ABSTRACT

In this conference paper, we will analyse the history of the new social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, twitter, Snapchat compare to the old social media platform that is MSN, Hi5, MySpace. This paper will also demonstrate how people used to stay away from social media platform when it first launched compared to nowadays that is people like to share their thoughts along with their pictures to social media platforms. Statistic concerning the number of users that social media platform has will also be stated in this paper in order to understand more the world of social media platforms and to understand more about the growth of social media platform during these decades. This paper will also demonstrate the aspect of narcissistic on social media platform that is how young people nowadays like to share everything and anything on social media platforms as they want to boost up their self-esteem. Privacy on old social media platform will also be discussed as an aspect of unawareness of what social media platform is.

Keywords: Narcissistic, Social media platform, Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, Participatory culture, modern behaviour, Privacy, Instagram, Facebook, positivism of narcissistic, negativism of narcissistic, statistic of social media platform.

INTRODUCTION

Social media forms part of the web 2.0. To understand more about the topic that will be discussed, the difference between web 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 will be analysed in order to understand how social media networking has gained territory in our daily life. To start off, web 1.0 was a readable World Wide Web idiom containing flat data. Here the interaction between sites and internet users was restricted. Web 1.0 was merely a gateway of information from which users collect information passively without any of the opportunity to post reviews, comments and feedback (“What are the major differences among Web 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0?”, 2012). When it comes to web 2.0, it was described as the World Wide Web’s “editable” phrase with customise data. With the exception of Web 1.0, Web 2.0 strengthens web users and sites to communicate directly to each other more openly and autonomously. Furthermore, web 2.0 promotes engagement, collaboration, and exchange of information as well as knowledge to anyone. It is Word Wide Web’s “executable” colloquialism with energetic implementations, interactive services, and interaction “device-to-device.” Web 3.0 is a network which now originally referred to the upcoming years. In Web 3.0, machines would be able to interpret information just like human beings and wisely start engendering as well as disseminate valuable content adapted to customers’ demands and needs (“What are the major differences among Web 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0?”, 2012).

The Beginning of Social Media Network

Web 2.0 was the first world wide web that introduce interaction among people, hence that’s where social media have started its journey. The Digital world does have its beginnings throughout the 1960s and 1970s when different domestic and international institutions agreed to come up with ways to get computer systems to converse with each other. Now in a modern framework, this could be seen as the commencement of social networking sites. Thus, it wasn’t up until the 1980s, as well as the 1990s, that personal computers became more acceptable, paving the way for social media to evolve. Perhaps the introduction of writing articles online in the 1990s still played a pivotal role in the era of social media (“The History of Social Media: Social Networking Evolution!”, 2017). The concept how an average person might log in to the internet and start writing about what they were thinking, or the way they were having emotions, by writing, and that anyone could read and respond to these articles anywhere and at any time, helped many people to start understanding the full meaning of the internet. Six Degrees is the website which were referred as the “first social media” site. It was named succeeding the initial theory of “six degrees of separation,” which stipulates that less than six degrees of separation connects anyone in the world towards one another (“The History of Social Media: Social Networking Evolution!”, 2017). These are often called the hypothesis of “Kevin Bacon’s Six Degrees,” even though the trend is inconsequential to Kevin Bacon himself. The possible explanation Six Degrees is viewed to have been the first social media site that allows individuals to make accounts along with adding everyone they know to their personal profile. It was revealed officially in 1997 and survived till about 2001 and it reaches around 3.5 million users at peak (“The History of Social Media: Social Networking Evolution!”, 2017). It was acquired for $125 million by Youth Stream Media Networks in 1999, but it was dismantled a year later (“The History of Social Media: Social Networking Evolution!”, 2017).

Growth of Social media platforms

More social media websites were created after that namely, MSN which was quite popular, followed by HI5, MySpace and many more. With so much of the success coming from Central America, Hi5 was among the most popular social networks in 2007 when it encountered an enormous progress spurt (“What Is Hi5, and Is It Different from Facebook?”, n.d.). One of the most popular social networking platforms at that time was MSN, when talking about MSN people start to revive some memories about how they knew MSN, how new it was for them in terms of the sound, photos available as well as old emoticons. Window live Messenger, previously known as MSN Messenger, was introduced in 1999 but had been dismantled in 2013 for most users after Microsoft acquired their challenger Skype (“MSN Messenger to end after 15 years”, 2014). This impacted the lives of hundreds of thousands of adolescents who were still getting used to what it once was like living on the internet in an age before real social networking (“MSN Messenger to end after 15 years”, 2014). MSN Messenger introduced a new era that is a time when a fellow student was chatting was no longer a frightening thought of having to try to convince themselves about something. However, now in the 21^st century the most popular social networking sites are basically, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Twitter as well as YouTube.

Facebook as a platform for university student

Facebook was initially launched on February 4, 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg along with Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollom, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. At first, Facebook was a platform that was only available for Harvard university students. Even though it spread rapidly to the rest of the Ivy League, Stanford and MIT (“The History of Social Media: Social Networking Evolution!”, 2017). That being said, after 2006, anyone stating to go beyond the age of 13 was able to reach Facebook, instead of whether or not they had a university connection or assess. Facebook has grown significantly after its initiate and successive expansion, outpacing MySpace as one of the most frequented websites on the internet in 2008 (“The History of Social Media: Social Networking Evolution!”, 2017). In 2012, Facebook became public and earned a $ 104 billion appraisal, making it one of the largest IPO valuation ever. It presently generates more revenue in surplus of $ 40 billion a year and is viewed to be one of the world’s largest tech companies. It can also be said that Facebook is among one of the most used platforms in the world. According to Global social media ranking Facebook is the most use apps and it is in the first place followed by WhatsApp, YouTube, WeChat, Instagram and so on (“Global social media ranking 2019 | Statistic”, 2019). Then comes Instagram, it is basically an app where internet users can share their photos along with displaying some story which is valid for 24 hours.

The Instagram we know today began life as a fundamentally different operation intended to teach some coding skills to Kevin Systrom. Again, at the time, Systrom ended up working in marketing for the former US Subway Directions Nextstop app but began to create an app called Burbn which was to be a mixture of Foursquare’s check in service and Mafia Wars online game based on HTML5 (Woods, 2013). Instagram was launched in 2010 and after only a few hours it flew from a bunch of users predominantly friends and early reviewers to the number one free photography app. Instagram had more than a million users by December 2010. The service’s prominence kept growing within the next two years and the Instagram team continued to add features such as hashtags, new filters, high resolution among other things, photo support and one click rotate as well as stories, highlights which appears on the profiles of individuals, and it recently came up with throwback pictures also known as memories. The 150 millionth photograph was uploaded to the service in August 2011. It had more than 10 million users by the end of the month of, September 2011, and secured $ 7 million in Series, a funding in a deal that valued the company at about $ 25 million (Woods, 2013). Conceptualised as an apple app, until April 2012, when the Android version was released, Instagram remained available only on Apple’s platform. It was scooped up by Facebook shortly afterwards for a cool $1bn in cash and stock, even though the final amount was dramatically less after a drop in the NASDAQ Facebook value (Woods, 2013).

DOES SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM INTENSIFY A NARCISSISTIC TRAIT?

Hence, knowing that now the number of users using social media platform are increasing, the real question is: “Does social media platform really intensification a narcissistic trait that may be an unwanted result of sharing images, including selfies?” According to Gianna Emilio, “The Open Psychology Journal, show that participants who posted large numbers of photos and selfies on social media developed a 25 percent rise in narcissistic traits over the 4-month study period”. Nowadays, more and more people are posting selfies about what they ate, or they are posting video about how they cooked their food thus, this may be classified as a narcissistic trait from social media users. Compare to long ago when social media platform was introduced, people was not sure whether to post everything about themselves. When it comes to uploading their real pictures or even their real name they would think twice before doing so as they wanted to have a more private life on social media and not to merge their real identity and their online identity. Researchers from Swansea University in the United Kingdom and University of Milan in Italy worked for 4 months with 74 individuals involved, aged 18–34. Sixty percent use Facebook, 25 percent use Instagram, and 13 percent use Twitter and Snapchat. The participants used social media on average for almost 3 hours a day, and that doesn’t include job use, however some participants confirmed personal consumption up to 8 hours a day. Generally speaking, those of us who posted photos in proportions perceived “obscene” by the researchers showed an average 25 percent increase in narcissistic features over the period of study.

Narcissism is self – obsession, and narcissists generally think they’re better than others, inflate their own admiration, and believe they’re special and important. Buffardi and Campbell found that social media involvement could be anticipated by these traits (Buffardi and Campbell, 2008). “Narcissism among young adults has been consistently and positively correlated with online content generation” (Poon & Leung, 2011). Those with narcissistic tendencies tend to report more social network friends and wall posts and are more willing to upload pictures (Ong et al., 2011). The use of social media enables individuals to demonstrate their ambitions and illustrate their accomplishments to a potentially massive audience and obtain conspicuous rewards and acceptance through “likes” and supportive comments from other social media users. Most contemporaneous analyses adhere to narcissism as a relatively wide domain of psychological traits, reflected among several other things by self-centred narcissism, superiority, manipulation, and similar characteristics (Alarcón & Sarabia, 2012). However, the complexity of the construct of narcissism needs to be emphasised. In particular, social media can be a rewarding and fulfilling medium for people with high narcissistic characteristics, and it is theorised that narcissism is positively linked to the addictive use of social media. It also claims that inner self-evaluations that is self-confidence or self-esteem play a role in the use of addictive social media (Andreassen, 2015). These assessments may require fundamental beliefs, attributions, projects, and automatic thoughts and have the power to generally activate behaviour including social media activity (Beck, 1995). Therefore, it could be hypothesised for people with high narcissism (Marshall, Lefringshausen, & Ferenczi, 2015). 

Hence, it could be said that nowadays internet users are more prompt to post more and more pictures as well as sharing their emotion with their internet friends and acquaintance. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and other social media applications can represent an ideal social arena for people who enjoy and are attracted to ego-enhancing activities as they encourage people to reinforce their self-importance on the basis of immediate feedback from potentially massive numbers of other people. All in all, this study shows that basic demographic variables’ narcissism, and self-esteem are all affiliated with social media addictive use. Highly addictive use of social media was linked to lower age, being a woman, not being in a relationship, lower education, being a student, lower income, having narcissistic characteristics, and negative self – esteem. Combined, these variables had a progressive effect on the addictive use of social media, whereas all in all their relative value was small. Low self-esteem had the toughest effect on the use of addictive social media after influencing for all other variables in the equation, followed by being a woman, narcissism, and lower age. Even though using social media is a usual and prevalent modern behaviour, individuals with some of these characteristics could be targets for interference with the aim of averting addictive and destructive an online participatory culture.

CONCLUSION

To conclude, it could be critically said that, narcissism could be both be classified as a positive and negative thing. In terms of positivism of narcissism, it could help people who have low self-esteem in them, to have people liking their post, photos, comment as it will boost their self-confidence. Another positive thing about being narcissism would be for people who want to work in the photography world or in the cinematography world as they need to show what they like to do, to eat, how fit they are maintaining themselves, thus having social media platform and posting pictures, post and many other thing may help them to achieve their goals in life. However, showing too much of their personal life may become a negative thing for the users, as it could have negative impact on their life as hackers could hack their accounts and have access to all their personal information such as where they live, their phone numbers, as well as have access to their photos and use them in different ways. Hence, narcissism amongst young adults can be consistently and completely correlated with online content creation. Furthermore, low self-confidence had the harshest consequence for the use of social media after inducing all other variables in the comparison with behaviour. Narcissistic tendencies tend to report more social network friends and wall posts and are more willing to upload pictures, hence use of social media to enables people to reveal their determinations and show their goings-on to a potentially massive viewers and obtain conspicuous rewards and acceptance through likes and supportive comments from other social media users.

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