By: Jacob Martinez
For the last couple of decades, mobile technology has emerged to help communicate with friends, family and other people a part of the community. Mobile technology has also been said to help people identify who they are. When we discuss the topic of self-extension, smartphones are attached to people on a daily basis as some people use it for daily reminders, or rather just for reaching out to other people a part of their community. In my eyes, people are able to identify who they are through social media and reach out to other individuals and social groups to better understand who they are, and their common interests.
This week I understood the definition of self-extension by reading “Explicating self-phones: Dimensions and correlates of smartphone self-extension.” In this article, Morgan Quinn Ross and Joseph B. Bayer explain how a mobile device can be described as an extension to ones self. Along with that they explore and describe how a physical object that sticks with a person through their life, typically describes who they are as a person. The article also describes how with the rise of smartphones, “these trends, Belk (2013) updated self-extension to reflect the increasingly digital world (see also Sheth & Solomon, 2014), specifying five crucial points of departure from the original concept: dematerialization, re-embodiment, sharing, co-construction of self, and distributed memory”. These five points from the original concept help explain how involved smartphones are in a persons life and how it can define a person. With the increase in smartphone development, people have been able to create avatars of themselves, share more content through different media platforms, edit photographs with high-tech technology, and save content or photos on their mobile device.
When we look at the Psychology side of self-extension, we can understand that a persons behavior can be changed or shaped by watching other people share content through social media. For example, if a person were to follow a celebrity on a social media platform, they may shape themselves to behave and look similar to the celebrity they follow. While this may be seen as a more negative image, smartphones do have a big part in helping people identify who they are. People are able to reach out to different people in the community who may identify themselves in a similar way, and it ensures that people create relationships with similar people in the same community.
From the research that was provided, the article describes how one of the biggest issues that we face is the attachment issues of a smartphone. Mobile technology can be very addicting to a ton of users, and researchers have been studying the types of withdrawals during separation. Another concept that is discussed is the relationship between oneself and a smartphone. In my opinion I believe that there is an issue with smartphone users being categorized based off of the product they use. For example, there is a divide when we discuss Apple IPhones and Samsung products. I think that a lot of people see the two companies as very different, and people will create these stereotypes about other individuals.
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