The anthropology of social media | Mumbrella360 video
In this session from the Mumbrella360 conference, Mozilla's Maura Tuohy takes the audience on an anthropological journey, and delves deep in order to better understand what our social media habits say about human nature.
Maura Tuohy, head of social and event marketing at Mozilla, begins her talk with the kind of analogy not usually heard at a marketing conference: “I want to start with a story of how an internet meme spread through social media and provoked two 11-year-old girls to stab their best friend 19 times and leave her for dead in a forest in Wisconsin.”
Tuohy clarifies that these girls felt compelled to commit the act after becoming obsessed with the ‘Slenderman’ meme which had found traction on social media over a number of years. “Behind this horrific and unfortunate act were very deep human needs and human instincts,” she says.
“Memes crowdsource our cultural values, fetishes, fears and anxieties.”
Despite the dark beginning, Tuohy’s talk eventually takes a more positive turn. She points to three key human characteristics that are strengthened and enabled by social media, including friends and family, community and having meaning in our lives.
According to research presented by Tuohy, the tears of joy emoji (?) is the most used of all time. Tuohy says this alerted brands and social marketers to the fact we use emojis to communicate and show warmth.
“The tears of joy emoji helps to soften darker emotions. The top 10 emojis are all in the positive spectrum, so if we think about this and what we can try and learn from this insight here is that we want to be seen as positive people. Something that seems as throw away as an emoji can actually tell us something about our personality.”
Tuohy: “Social media is the prism, that held against the white light of our personality refracts into a bunch of different identities”
Hashtags are another example of social media reflecting human nature, with Tuohy attributing their popularity to their ability to help people feel connected.
“As humans we are feeling this need for connection and to build bridges, if you were to look at something like Twitter, you would find those same insights,” she says.
