She wasn’t one of the first people on Facebook but she
quickly became fascinated when Twitter started to grow because
she could see how quickly content moved and how people could
interact in a new way. With her background in sport marketing she
saw clearly how this tool could help fans and athletes connect to
each other. She became fascinated by what athletes would do if they
had unmediated access to people to promote themselves.
“It’s a power that’s fundamentally changed how we com-
municate because it’s not always face to face. If I follow an athlete
and interact with them, I sometimes think I know them better than
I do.”
I asked her about the influence of social media on sensation-
seeking. “I do think that it does play a role because of how handy it
is, how easy it is to share what you’ve done on your phone, on the
phone that most people carry around, that you have access to
videos or their own accounts where they’re sharing the crazy things
that they do.
“People doing that are looking for the followers to follow
them and they are getting a high from that.” But there’s another
thing. Social media can be really rewarding.
Mauricio Delgado, associate professor of psychology at
Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, says that social media
can have an effect similar to face-to-face interactions. “The same
brain areas that are activated for food and water are activated for
social stimuli,” he says. “This can be a smile, someone telling you
you’re doing a great job or you’re trustworthy, or you’re a nice
person, or even merely cooperating with somebody. All of these
social reinforcers are abstract but show similar activity in the
reward centers of the brain. This suggests that, perhaps, if you’re
getting positive feedback in social media – ‘likes’ and shares and
retweets – it’s a positive ‘reinforcer’ of using social media, and one
that allows you to a) get the positive effects of it, and b) return to it
seeking out more social reinforcement.”^36
So not only can you do it for the experience of the moment,
but also now it’s easy to get rewards from thousands of people you
may not even know. Remember Jeb? Last time I checked he had over
70,000 Instagram followers (roughly the population of Napa,
California or Kalamazoo, Michigan) all commenting and “liking”
the things he posts.^37
“I think they trigger some of the same things and reactions
you get from the thrill-seeking behavior,” Dr. Pegoraro explained.89 / Sports and Adventure in High Sensation-SeekingDownloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:19:03, subject to the Cambridge