In the past, every time I’ve had to go through a hard break-up, I’ve resorted to social media. Instagram was a doorway that led me to constantly want and be able to show the world that I was doing well and better than ever. I now realize how horribly on edge I was when I was constantly stressed about how to plan and execute the perfect post at all times. And I knew I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. This made me wonder–how exactly has social media changed romance as a whole?
Background: Social Media Surveillance
Social media has given us access to each other that no medium has before. We’re always being watched. Social media surveillance is when you monitor someone’s online content without necessarily interacting with it, for example, scrolling through someone’s Instagram profile, watching their Snapchat story, or checking when they were last active online.
In my survey of undergraduate students, 98.3% admitted to engaging in social media surveillance at one point, with 53.3% of them saying they engage in it at least once a day. Even though it causes us anxiety, a phenomenon I will explore, rather than choosing to pass it up, most of us choose to use it to our advantage. Why? Well, because everyone else is doing it. And it’s just so easy. 55% of Stanford students surveyed admitted that most times they surveil others online, it’s not nearly intentional, but just happens subconsciously. On any of these platforms, passively monitoring others is irresistible because of how easy it is and how much information comes out of a quick tap or swipe.
According to Techaddiction, a help site for tech addiction, Facebook is addictive because it feeds into our need to feel included, our need to be social, our “insatiable desire” for information and our desire to self-express and self-reinforce. This is a cultural phenomena that too few of us talk about. We let social media very obviously affect our quality of life, yet we still continue using it.
There will only come more and more new surveillance tools that become available to us, and we will become more and more hooked on them. The younger generations are growing up in an era where love exists at least partially in a virtual realm. This is all they will know. Since digital communication mediums have taken over, an entire unspoken etiquette over late text message replies has emerged and intentional revenge and jealousy are rife on photo-sharing platforms. We as a generation and as technology users need to be more aware of how technology is reshaping romance through publicizing our private actions and threatening the health of our relationships and our happiness in them.
This papers aims to investigate how exactly digital surveillance culture has caused negative feelings to arise on both sides of a romantic interaction. I uncover how read receipts and lack of text responses contribute to a culture of immediacy that exacerbates anxiety in a romantic context. I also explore how response anxiety can be used as a tactic against others as an alternative to confrontation. Next, I acknowledge the upshots of social media surveillance in long distance relationships, but ultimately conclude that engaging in social media surveillance is a vicious cycle, backed by multiple psychological studies, proven to undermine trust and increase jealousy in relationships.
Texting Anxiety
A lot of us now use text messaging to communicate with our significant others or love interests, constantly keeping an eye on each other and waiting for a response as soon as we send a text. While social media platforms seem like an obvious medium for digital surveillance, some may not realize that texting services like iMessage or Facebook Messenger also create opportunities to monitor others from afar.
iMessage users are all too familiar with “read receipts,” which indicate whether a message was opened and at what time.. Of the 60 Stanford students surveyed, 86.9% agreed that read receipts have made them unnecessarily anxious and stressed (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Do read receipts cause you stress and/or anxiety? Hurr.
Take, for instance, a narrative all too common:
“A few minutes went by and the status of my text message changed to “read.” My heart stopped. This was the moment of truth. I braced myself and watched as those little iPhone dots popped up…but then…they vanished. And there was no response…” (Klinenberg).
Even a decade ago, this wouldn’t become a worry, yet now, most have experienced panic like this before. There’s this gut-punch sensation when we see that our messages have been seen but not replied to. Texting as a form of communication has gotten far enough that it has even created a culture of immediacy, so even in the absence of read receipts, a long response time or a ghosted message seems to indicate that someone is just not interested.
The read receipt can have a detrimental effect on users and their mental health, which some attribute to the ‘hyper-narcissism’ among young people today (Palfrey). We now find ourselves in a world where every interaction requires an immediate response from others, regardless of whether or not they are actually busy. We just see the situation from our perspective and wonder why someone won’t reply to us. In an age where people are expected and assumed to be available and on their phones at all times, an ignored message or a slow reply seems to be personal. We start to imagine everything we did wrong, or on the other hand everything that may be happening so as to justify why someone hasn’t seen our text yet. This anxiety is heightened when the message recipient is not a friend or family member, but a potential love interest–someone to whom you’ve put yourself out there to, maybe taken a risk in sending them a text message: 86.7% of surveyed Stanford students agreed that the negative effects of read receipts were amplified when texting someone they were romantically interested in. In this case, a non-response seems to be more personal–an indicator that the other person isn’t interested and didn’t even make an effort to tell you. On the flipside, sometimes, all of this worrying is for nothing. Perhaps they were just busy.
Even so, texting and instant messaging has contributed to this unhealthy culture of immediacy where we need and expect instant replies to our messages, even though we ourselves may not always respond promptly to others. This is unlike email, where a response that takes over a day is completely acceptable. With texting, we realize that a message comes with an audio and a visual notification. We realize that everyone probably has their mobile phones on person at all times, and we can use surveillance tools like “active now” to check when they were last online to back up our hypothesis that they’re ignoring us. We’ve come to understand that with texting, a response that takes over a day is probably not a good sign in a romantic context, and if it goes over that, we probably won’t ever get a response. But this culture creates excessive and frivolous worry. It creates an unspoken etiquette around communication in relationships that differs across relationships. I have dated people who text 24/7 during a relationship as well as people who don’t text at all, or if so, take days to respond to messages. What should be considered normal, since everyone is different? Is an ignored message really a sign of romantic doom? It is clear that because of the availability of information about when someone was last online, combined with the culture of immediacy surrounding texting, communicating with a romantic interest has become a lot more stressful than in the days where we called each other on landline.
Manipulating Texting Anxiety
With mutual knowledge of these surveillance features, some people actually use means to minimize this type of texting stress in others: According to Elle Hunt, a communities editor at The Guardian, “people will go to some lengths to avoid being seen to have “seen” a message.” They do this through marking a message as unread, turning on flight mode, or using a message preview so that they can see the message without actually opening it. One surveyed student stated that he turns read receipts on, then doesn’t open the text so that he can pretend he didn’t see the text yet.
However, while some people contort themselves to avoid being seen to have “seen”, others manipulate that anxiety to their own advantage. They leave people on “read” deliberately to exact some sort of revenge, for example, to passive-aggressively show that they are upset. In this sense, using surveillance to their advantage, they are able to opt out from confrontation and assert their dominance in the relationship, knowing that the other person will be distressed over the fact they saw and didn’t reply to their message.
Some of the anonymous Stanford survey participants stated a reason for turning on read receipts was to let people know they read and ignored their message when they were angry.
In addition, when one isn’t interested in someone romantically, they can use a tactic such as ghosting, or ignoring a message, as an easy alternative to confrontation. This is an easy, ruthless tactic, since we know that the texter knows that we have seen their message. We will either turn read receipts on or eventually post something on social media, showing them that yes, we are active online, yes we have seen their message, and no, we are not interested. This is just what surveillance allows us to so easily do.
Some Good That Comes Out of Surveillance
Social media inherently allows us to keep in touch with friends from all corners of the world. This can help people in long-distance relationships keep in touch and stay updated on each other’s activities.
According to Tokunaga, a Ph.D. who studies the psychological implications of communication technologies, those in long-distance relationships or who have had experience with infidelity in the past are especially prone to using social media to watch a significant other’s online behavior closely. In his study of 126 college students currently in a relationship, 81% admitted that they visited their partner’s social media page often, looking through photos and comments, and even venturing to see what their partner’s friends were up to. Tokunaga calls this surveillance an easy “information-seeking” strategy that can develop interpersonal trust and relational security to the extent that trusting behaviors are exhibited through one’s profile. Couples tackling the issue of distance may rely on such means to keep in touch and stay updated on each other’s lives.
However, according to Dr. Sanja Utz, Associate Professor at the Department of Communication at VU University Amsterdam, even something as small as seeing a long distance partner become friends with contacts at their new location evokes jealousy. With social media handy, we start becoming distrustful of our partners, and we can even start to see all of the potential new options out there. We compare our relationships to others’ relationships, and when nothing seems private anymore, jealousy becomes prevalent.
Social Media Content Consumption and Envy
Just as text message surveillance lets us keep tabs on our romantic interests, social media allows us to keep up with each other constantly, whether it be through sharing status and photo updates or viewing each other’s stories. Social networking sites offer a way to monitor the partner without committing an obvious trust violation, such as looking through their bag (Utz). This easily allows somewhat surreptitious, private monitoring to occur. Facebook and other social network sites are structured so that it makes it easy to see what others are doing online and even easier to fall into a cycle of surveillance. On Facebook, the news feed constantly updates when people we follow post, like, comment on, or are tagged in a post. We can see a real time record of whose posts they’re liking and commenting on.
The public nature of social media exacerbates this. Utz found that information found online has a stronger impact than information learned a less public context, for example, seeing on Facebook that one’s partner puts an arm around another member of the opposite sex might be experienced as a public self threat because this picture can be seen by all friends and acquaintances. The sheer publicness of this can make the situation more embarrassing, alarming, and stress-inducing.
With so much information at hand, it is inevitable that jealousy and suspicion arise from it. Amy Muise, a York University professor researching healthy romantic relationships in an age of social media, reports that “exposing one’s social network activities in a public domain appears to have some negative implications for romantic and sexual relationships.” Her research shows that increased time spent on Facebook led to increased relationship jealousy. As one of her study participants reported, “All of that personal information is totally unnecessary, but no one can help themselves.” Another responded that Facebook made him more insecure in the relationship: “I can’t help but second-guess myself when someone posts on her wall.… It can contribute to feelings of you not really ‘knowing’ your partner.’’ Her research also found that the vast majority of the sample are Facebook friends with past romantic and sexual partners and often post photos out of context, which sets the stage for jealousy to become evident.
Interestingly enough, the relationship jealousy that arises from social media posting seems to be dually caused. Muise found that college-aged students practice high self-disclosure on Facebook, suggesting that individuals may “not adequately recognize that their own information disclosure may be a cause for concern for their partner.” Consequently, personal disclosures may foster a vicious cycle where a person’s acontextual disclosure on Facebook only increases the likelihood that one’s partner may also do the same, thus increasing one’s own experience of jealousy. It seems quite obviously unhealthy that our online actions cause this kind of distress in our partners.
Marisa Kabas, a Daily Dot journalist who focuses primarily on social media and relationships, sees these effects and suggests that even being “friends” with a significant other on social media is a bad idea. While she acknowledges that it can help couples become closer to one another, she agrees that oversharing online introduces unhealthy levels of jealousy, especially in those who have been cheated on before or who have low self-esteem. One surveyed student also admitted that she “stalks her boyfriend on Instagram,” and gets somewhat offended when she sees that he likes photos posted by Instagram models. Some have even cited Instagram as a cause of relationship fights and issues due to one partner seeing the other liking other girls’ photos.
Following this phenomenon, research done by Russell Clayton, Director of the Cognition and Emotion Lab at Florida State University, has shown that “the more a person in a romantic relationship uses Facebook, the more likely they are to monitor their partner’s Facebook activity more stringently, which can lead to feelings of jealousy…concerning past partners.” It also found that “excessive Facebook users are more likely to connect with previous partners, which may lead to emotional and physical cheating.”
One anonymous survey participant shared similar sentiments, stating that seeing a partner’s old photos of relationships hurt. Another reported that she compared her relationship with the happy couples she saw on Instagram and felt insecure about it. In another case, a student’s girlfriend got angry at him for keeping old photos with his ex on his social media. These all point back to suspicion and jealousy, which online surveillance is a leading cause of. By forgoing our online privacy in exchange for being able to view others’ “private” actions and lives, we start to make each other envious.
Surveillance and Breakups
While digital surveillance surely causes added stress in the midst of a relationship, it also introduces a new layer of complexity to relationships after a breakup. While before social media existed, ex-partners would rarely see each other after the breakup, social media allows for the constant option to stalk an ex-partner’s life. According to Tara Marshall, a Psychology Ph.D. with a focus on romantic relationships, after breakups, social media surveillance is associated with greater distress over the breakup, more negative feelings, unnecessary paranoia, and lower personal growth. It can also significantly delay emotional recovery and even spark a need for revenge.
62.7% of surveyed students agreed that seeing an ex-partner post on social media has caused them significant distress. And that makes perfect sense. Being able to see what an ex-partner is doing and who they are with through Snapchat stories or Instagram posts creates a sort of FOMO (fear of missing out) that’s only exacerbated by the fact that this person, who used to be such a big part of your life, has suddenly left and is moving on. One anonymous Stanford student attributed a lot of post-breakup distress after seeing and comparing herself to her ex-partner’s new significant other online. It can be easy to see how keeping up with an ex on social media can delay the recovery process.
Winning a Breakup: Combative Use of Social Media Surveillance
On the flipside, perhaps this post-breakup sadness drives you to action. When you start to see your ex doing well online, you’ll want to show him that you’re doing even better. Just as some will manipulate “read receipts” and message surveillance to their advantage, some will use social media as an outlet to indirectly project a message to an ex.
James Hamblin, a senior editor for The Atlantic, calls our generation the “breakup generation,” because “winning” a breakup online has become common generational phenomenon. The concept of winning a breakup, defined first on Urban Dictionary, an online slang dictionary, in 2012, refers to the act of intentionally posting content online to create an image where it seems like you are thriving and better off than when you were in the relationship (Hamblin). These acts are done with the knowledge that the ex-partner will see them. As Hamblin states, “ In those days and weeks (months?) after a relationship ends, the theatrics of our social-media caricatures bend toward an audience of one.” These actions, like posing for photos with other members of the opposite sex, may seem devious, but even the most unassuming of us can succumb to these strategies.
According to data released by the Facebook Data Science team, after a breakup, Facebook activity soars by over 225% (Hamblin, see Figure 2). In addition to using social media for surveillance of an ex-partner, trying to win a breakup on social platforms is an easy trap to fall into.
Figure 2. Facebook Post-Breakup Activity. The Atlantic.
Of the 60 Stanford students surveyed, 73.3% have admitted to posting something on social media with the intent of one specific person viewing it. Popular reasons stated for doing so include: to spark that specific person’s interest, to make them jealous, “to show them I’ve moved on and am living my best life,” and “to make them see what they’re missing.”
At the same time that we are being hurt by social media surveillance, we are also intentionally thwarting its negative effects back against others. Is this really what romance has come to?
Conclusion
Nowadays, young people are using digital communication more and more to aid them in creating and maintaining relationships. They may even be unaware of what love was like without worrying about constant texting, how good they look in their profile photos, or what their ex-partners are posting on social media. Being on the cusp of a generation that just got sucked into tech and social media-mania, I remember how much less stressful it was having romantic interactions only in person, and not having to worry about slow or missed text responses and Instagram posts.
What is interesting is that the majority of people seem to realize the extent to which social media surveillance has been disrupting romance, but we still choose to do nothing about it, because even though information sometimes hurts us, we’d rather know too much than know nothing at all. Of the students surveyed, it was split 50/50 over whether love would be better off without social media. It seems like our generation may have a love-hate relationship with social media in relationships–we hate it, but we can’t live without it.
Everyone who is an owner of a social media profile should be aware of this. We have started to manipulate content and surveillance strategies to use against others. This is unhealthy, and we need to start discussing this. This starts with first admitting that a lot of us do partake in social media surveillance. It shouldn’t be a secret, and it shouldn’t be stigmatized if we are all doing it.
A lot of this may seem to fall on tech companies to assume responsibility for the tangible effects their services have on a generation. However, while companies like Facebook have taken steps to alleviate anxiety, such as creating a “breakup” feature that allows users to see less of an ex-partner (Amatulli), there is still a long way to go, and platforms don’t seem to want to stop giving us access to surveillance features. According to Dr. Tony D. Sampson, a professor at the University of East London who has published various works on digital communication, as cited in Dazed Magazine, reports “Facebook wants to keep you on there…the aim is to trigger often negative emotions linked to compulsive behavior so as to keep people checking their social media page.” So, social platforms are well aware of the tangible and detrimental effects that their services have on users, yet they sacrifice this in favor of the promise that users will linger on their service more often and for longer. Since there is no evidence tech companies will act on their own dangers, we users need to reexamine how and how often we should use these features and scale back in order to help ourselves.
Love will still be love, but we may want to rethink how big of a role we want technology to play in our relationships. We can start by agreeing as couples or friends to turn off our social media notifications, text less, and spend more time together in person. Perhaps for those of us looking for love, keeping a relationship entirely offline might be worth a shot. We need to start combating surveillance culture and all that it entails.
