Broadcasting Brain

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.

If you're new here, welcome! Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed to stay up to date with my latest posts and articles. Thanks for visiting!

Image by miliquin

Esteem, usually partnered with the word “self”, sits near the top of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs, just below self-actualization. As we continue this series of posts about the intersection of social media and the different types of human needs, we’re going to take a look at esteem and see if social media can help you build esteem, both within yourself and back to the rest of the world.

First, the definition of esteem, as per dictionary.com:

Noun: favorable opinion or judgment; respect or regard: to hold a person in esteem.

Here’s a way to paraphrase the dictionary definition of esteem:

Esteem: being respected and well thought of, both by yourself and other people, while according that same good will towards other people.

Maslow’s hierarchy shows that there are five aspects of esteem.

Here are my thoughts on what these aspects are:

Self-esteem

Self-esteem is when you have a favorable opinion or judgment about you. In many ways this is about liking and respecting yourself. If you feel worthy, you have positive or good self-esteem.

Confidence

Confidence is the belief in your abilities to perform well, to do the right things. Confidence (or self-confidence) means that you can think and act without hesitation because you have the assurance that you are thinking and doing the right things.

Achievement

This is all about getting stuff done: finishing projects; and creating new things.  This seems to link closely to the self-actualization level of Maslow’s hierarchy, particularly creativity and problem solving.

Respect of others

Respect of others is the consideration of the rights, thoughts, and feelings of other people.

Respect by others

When other people respect you, they will give due consideration of your rights, thoughts, and feelings

What’s the key to building esteem using social media?

To me, the way that you can fulfill these aspects boils to three things:

• Do good work and share it (achievement, confidence)
• Help other people and win their trust (achievement, respect by others, confidence)
• Be considerate of your fellow human beings (respect of others)

If you repeat these things over and over again and get positive feedback, your self-esteem will grow but only if you believe that you are doing the right things. If you don’t believe that you are trying hard enough, giving enough, and growing enough, your self-esteem might not build as much as it could, so belief is a big, unstated component of self-esteem.

So where does social media come in?

Social media is a tool by which you can do these things and can augment your offline activities. Social media’s powerful capabilities for communicating with people, publishing content, sharing ideas, and helping each other lend itself towards achievement, respect by others, and respect of others.

There are endless ways to publish content, either in blogs, forums, discussion groups, photo sharing, video blogging, and so on. There are endless people to communicate with, help, and learn from. This activity, knowing that you are doing good work and helping other people learn and grow, builds confidence and self-esteem as we’ve seen in Maslow’s hierarchy diagram. It’s a great proving ground to help you feel better about who you are and what you can do.

And, on top of all that, interacting with other people, learning about them and seeing their skills in action, can help you better appreciate and respect them.

In my opinion, these things help fulfill our esteem needs and set the stage for us to take the next steps toward self-actualization.

Do you agree or do you think I’m full of crap? Does this level of Maslow’s hierarchy have any meaning to you?  What do you think?

There’s always more interesting stuff coming up at the blog, so why not subscribe by either E-Mail or RSS reader?

The magic pyramid is an indication of when, or if, you might have some creative itches to scratch.

Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs, the pyramid in question, is a means to understand when and how human beings experience certain needs at different points in their lives. Maslow’s theory suggests that there are certain basic needs that must be satisfied before other needs become active. The top of this pyramid is self-actualization, the need to realize your potential via creative expression, thought and understanding. On the surface, it seems that social media, an increasingly popular outlet for communication, creativity, and community, can help people satisfy some of their needs, although you would think that it fits better with the needs for esteem and self-actualization than at the basic levels.

Could social media help us satisfy our more basic needs? Just for fun, let’s examine this idea.

Physiological

The most basic of human needs are things like breathing, food, water, sex, sleep, homeostasis, and excretion (sorry, but that’s what the pyramid says!): these are biological musts that we can’t ignore, at least for long periods of time. Can social media satisfy any of these needs? Directly, no. Indirectly? Almost never. The only way that it could is if social media activity leads to income that allows a person to buy the staples of life that would satisfy these needs. Don’t hold your breath waiting for that…

Safety

Safety refers to security of body, employment, resources, morality, family, health, and property. It’s all about being able to believe and trust that these other important things in life are going to be around for the long term. Social media? Again, it’s all about the money.

Love/Belonging

Maslow groups friendship, family, and sexual intimacy into the love and belonging set of needs. Can social media help here? There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence out there that talks about how people meet and become friends via the Internet. Family members can use social networks to keep in touch with each other. Sexual intimacy? Well… I dunno. Two out of three seem to have some potential, at any rate.

So far social media has a decent chance of satisfying one of these three sets of human needs. No real surprises here, but it’s worthwhile to at least think about them.

Onto more needs next time. We’ve still got to work our way up to self-actualization, after all.

Why do people blog, create podcasts, develop sets of photos on Flickr, or otherwise create and publish content? Is it a want or a need? I think it’s a need and I want to explore this need (or set of needs) while introducing one of the more famous concepts about motivation and needs.

Psychologist Abraham Maslow is most famous for his work about human needs. His hierarchy of needs is normally represented as a pyramid. The bottom of the pyramid represents the most critical items that we can’t live without. As you go up the pyramid, so Maslow proposed, more complex needs arise.

From bottom to top, the five levels of needs are:

• Physiological
• Safety
• Love/belonging
• Esteem
• Self-actualization

We’re all bound by our physiological needs. We need to breathe, to eat, to sleep, to drink, and otherwise fulfill all of the other biological imperatives that bind us in our flesh.

Without the safety of shelter, personal security, and a general sense of stability, many other aspirations simply fall by the wayside.

For many, the bare necessities aren’t enough. We need to love and we need to be loved in all ways, shapes, and forms.

The next level of needs deal with the compelling requirement to feel at ease in our own skins. We need to be able to accept and respect ourselves so that we can more completely embrace those around us. Esteem of the self is the next necessary step.

Finally, with the other levels of the pyramid complete and fulfilled, we stare up at the top level: self actualization. With this firm foundation beneath us, we can reach up and try to be the best that we can be. Things like creativity and problem solving may represent some of the hardest but most rewarding activities that a human being can do.

Many of us in the blogosphere write about social media. This ability to connect with other people via computers and user interfaces is, among other things, a means for us to achieve fulfill some of the needs from Maslow’s hierarchy:

• Love
• Esteem
• Self-actualization

I think that social media can help satisfy some or all of these three needs.

I’m going to exploring self-actualization here at Broadcasting Brain. It’s going to become a recurring theme, an ongoing story arc that we’re going to engage in. I don’t consider myself an expert or authority on this stuff – yet – but I’ll share what I learn as I go.

I’m hoping that you’ll journey with me.

OTHER LINKS:

A more humorous link at Maslow’s hierarchy, tweaked for social media