Emotions, and emotionally intelligent ways to use social media
This is the first piece of a series of reflections I wrote for a school design course. Throughout the course, we discussed emotion, emotional intelligence, and identity, to set the stage for examining current and emerging technologies and how we relate to them.
Essentialists believe that emotions are genetically/biologically determined and their relatively invariable responses make it universal to all humans, which is controlled by brain patterns and displayed via facial expressions.
Constructivists, however, believe that emotions are summary of what’s going on in a person’s brain and body, and must be interpreted within the context of the social-cultural system around that person.
Both views could be used to reflect on challenging situations in my own life.
The essentialist view helped me decide whether to continue a conversation or to switch to a different topic. My friend just came back from a road trip with her boyfriend. She said it was boring and way below her expectation. From her words, it seemed that I shouldn’t talk more about it. However, instead of lowering her brows or wrinkling her nose, she was smiling when she commented on her trip. Therefore, I asked to tell me more about her “complaints”, and she filled me with all the funny episodes on her trip.
The constructivist view made me interpret my inner state more precisely. Last quarter I interviewed for a summer internship position, and got an email notice that I didn’t get the job. I could be feeling sad, disappointed or even defeated. Instead, I framed it as “a bittersweetness of failing to meet my expectation and relief given that this job isn’t where my aspiration lies”.
The second part of the reflection focuses on how my social media use that was/was not sociable or in some way emotionally intelligent. Well, I’m a bit older (literally just a few months) than generation Z who is highly exposed to social media when I grew up, I do use social media platforms across different countries.
Example 1
Platform: WeChat Moments
Use: a post — “It’s been a long time since I posted something about a singer”, followed by a quote of lyrics and a link to a song.
To me, WeChat is a social media platform for more intimate social relationships. On this platform, most connections I have are friends with whom I have pre-existing offline interactions (and know that I’m a huge fan of this singer). This post could show them that I liked this song so much that I would post it to a less music-focused platform. Telling people your music taste is very private to me, and this incident is sociable as it could induce further discussion about this song and thus deepening pre-existing offline interactions.
Example 2
Platform: Instagram
Use: I purchased a desktop calendar online and saw the shipping address was from Vancouver, a city I planned to travel during winter break, so I asked if the shop owner had a physical store there, by sending a direct message.
I interact with my friends on Instagram a lot, but I also follow quite a few people I don’t know offline. By sending a message to the shop owner, I used this social media platform in a sociable way as it provided an opportunity for me to interact with someone that lack in-depth offline interactions.
Example 3
Platform: YouTube
Use: I edited some video clips from a TV drama series and posted it to YouTube, visible to the public.
In the description I wrote about how I was inspired to do a fan-edit and why I thought this background music was suitable. This video was quite popular (about 350k! ) and I received a lot of likes, comments, and followers. Even though this can’t be categorized as a high-quality interaction, it sure provided a channel to hear from others. More followers would increase my presence in this community as well.
Example 4
Platform: Weibo (China’s version of Twitter)
Use: In a team of four, I established a social media account (fansite of a singer) on weibo. In that team, I’m in charge of media content production. Apart from recording live stream events, I regularly edit and publish new videos, make animated gifs, and organize monthly resources.
Compared to other incidents, this social media use has a longer duration, this collaboration lasted for about a year with more than 10k followers and over 200 reposts per blogging on average. I don’t consider this interaction as “online technology is a lower-quality substitute”, rather, it’s in-depth just as offline interaction — and I added the three team members to my WeChat. Hence, this incident is sociable to the extent that I became friends with people I met online.
One way I could use these tools to enhance my sociability is to add more text content on public-facing social media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter. Currently, I put in a lot of efforts in visual content, but with very little word underneath. What’s more, mostly I only write sentences that are quite descriptive, like where I took the photo and/or what I was doing. To enhance my sociability, I could use more words to write about the context, the backstory of that photo, how I was experiencing the world and myself back then, as a way to not only promote empathy, but also deepen my memory. Instead of considering media post a picture with some annotations, I could view them as a story conveyed by both the picture and the word.
Nevertheless, describing one’s emotions and feelings precisely could be challenging for people, and current tool designs aren’t promoting this. One way I can think of is adding a tag category of emotions. It could be a list of emotional granularity that users could simply choose from. Take Instagram for example — as for now, it allows users to tag location and people, and add hashtags about locations and events/activities. Such tagging mechanism could expand to the world of emotions. Once users could see what emotions are contained in media posts, it would be much easier for them to understand share similar feelings.
