Psychological impact of Social Networking Sites: A Psychological Theory (original) (raw)

The preponderance of social networking sites such as Facebook, Youtube and others, have altered the way in which people interact socially in the real world. In fact, much more can be said about the impact of these modern technologies on the basic structure of human personality: the id, ego, and super-ego. The paper proposes a psychosological theory that modifies Sigmund Freud's (1923) basic relationships and interactions of the id, ego and super-ego in his Psychoanalytic Theory. It is claimed that an individual's engagement with virtual reality (social networking) portends a segregation of the super-ego from the id and ego. In a virtual world, social interactions are not constrained by societal norms and standards (super-ego) so that the tendency is for the id (instincts and drives) to merge with the ego (what is real) and they become indistinguishable. The sociological implications of this theory are also explored in this paper.