Digital ego is the beast you encounter when no one likes your statuses. It’s what provokes people to post every gritty detail about their day on Twitter or Facebook, even when the Internet doesn’t seem to care. It’s what keeps people coming back to SecondLife. It’s what has teenagers saying, ” I deserve to be recognized and applauded for my online efforts” in more or less words. It fueled the “like my status if you like my status” phenomenon (apart from a particularly viral video). Digital ego, in a sense, keeps people coming back. It’s also why many of your friends have tried – and failed – to quit social media.
When Facebook re-invented social media (remember LiveJournal, AIM, MySpace?), it created a new way for humans to interact with each other. What makes Facebook different is that it caught on with the world. Since October, Facebook hit 1 billion users. That’s 10% of the world’s population, and its popularity is growing.
I remember when Facebook blew up. Now, my entire family is on Facebook, and some of my younger family member will have spent their whole lives on social media, assuming something else doesn’t come along the way and beats Zuckerberg’s brainchild into the dust. Even still, children will literally grow up with a separate version of themselves on the Internet. A whole new ego to cater to.
Am I saying that its bad? Not at all! At least not yet.
The problem with ego is that it has to be fed. Ego is great – it gets you places, brings you drive when you need it most, it works closely with pride so it can often prevent you from doing stupid things. At the same time, it brings arrogance. It sometimes brings need, jealousy, malevolence. But how much is too much?
I think abut how businesses will cater to the digital egos of the upcoming Millenial generation. The teenagers we know today will eventually become the leaders of tomorrow. And what will their psychological patterns be like with the addition of a digital ego? Did that child get enough “likes” on their Facebook page and enough retweets and re-pins?
Cyber bullying quickly became a huge problem with the integration of social media in our daily lives, and it has everything to do with the development of digital ego in young people.
I’m curious to see how the youth will develop having mastered social media at such a young age and growing up with the rest of the world on the Internet. The Internet didn’t start out as a crib, but it will be interesting to watch it embrace the young and old.