Facebook Addiction in Relation to Authenticity, Self-Presentation, and Psychological Well-Being

Abstract

Facebook has become ubiquitous with people of all ages and more than 1.9 billion daily active users. It allows people to portray themselves through their online profile.The aim of research was to establish a link between Facebook addiction and the inconsistency between the user’s online self and the self in the real world including other attributes such as personality, authenticity and psychological well-being of a Facebook user. Using appropriate questionnaires, data was collected from a sample of 618 university students of age range 18-30 years through purposive sampling in this time-bound cross sectional study. People addicted to Facebook were likely to have a distorted self-presentation on Facebook with poor authenticity and psychological well- being. Findings show that poor authenticity causes a drastic split between the real self and the online self which gives rise to several forms of pathology and further degrade mental health. The results have important implications in understanding the encompassing effect social media is having on our concept of self.