Question
Do people base their worth (social media--wise or personal) on how many followers they have?
Answer
I assume you mean psychological self-worth, not net-worth in a financial sense or something else.
There is clearly no general answer. There are people who do, people who don't, and people who are somewhere in between. So the actual question is, what kind of people base their self-worth on things like follower counts, and how significant a proportion of users are they?
Are they all like this kid Kip Drody from the South Park episode 1404, You Have Zero Friends?
If so, everybody who owns stock in social media companies should dump it.
Ignoring brands, social hacks and other non-canonical uses, you're obviously talking about real people for whom a significant amount of their social identity is online.
What do I mean by that? First you need to understand identity and self-worth in the real world.
Think of your identity as having an inner layer defined by you in non-social ways (personal identity) and an outer layer that is a response to what you think people think about you (social identity). For ordinary people, self-worth is a function of both personal identity (which is shaped by transformational experiences and is intrinsic in a sense) and social identity. Unless you are severely messed up, having many people in your life who are contemptuous of you will definitely have an impact on your self-worth, and you will form appropriate defenses. Unless you are severely messed up in a different way, having many people in your life esteem you will also have an impact, and you will form appropriate defenses against that as well (basking in esteem is actually not as easy as it sounds).
A basic prerequisite for constructing an identity out of your reading of what people think of you is that there are, in fact, people who think about you at all. I remember a wise saying from my childhood, "When you are 20, you wonder what people think about you. When you are 40, you don't care what they think of you. When you are 60, you realize they haven't been thinking about you at all."
This is, as a first approximation, true for a lot of people.
So the raw material for social identity construction, at first order, is the number of people who have any opinion about you at all.
Traditionally, for non-celebrities, this was simply your friends, family and coworkers.
Add the Internet, and you add people who e-know you.
How serious is the latter fraction?
Not at all serious if you don't put any effort into your online persona (i.e., you only have a Facebook profile to connect with real-world contacts, and only use twitter to consume news and links from our favorite sources). If you are of this kind, follower count is irrelevant since it is most likely a subset of your real-world friend/family/coworker set.
The number that matters is the size of the real world set. Your real-life social identity subsumes your online one, so your self-worth is not linked to your online follower count etc.
But if your online identity represents significant investment (such as for a blogger), yes, the number means something, because it will likely be much larger than your real-life social identity contributors, and because you will likely know nothing about them other than that they have a non-empty opinion of you. Adjusting for bots and other noise, this is people who self-selected into your social identity.
How significant a fraction are such people?
I'd estimate, maybe 20-25% of active users of social media sites are of this type, with a significant "online surplus"
There is clearly no general answer. There are people who do, people who don't, and people who are somewhere in between. So the actual question is, what kind of people base their self-worth on things like follower counts, and how significant a proportion of users are they?
Are they all like this kid Kip Drody from the South Park episode 1404, You Have Zero Friends?
If so, everybody who owns stock in social media companies should dump it.
Ignoring brands, social hacks and other non-canonical uses, you're obviously talking about real people for whom a significant amount of their social identity is online.
What do I mean by that? First you need to understand identity and self-worth in the real world.
Think of your identity as having an inner layer defined by you in non-social ways (personal identity) and an outer layer that is a response to what you think people think about you (social identity). For ordinary people, self-worth is a function of both personal identity (which is shaped by transformational experiences and is intrinsic in a sense) and social identity. Unless you are severely messed up, having many people in your life who are contemptuous of you will definitely have an impact on your self-worth, and you will form appropriate defenses. Unless you are severely messed up in a different way, having many people in your life esteem you will also have an impact, and you will form appropriate defenses against that as well (basking in esteem is actually not as easy as it sounds).
A basic prerequisite for constructing an identity out of your reading of what people think of you is that there are, in fact, people who think about you at all. I remember a wise saying from my childhood, "When you are 20, you wonder what people think about you. When you are 40, you don't care what they think of you. When you are 60, you realize they haven't been thinking about you at all."
This is, as a first approximation, true for a lot of people.
So the raw material for social identity construction, at first order, is the number of people who have any opinion about you at all.
Traditionally, for non-celebrities, this was simply your friends, family and coworkers.
Add the Internet, and you add people who e-know you.
How serious is the latter fraction?
Not at all serious if you don't put any effort into your online persona (i.e., you only have a Facebook profile to connect with real-world contacts, and only use twitter to consume news and links from our favorite sources). If you are of this kind, follower count is irrelevant since it is most likely a subset of your real-world friend/family/coworker set.
The number that matters is the size of the real world set. Your real-life social identity subsumes your online one, so your self-worth is not linked to your online follower count etc.
But if your online identity represents significant investment (such as for a blogger), yes, the number means something, because it will likely be much larger than your real-life social identity contributors, and because you will likely know nothing about them other than that they have a non-empty opinion of you. Adjusting for bots and other noise, this is people who self-selected into your social identity.
How significant a fraction are such people?
I'd estimate, maybe 20-25% of active users of social media sites are of this type, with a significant "online surplus"