In a study Facebook commissioned to "display its emotional connection with consumers to advertisers," researchers found that participants responded better to Facebook than both The New York Times and Yahoo websites on a scale of attention, emotional engagement and memory retention. Why? Because of the presence of human faces. The New York Times and Yahoo sites don't have a reason to portray these, because they only really publish newsworthy photos rather than images of each reporter or contributor, nonetheless profiles.
A.K. Pradeep, CEO of NeuroFocus, says in the article that "The face is a window to the human emotions. Since childhood, we are trained to read people's faces to discern emotion, and that such information is key to survival: Thus the stimulation we experience when scanning our newsfeeds."
So here's the irony with today's young adults and teens. Faces are the key to emotions. We want that stimulation and emotional engagement, but we don't want it from a face IN PERSON. We want that from an image of someone using impression management on the internet. No one puts up a profile picture of him or herself looking mediocre or depressed. They post nice, happy photos where they feel they look attractive. So why get together in person for emotional engagement in a conversation when you can look through your newsfeed with faux images of people's faces?
It's great that we can have so much engagement online, especially in maintaining relationships with friends and family members across the world. But there are plenty of people like my own sister who sit on Facebook chat for hours at a time instead of calling friends up and inviting them over for the night. Today's youth can have just as much fun sitting on Facebook chat having racy conversations on a Friday night rather than getting together and hearing about the others' lives. They are adjusted to learning about acquaintances' thoughts, feelings and doings from statuses and pictures, instead of the art of asking them about it.
We are losing our value of conversation. As much as Facebook can be emotionally engaging and capitalize on this idea with advertisers, we as individuals should take note of the fact that human contact is a value that will always produce more emotional engagement than a phone or computer screen.
Even Steve Jobs thought the most crucial thing to do was meet up with someone face to face! He believed the world was losing out on human connection because they thought relationships could be created and fostered over technology. He believed that true relationships came from spontaneous meetings in person. He built the physical structure of Apple to encourage random meetings, i.e. only one bathroom so that everyone would have to pass each other and run into each other.
ReplyDeleteI just thought I would point that out, seeing as he is responsible for so much of the technology that hinders face-to-face communication, and yet he still values it as the most important thing in life.