How do social media and ‘real life’ friendships differ?

Television and radio's Sara Cox will aim to find out with the help of an Edge Hill University psychologist in new TV programme ON, premiering on the W network.

Airing on Monday, February 15 at 9pm ON — a series of authored documentaries — will see the DJ turn to science to discover what it means to be a ‘friend’ in 2016 and whether friendships conducted in a virtual world can compare to real world friendships.

Using an MRI machine at the University of Liverpool’s MARIARC MRI centre, Dr Joanne Powell, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Edge Hill University scanned Sara’s brain to see whether there are physical indications of true friendship.

“While Sara was in the MRI scanner, we projected photos of her close friends, as well as those of acquaintances and complete strangers to measure activity in the brain,” Dr Powell said.

“What we discovered was that when Sara was processing images of her friends, including her nearest and dearest and acquaintances, she called upon her long-term memories of those people and attached emotions to them.

“The results suggest that we find our best friends to be the most rewarding of all. When we use social media and see our Facebook 'friends' we might be receiving some sort of reward, but this is nowhere near as psychologically rewarding as the experience of seeing our four or five best friends in real life,” she said.

As well as looking at the scientific side of virtual friendship, Sara will meet people obsessed with ‘harvesting’ friends, and who are terrified of the idea of being ‘defriended’.

She will also meet doctors who are encountering Facebook addicts and people for who life without social media is a one-way-ticket to panic attacks.

Dr Powell’s future research will explore the function of different communication methods in maintaining social network contacts and whether this might differ for individuals with autism who struggle in social situations due to problems with social interaction and communication.

ON will also feature journalist and author Grace Dent as she investigates romance in the modern world.

With the internet an increasingly popular way to find a date, Grace questions if embracing modern technology is helping singletons in the quest to find true love — or killing romance.

Musician Sophie Ellis-Bextor explores the changing shape of celebrity in our instant access, technology-driven society.

Now that Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat have broken down the barriers between celebrities and the public — making internet vloggers as famous as movie stars — Sophie questions what it means to be popular and weighs up the pros and cons of a life led in the social media spotlight.