Are you an introvert or an extrovert? It’s a question you might have run into while browsing Facebook or Pinterest. Maybe in the form of a six-question quiz titled “Discover who you are!” with the outcome placing you in one group or the other. Extroverts are characterized as talkative socialites and introverts as quiet recluses. The truth is these personality types were never intended to be used as categories to put people in. Extrovert and introvert originated as a part of a scale of five basic behavioral traits. While people can certainly lean more towards one side or another, “extroverted” and “introverted” are hardly suitable for defining modes of sociability. They are, however, useful for identifying how we socialize. And from this perspective, I think there exists a growing trend in introversion.
How would you describe an introvert? A book-loving person who walks through parks pondering the fabric of reality? Not likely. We live in a time where people who are not outwardly expressive in public can still be sociable. Hardly anyone really prefers isolation — we naturally seek connections with others to gather a sense of belonging. To avoid public engagement, introverts are more likely to use current technologies to develop “virtual communities.”
Back in 1998 a study was carried out by Katelyn McKenna and John Bargh to find out why marginalized groups bond over Internet newsgroups. They found that people with marginalized identities could not, essentially, “speak their mind” in public social engagement and were more likely to label their “real self” as their Internet personality. To follow it up, a 2002 study in the journal of “CyberPsychology & Behavior” found that the user’s personality type affected the motive and importance of social interaction through the Internet. The conclusion was that introverts are more likely to form virtual communities, while extroverts stick to traditional communication.
However, there’s a flaw with this kind of thinking. It stems from the assumption that personality types predate Internet usage. That is to say, you were already an introvert or an extrovert before you started reading this. Before you created a Facebook account or even used a cell phone, your personality type predated and predicated your decision. While this may have been true before the turn of the century, we’ve entered a new era where digital technology is so prevalent that the majority of young adults are socially engaged through the Internet. Whether it’s friends, family or total strangers, the majority of us are communicating through Facebook, Skype and cell phones.
As a result, the scale of our community has changed drastically. No longer do we form virtual communities solely on identity alone. We have blogs, Twitter accounts, picture- and video-sharing sites that we follow and engage with. In nearly all aspects of life we’ve shifted to a more digitally maintained community. Overall, it’s a less publicly engaged and more “introverted” lifestyle.
In this greater scope of community, we lessen the need to engage with the public community. This overall shift is also directly affecting our personalities, and with the greater capacity to pick and choose one’s digital community there is less of a need to engage with one’s immediate social community. As college students our generation is noticeably less engaged than college students from the ‘60s. So does Internet usage increase the amount of introverts in society? Possibly. But the need to have face-to-face interaction is certainly reduced when you can have a safe, digital community of like-minded people.
It is the development of a kind of artificial introversion. Artificial because it’s maintained digitally and because it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with actual neurosis. A person who’s quiet at school and loud with a computer screen is not necessarily introverted. It’s just a different kind of sociability. However, we still live in a job market that’s very much dominated by face-to-face communication and public engagement. Only time will tell whether “artificial” introverts will have an edge on the market and how they will fare when they are at the mercy of interviews — we can only hope for the best.