Neediness

We all need to feel important and valued, its human nature, just look at Maslow's Hierachy of Needs. Social media has changed this need for esteem into a need for likes. We expect all of our posts to be liked by our "friends" on social media. Not only that, if they don't like the posts we're personally hurt. Similar to Mae who felt damaged after the Demoxie demonstration, when 368 people voted that Mae wasn't awesome. Each one of these votes Mae felt, were from people who "preferred her dead" (Eggers 414).

With social media, there is a more personal dimension to this need to feel important. With social media, I'll talk about Facebook, we can see exactly who liked and didn't like our posts. Before social media, we knew only by directly interacting with others, if we had their esteem and vice-versa. And those who didn't have esteem for us didn't talk to us and we never had to know. On Facebook you become "friends" with many people not based on friendship, but on who they're friends with. Without even knowing these people, but knowing they exist, makes us need their likes. And we feel unwanted when they don't like our posts. This again is similar to the Demoxie demonstration, where after the vote Mae had the power to see exactly who thought "these things" of her.

Social media has also increased our impatience and decreased our self control. When we receive notifications on our phones, we look at them without hesitation. This has become a Pavlovian-like stimulus where we must look at the notification because we expect to see something we like. We can't look away even if we know its going to be painful. Like Mae reading the letter from Mercer, "... she knew she shouldn't read the rest. But she couldn't stop" (435).

Social media has finally made us more sensitive. Social media has perpetuated the idea that there are "haters" everywhere. And with this idea comes people being more aware of and looking for these "haters." For the slightest criticism we quickly label the criticizers as haters. This has made us more sensitive and unwilling to accept a little bit of criticism. Similar to Mae reading Mercer's  letter, "She didn't want to read it, because she knew it would be ornery, and accusatory and judgmental" (434).

Social media has made our whole society needier. We need likes. We need things faster. We need only love, no "hate." Social media has made us needier offline as well. We spend more time online, being needy, which means we spend less time offline. This in turn makes us needier for human interaction in the real world. The Circle has made this neediness more obvious.