3: The Self
3.0 The Self
Dr. Hammond Tarry and Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani
Social Media – Living Our Social Lives Online
Recent statistics report that there are around 5.56 billion global Internet users as of 2025 – roughly 67.9% of the world’s population. This number will likely continue to grow, particularly as mobile technology becomes increasingly available.
In addition to increased access to the Internet, people across all regions of the globe are spending more time online. Adult internet users spend approximately 6 hours and 38 minutes online each day. 5.78 billion people use a mobile phone today, which equates to 70.5 percent of the world’s total population. There are around 5.24 billion social media identities, which equates to 63.9% of all people on Earth. And on average, people spend about 2 hours and 21 minutes on social media each day. These social networking users are also drawn from increasingly diverse demographic groups.Social psychologists have become very interested in why and how so many of us are conducting an increasing number of our social interactions online, particularly on social networking sites. Like any social context in the offline world, sites like Instagram and TikTok provide an environment where a wide range of human social cognition, affect, and behavior can be displayed, from posting selfies and status updates to communicating our views on social issues. One area of social psychology that seems particularly relevant to these online activities is the study of the self—our thoughts and feelings about who we are and the social influences on them. In many ways, the online social behaviors outlined above both affect and result from people’s perceptions of and feelings about themselves, and their desire to project those selves into the social worlds they belong to. Often, these dynamics in our online lives mirror those that social psychologists have long recognized as operating in our offline lives. We will thus explore the various aspects of the self in relation to both our offline and online social lives throughout this chapter.Source: Digital 2025: Global Overview Report.
At the foundation of all human behavior is the self—our sense of personal identity and of who we are as individuals. Because an understanding of the self is so important, it has been studied by psychologists for many years (James, 1890; Mead, 1934) and remains one of the most important and widely researched topics in social psychology (Dweck & Grant, 2008; Taylor & Sherman, 2008). Social psychologists conceptualize the self using the basic principles of social psychology—that is, the relationship between individuals and the people around them (the person-situation interaction) — and the ABCs of social psychology—the affective, behavioral, and cognitive components of the self.
In this chapter, we will first consider the cognitive aspects of the self, including the self-concept (the thoughts that we hold about ourselves) and self-awareness (the extent to which we are currently focusing our attention on our own self-concept). Then we will move on to the role of affect, focusing on concepts such as self-esteem (the positive or negative feelings we have about ourselves) and the many ways we try to build positive self-esteem. Finally, we will consider the social aspects of the self, including how we present ourselves to others to project a positive self-image, as well as the many ways our thoughts and feelings about ourselves are shaped by our relationships with others.
Image Attributions
Tween Cell Phone Texting by Carissa Rogers is licensed under a CC BY 2.0 license
References
Principles of Social Psychology – 1st International H5P Edition Copyright © 2022 by Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani and Dr. Hammond Tarry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
