In the 20th century, young Billy Batson used to say the magic word “SHAZAM!” to transform himself into Captain Marvel, the World’s Mightiest Mortal. Now, in the 21st century, do we scream “SOCIAL MEDIA” instead?

Just do it.
Be all that you can be.
Trust your instincts (Luke).

Some of the more memorable slogans of the past few decades exhort the listener to realize their potential. Self-actualization slogans are the mantras that encourage people to buy, join up, or otherwise try out new things. Psychologist Abraham Maslow was one of the thinkers who helped bring the concept of self-actualization to a wide audience of listeners. A question, though: does this evolving electronic era give us any opportunities to realize our own potential and become better people? Let’s go back to Maslow and try to glean some ideas from his words.

Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs suggests that human needs can be grouped together into meaningful categories. After introducing the Maslow hierarchy of human needs earlier this week, we looked at both the basic needs of physiology, safety, and love/belonging and our needs for esteem. If you follow Maslow’s theories (and some people don’t, by the way), these lower levels of need must be satisfied before the highest level of need, self-actualization, kicks in.

As the name implies, self-actualization is all about “activating” and realizing potential. People can grow, learn new things, increase skills, and expand their belief in what they can do. This goes beyond self-esteem; this is about having the confidence to try new things, learn from them, and move on to bigger and better things (another cliché in the same vein as the self-actualization slogans that I mentioned earlier).

We looked at social media and self-esteem in the last post. Is it possible that social media could help us along the path to self-actualization? Let’s quickly look at the pieces and see if there’s potential there:

Morality

Here’s how Stanford University defines morality:

The term “morality” can be used either
1. descriptively to refer to a code of conduct put forward by a society or,
a. some other group, such as a religion, or
b. accepted by an individual for her own behavior or
2. normatively to refer to a code of conduct that, given specified conditions, would be put forward by all rational persons.

Does social media help you develop a moral code or to behave according to a moral code? The short answer is maybe, but it might be worth a more detailed discussion in a follow-up blog post. There is certainly etiquette and rules of conduct throughout social media, but does it actually take on the role of a moral code?

Creativity

There are lots of people who talk about creativity and how to be creative. Generally speaking, creativity deals with the ability and process of generating and developing new concepts, ideas, services, and products.

Simply put: between blogs, social networks, photosharing, podcasts, videoblogging, and more, there is no shortage of creative outlets to use.

Spontaneity

This is an interesting one. Let’s see what Dictionary.com has to say about the adjective spontaneous:

1. Happening or arising without apparent external cause; self-generated.
2. Arising from a natural inclination or impulse and not from external incitement or constraint.
3. Unconstrained and unstudied in manner or behavior.
4. Growing without cultivation or human labor.

I would classify spontaneity, in this sense, as the ability to self-motivate and start new things without external stimulation. In other words, it’s kind of like the opposite of being a sheep or a plant.

Does social media make you spontaneous? Not directly, no. However, it can expose you to different people and different ideas that may expand your horizons. Perhaps social media activity could be a catalyst or inspiration. It can certainly provide opportunity.

Problem solving

Social media can engage your problem solving muscles just like any other new activity does. Whether it’s setting up and maintaining a blog, learning how to record audio and/or video, or take photos, as you learn and try new things, you’re going to face problems. You’ll have to solve the problems in order to get to the next good thing. Social media doesn’t offer anything new or unusual to help your problem solving skills grow, but it can be as good as anything else.

Lack of prejudice

Social media won’t remove prejudice from you, sorry. If you make snap judgments or if you are predisposed to believe certain things, you’ll certainly find a lot of stimuli if you look hard enough. In fact, social media seems to act as an amplifier. If anything, it may make you more prejudiced if you’re already prejudiced. But the opposite could happen if you learn, think, debate, and discuss via social media. I don’t think that social media can remove prejudice all by itself, but it might lead you to some interesting ideas.

Acceptance of facts

No, social media won’t help you accept the world as it is or cold, hard facts any better than anything else can. At best it can put you in touch with people or ideas that might help you change your thinking, but at best that would be a byproduct of social media usage.

Conclusions

So does social media directly lead to self-actualization? So far I’d say only partially. I’d say that social media can act as a catalyst to spur other things on, but it doesn’t start anything by itself. It’s certainly a potential outlet to realize your creative capabilities.

Let’s be honest, this has not been an in-depth look at Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. At best, I’ve tried to set the stage by introducing some concepts to you. There is a lot more to talk about on the topic of self-actualization and it’s going to be a recurring arc here at Broadcasting Brain, amongst the other varied assortment of topics that we discuss here.

I hope you’ve found these posts to be useful and I hope you’ll stick around to share your point of view on Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs and self-actualization in particular. It’s proving to be an interesting and useful exercise for me to write about these concepts – I hope they’re helpful for you as well.

Related links:

Maslow Self Actualization – unlearn:  great summary of Maslow’s self-actualization ideas.

Abraham Maslow’s 8 Ways to Self-Actualize:  Sivers’s article pointed me towards the above link.

Other posts that you might enjoy reading:

• Introduction to Creative Infrastructure 2.0
• Is creativity in danger of becoming the new Web 2.0?
• The hierarchy of human needs – an introduction
• Take the conn dear reader – strut your stuff!
• The birth of a nation – I mean a blog