and even his life goals based on how others affirm—or do not affirm—those same things on social media. He derives a tremendous amount of meaning from what others tell him about his life through “likes” on his posts. His stress about how much “likes” mean to him is painfully evident from the number of times he mentions it. He doesn’t understand why they’re so important to him, though, and he wishes with all his might that they weren’t. But they are, he always confirms. He mentions on six different occasions during our interview that “likes” give him a much-needed “ego boost.”

  What is it about Rob that makes him care so much about this kind of approval, whereas other students—many of whom are not nearly as successful socially as Rob claims to be—truly could not care less? It seems that a steady stream of social media affirmation helps to remind Rob that he exists (in general), but also that he matters socially and that his ideas and updates are worth paying attention to. People “like” what Rob says; therefore he is.

  HIGH TRAFFIC TIMES, AND MY BEST-SELLING AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  Should we worry about young adults, like Rob, who obsess over this aspect of Facebook and other social media platforms? Or is this all harmless, a passing fad that won’t mean much as Rob gets older? Rob isn’t alone in how he feels; many of the students I surveyed had similarly intense views and worries about “likes,” concerns that defined much of how they operated and what they posted online. They, too, stressed about “likes” even as they also really longed not to notice whether or not they got them.4

  I asked everyone I interviewed what they thought of “likes” and whether they cared about getting them. Some students were adamant that they didn’t care at all, that they barely thought about “likes.” Some went so far as to say that they really hated the whole “likes” business, just as they do “retweets” and “favorites” and anything else that people can count up. Many students mentioned how awkward and weird it is when people “like” posts about someone being sick or sad, or having a family member pass away. (Why would you “like” that? they wondered. Isn’t it inappropriate to “
like” someone’s grief?)5

  But just as many students grew sheepish at this question, rolled their eyes, and said something about how, while they wished they didn’t care about “likes,” because they are superficial and therefore shouldn’t matter, of course they cared! How could they not?

  For example, Mercedes marvels that there even was a time in her life when “likes” didn’t yet exist. In 2006, the year she first got onto Facebook, “likes” were not yet a feature, and she almost can’t remember life without them affecting every comment, update, and photo a person posts on Facebook. “I think whenever people post things, they are hoping for some kind of reaction,” she says. “I mean, if I posted that I’m ‘In a Relationship’ on Facebook, I’m going to be hoping that people would ‘like’ it.” In fact, a month before our interview, Mercedes and her boyfriend did just this, and they broke the “100 likes” barrier (most students seem to consider the first time a person gets a hundred “likes” as a kind of Facebook milestone). She was pretty happy about this, though even as she tells me that she cares she also chuckles and rolls her eyes. “You’re like, ‘I feel so good about this!’ But you’re [also] like, ‘Why?’ You should feel good about the relationship! Why did having more ‘likes’ make it cooler?” Mercedes goes on to talk about how getting all those “likes” definitely gave her a rush, but she felt “stupid” that she succumbed to it. She is quick to say that “likes” “mean nothing” and that it’s “dumb” that they make people feel anything at all.

  People judge their profile pictures based on how many “likes” they get, too, according to Mercedes. Unless you get at least 30 “likes,” the picture “doesn’t count, it doesn’t count. You should change it right away. That’s how people think.” I ask Mercedes if this is her rule of thumb about profile pictures. She says no, she wouldn’t take a picture down just because it failed to get the requisite thirty “likes.” But it does make her doubt the picture. She may have thought a picture was cute, but the low number of “likes” tells her she was wrong.

  This is when I first hear about “high-traffic times” for posting. The idea is to post at certain times of day to maximize the number of “likes.”

  “A lot of people would say, and my friends would tell you this too, it depends on the time of day that you post this information—that’s how crazy it is,” Mercedes explains. “If you change your profile picture at seven at night, you’re going to get more ‘likes’ because more people are on Facebook at seven at night… . But if you change your profile picture at two in the afternoon, then you’re not going get as many ‘likes.’ ” I ask Mercedes if she follows these guidelines. Not necessarily, she tells me. But she certainly has many friends who do.

  Like so many students, each time Mercedes posts and doesn’t get a lot of “likes,” she goes through a kind of rationalization process to console herself. When she feels the disappointment coming on, Mercedes reminds herself that “likes” don’t really matter. “This is my page,” she tells herself. “So it’s just about things that I like. [It doesn’t] have to mean that everyone else will like it.”

  Yet, for students like Matthew (mentioned above), gaining approval and getting “likes” can become a constructive and positive part of one’s self-understanding. Matthew tells me about “My Story,” a feature on Snapchat that compiles photos from a single day, and the Timeline feature on Facebook. Matthew’s reflections intrigue me. “I feel like everybody wants to have a story,” he says. “Everybody wants an autobiography at the end of their life, a bestseller, and [My Story] is a way to do it now … .you know, a way to get that feeling for a moment or two. Like, ‘Hey, check this out! This is me. This is my life! Look at me!’ ” Matthew pauses a moment, then explains that before our interview he’d never thought of his collection of posts as an “autobiography,” but now that he’s said this out loud, he thinks it makes sense. “I’m pretty sure there’s a picture or post about almost every big event in my life on Facebook or on Twitter somewhere,” he says. “Snapchat is more of a day-to-day experience [because snaps disappear], but Facebook and Twitter definitely, on some level, become your autobiography.” The Facebook Timeline itself, Matthew explains, is a kind of autobiography because it captures the significant things that have happened throughout your life. That is its purpose.

  Matthew goes on to equate posting something that gets a lot of favorites, “likes,” or “retweets” as “sort of like saying your autobiography is a bestseller”—at least for a moment. Having so many people see whatever it is you’ve put up about yourself, and then approve of it, letting you know that they’ve seen it and “liked” it, shows you that everyone can relate to whatever you’ve just posted. He gave me an example. He once sent a photo via Snapchat that tons of people took screenshots of because they loved it so much and it made them laugh. He told me how much he loved that so many people saw it and enjoyed it and how this made him feel appreciated. Matthew thinks that people are kidding themselves if they don’t want their posts to be favorited, retweeted, and “liked”—he certainly wants it, and says that getting “likes” is one of the main incentives to post.

  Then there’s Maria, who at one point abandoned her Instagram page because her photos weren’t getting any “likes” from friends, which made her feel terrible. “It’s so easy to press ‘like,’ and nobody was ‘liking’ anything,” she says. Maria felt especially bad when photos that were important to her went unnoticed by the people she cares about. But then Maria created a new Instagram account exclusively for pictures of her dog—“people love pictures of dogs,” she says—and now she gets tons of “likes.” Maria swears she didn’t do it just to get “likes,” but she admits she loves having so many unexpected fans, and that this makes updating her Instagram page “more fulfilling.”

  Maria says she no longer actively searches her Facebook page to see if people are “liking” her photos. She doesn’t love the way Facebook operates—what things stay on top of the feed and why. “So, [my friend] got 170 ‘likes’ for this one picture, and it was there for days at the top [of the feed]. So then I ‘liked’ it, because there’s so much exposure, but that’s an interesting thing: Facebook decides to expose you to something based on how they feel it ranks [and how] it should rank to you.” Maria thinks this is “weird and creepy,” but she also doesn’t want to miss the things that are popular on Facebook, so it can be a useful tool. Maria doesn’t judge the “success” of her posts by this, however. For example, she tells me, “There’s a picture of me and my old dog [on Facebook] before he passed away, and we’re hugging and it’s kind of an artistic photo and only a few of my friends ‘liked’ it.” She adds with a laugh, “But I didn’t care. I thought it was great anyway. And it was a great success to me.”

  You always get a response from people if you post during “prime time,” according to Maria. “You know, like six, seven [o’clock], when people are getting done with class and they’re not doing anything,” she explains. This is when you can expect people to be online and when you can expect the best—or, at least, the widest—reaction from people on your friends list. Of course, if you post something then and you don’t get any reaction, it can make you feel even worse.

  There is a tried-and-true way to ensure you get a lot of “likes,” though—well, a tried-and-true method for women. While Rob complained that girls can take just about any shot of themselves, put it up online, and get a ton of “likes,” Maria sees something slightly different—and incredibly worrisome—going on. Generally, the photos that get the most “likes” are provocative photos of women. Maria tells the story of someone she knew from home who had a photo on her page that got more than two thousand “likes.” The photo was very revealing, she explains. “It was disturbing, and it was also scary because she kept posting more and more of those photos, and they were getting a ton of ‘likes,’ ” Maria says. “And it was kind of upsetting to me to realize that she kept doing this for the popularity of it. The photos were of no one except for h
er in a bikini or doing something suggestive and then that’s all her profile is now. It’s thousands of ‘likes’ and those kind of pictures. It made me sad.”

  Be careful, though, Maria warns. If you post too many of those suggestive photos, eventually people will get bored and start ignoring them, and you won’t get that much-desired boost. Even people on Facebook have limits. This happened with Maria’s best friend. “She did that kind of thing and posted all of these pictures and they were getting ‘likes’ for a long time, like these provocative photos,” Maria says. “I think people started getting sick of it or something and then, out of nowhere, people just stopped ‘liking’ them, and eventually she stopped posting altogether because nobody ‘liked’ the stuff.” It’s as if people had built up a tolerance.

  “Likes,” “retweets,” “shares,” upvotes and downvotes—all of these are methods for viewers to actively judge (or render invisible, irrelevant, and uninteresting) users’ content. These functions can provide affirmation (when you get enough of them, and they are positive), but they also raise the stakes of posting and heighten everyone’s sense that they have an audience out there watching and evaluating them. Most students try not to care about the reaction they get when the post, but the fact that there are mechanisms people can use to show you that they care—or don’t—is nearly impossible to ignore. Posting on social media is rarely ever innocent. You don’t post simply because you feel like it or because you’re just employing your right to self-expression. You post with at least the slight hope—if not the profound one—that everyone will see your post and respond positively. No response or a negative one can render you miserable. “Likes” take the usual highs and lows of young adult social life and make them quantifiable—a running tally of your self-worth.