Social psychologists have known for decades that people are motivated to work harder when others are watching. When they are observed, people run faster, are more creative, and think harder about problems.

People change their behavior when they know they’re being watched. And on social media, somebody can always look at you.

There's a key point that our actions do fundamentally change in some ways when we think someone's watching us. David Elkind, a child psychologist of high repute (repute as a psychologist I mean, not as a child), coined the term Imaginary Audience in 1967. He coined it to point to a belief that we are under constant observation by peers.

I suppose it is better to say that the machine mediates the attention of others. But there is something about the nature of that mediation that transforms the experience of being the object of another’s attention to such a degree that it may be inadequate to speak merely of the attention of another. By comparison, if I discover that someone is... See more