A psychologist and curriculum leader
Dr. Raymon P. Espanola is a psychology academic from Surigao del Norte State University in the Philippines, and serves as Director of the Curriculum Development Office, a role that ensures academic programmes meet the standards of the country’s Commission on Higher Education (CHED). He taught at Parul University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts under the Centre for International Relations and Research (CIRR) Visiting Professor Program, where his lecture on the psychology of the digital self was integrated into a course for students, an approach to curriculum he praised.
From the self to the digital self
Not making the session heavy, Dr Espanola started the session on a lighter note. He started with how people play different roles in their lives for different audiences. He connected it with Shakerspeare’s line that the world is a stage. He talked about the front stage, where we self-perform for an audience and the backstage, the part that is not visible part of life. It is where the performance is lowest. And it applies to social media, where a post, story, or photograph is a selective representation. It is only a part of the person that he/she want to show, it is not the complete record of the person. This opened topic of impression management. It is the effort or intentional work of putting out oneself in a way other see. Which he said is not new, people always do it. They manage impressions through speech, clothing and behaviour. But digital platforms make faster, editable and visible to a far larger audience.
The seven features of social media
Dr. Espanola examined what makes online interaction different from face-to-face exchange, discussing features including asynchronicity (time to draft, edit and rehearse before sending), permanence (a post remains and can be retrieved), publicness (content can reach a far larger audience than intended) and availability (the digital stage never closes). He gave particular attention to quantifiability, where approval appears as visible numbers such as likes, turning something once qualitative into something that can be counted and compared, which becomes another basis for comparison with others.
Social comparison, envy and the comparison engine
Moving to social comparison, Dr. Espanola defined it as evaluating one’s own abilities and opinions by reference to others, especially where no objective standard exists, and was careful to say it is not automatically a flaw, people compare to understand how they are doing. He distinguished upward comparison (with someone who seems better off), which can motivate or diminish, from downward comparison (with someone worse off), which can comfort, and separated comparison from envy. He contrasted benign envy, which drives a person to improve, with malicious envy, which seeks to pull the other down, and used the phrase comparison engine for the way comparison runs constantly in the background, more active online because users are continuously exposed to others’ selected achievements. Comparing one’s ordinary backstage life with another person’s curated front stage, he warned, is an unfair comparison.
Evidence, and The Correction
He talked about a research, a study by Ojha and colleagues (2021). Presented it. The lecture went beyond reflection. The study by Ojha and colleagues (2021) in the Indian Journal of Psychiatry, that has 220 students in Gangtok, Sikkim. It used the Iowa-Netherlands Comparison Orientation Measure and the DASS-21. It was found out that time spent on social networking sites was not related with social comparison, depression or anxiety. It simply meant that more time on these sites means more harm way often assumed. His learnings were that claims about social media should be checked against the evidence actually counted. Since the type of behaviour can matter more than the hours.
He set an individual assignment, The Correction, asking students to find a real claim about social media and student mental health, check it, and correct it, extending the session into a lasting habit of critical thinking. Alongside his teaching, Dr. Espanola, as a curriculum-development leader, discussed research collaboration with the psychology faculty, beginning with social-emotional learning, and shared his practice of consulting industry practitioners before implementing programmes so that curricula match professional requirements. Join the psychology related programmes at Parul University.
