Depersonalization and (in) communication in social networks

The technology a big hole has been made in our day to day through the social media, the apps, the ubiquitous tablets... But, How can these influence our communication processes?

We are increasingly connected, although the physical barriers that exist between people when communicating online, make them a useful tool to facilitate our routines, but being a complement without replacing human contact direct. The world of applications and social networks allows us to more or less faithfully recreate a direct communication process between sender and receiver, pBut it is not the same to be in front of the webcam and to be able to appreciate the nonverbal language, what to interpret a text message.

The sender-receiver scheme in social networks

The human communication it is not something simple. There is never a situation where information travels cleanly from one person to another: there are always gaps for misunderstandings, hidden meanings and double meanings to arise.

This is so because the schema

transmitter-channel-receiver is affected by physical barriers, our ways of interpreting phrases and words, and even our emotional state, which in some cases can cause, for example, rises in tone to appear in a conversation. In communication there is always a margin for unexpected dynamics to appear: phrases that turn out to be unfortunate, confusion with double meanings, etc.

Communication problems increase when we interact from the internet

Not being face-to-face makes these potentially troublesome contingencies come up more often. However, the use of social networks and electronic devices used to communicate does not influence our way of communicating only by hiding contextual information or gestural.

For example, the sense of security surrounding the comfort zone from where you can comment can create the phenomenon of depersonalization when attacking other participants without measure. Being separated from each other causes members of a conversation to behave differently. To be able to perform a discourse analysis and to be able to interpret the emphases, movements, looks and symbols that are of relevance For the issuer, it is necessary to be able to access a certain personal proximity, in addition to being able to enhance the capacity for empathy and assertiveness.

A clear example can be the comments that are made in the Facebook post regarding some topic or opinions. An incomplete communication process is given here, in which anyone can stop responding at any time, they can reply without having read the messages that have been said before and can misinterpret the recipient of the phrases, among others things. That is why sometimes it falls into the overjustification of what is said, creating very extensive contributions that slow down the conversation.

Creating perfect avatars

The distance creates the opportunity to offer the public an ideal image of the self through profile photos, posts and more, but they can appear cognitive dissonances between the "real me" and the "ideal me" that are somehow temporarily resolved by the social masks that the user may create, added to the development or expression of the own ego.

We can find examples in group posts that could well be social experiments, and if they weren't, they are a great source of information about communication processes in social networks and how sympathies are configured to create new networks.

Groups of people in a city, pages with viral content, etc. They contain information about the conversations and how the "I's" interact to display a desired public profile in the discussions. As banal examples of conflicts that can illustrate this, we find the replies to comments about the spelling, or how to reinforce the arguments use internet search engines by copying and pasting concepts and quotes created by third parties people.

All this facilitated by the comfort of home and the ease of accessing information on the network, in addition to the security generated by not having the person speaking to them in front of them.

New forms of harassment

The cases of cyberbullying, which personally remind me of the famous milgram experiment about submission to authority (but in this case without a socially accepted authority figure). The processes of diffusion of responsibility are facilitated when people are not physically present, since comments can easily be deleted, For this reason, many people choose to take screenshots to be able to have evidence about cases of abuse.

These processes have been going on for a long time, but the communication channel and the context have changed, making it more complex. In communication through social networks there are multiple factors that determine the behavior of a person.

For this and much more, It is worthwhile to encourage us to reflect on how we can use social networks to improve our power of communication between people, beyond using them as a means of entertainment or to seek social acceptance through the image that we want to show the public.