How many times have you been told by your parents to lose the phone when you come to the dinner table? On how many dates have you been rescued by your social media feed when the conversations get awkward? How many train or metro rides have you glided through, travelling along the length of your time-line? This can go on for a while; so let me stop and ask you this : Do you get my point?
Our lives have been hijacked by these teeny tiny smart phone devices in our hands, evidently smarter than ourselves that bring quite literally, the world to our fingertips. While there are many positive externalities to this advancement, I am here to discuss the eminent harm to individuals consuming mammoth of psychologically stimulating information in their daily dosage of social media. Let's dive right into it.
Firstly, let's talk about the time we lose. Have you ever wondered how many of those twenty-four hours do we exactly spend scrolling memes, sharing relatable posts, answering notifications, reading group messages and navigating through beautiful lives of absolute strangers? I dare you to it. There's a little feature in all our devices that monitors screen time of each application - which is safe to say, gives an accurate bottom-line to the amount of time we spend on our favorite apps, also while complaining how busy we are and how we don't have "time" to do things that we really are passionate about.
It isn't just this abrupt number of minutes or hours that are gone, it's also the moments that are lost to the need of sharing, which otherwise could have been what they truly were about. You are at a concert. You paid thousands of bucks to witness the euphoria and energy. You'd rather spend your time finding a right angle to live stream it than enjoy your favorite artists. The process of creating memories has super-ceded our ability to actually live through them. Often times, we feel like we've only had fun when there's enough proof for us to share it and proclaim it; which brings me to the next problem, a rather serious one.
Social media for social animals has had rippling consequences on the pattern of behavior which revolves around validation and acceptance. I believe the spear is two headed and both dipped in poison. With the freedom to write our own narrative and share it with world, there is the danger of feeling a fake sense of high and accomplishment on receiving this instant validation in form of likes, shares and comments. And with the quantification of such validation and acceptance, it's easier to grieve and feel insecure when one doesn't receive enough of it. And believe me in some cases, there is no enough.
It isn't unheard of that people tie their self esteem and worth to the acceptance and validation they receive from society. And when this metric is introduced in a volatile, hyper intensive and dynamic ecosystem such as this, one can very well soar to the highs and depths of peril unfurled. Many scholars refer to this phenomenon as "The Highlight Reel Effect".
We tend to share the best moments of our life in front of everybody. We don't share the moments when our jobs sucked or we did badly on a test inspite of having gone through all of them. As such we end up comparing our whole life, that's made of good and bad, with somebody else's high-light reel. It's an uneven comparison; one that shouldn't have been made in first place, but nonetheless, uneven, unfair and self-depreciating.
Perpetuating this very conundrum, in this specific paradigm, we have the giant economy of attention. It's quite in a boom as the rest of the world is in isolation and quarantine. The time that I earlier mentioned is what the social web borrows from us and lends to these giant corporate enterprises. It is a metric of attention to them, quantified and sold as bits of currency from advertisers to content creators to our best friend from kinder-garden who is now a model and flies international for her shoots. You remember which bar she last hit, right?
The science of customizing your experience, empowered by algorithms that feed on your insecurities and wish-lists to perpetuate this positive feedback cycle is called Machine Learning, Analytics and what not. People pay to learn what it is and how it's used. But if you don't understand a lot - then the lay man's explanation is : what you think, what you want and what you watch - a lot of it will automatically tend to appear more in front of you.
Some may call it magic, but I believe it's only tragic that even though we have so much control on the levers that manipulate our minds, we fail to exercise it and instead fall prey to the designs of these savvy technocrats who use science of psychology to make these services and interfaces addictive. I wish I was lying or this was a hyperbole, but it isn't. It's the truth. There is scientific evidence that suggests neurological bio-chemical reactions entail a sense of alarm, anxiety and restlessness upon interacting with social media and there is also legal evidence of firms using it to maximize the gains of attention economy.
There is a micro-dopamine release at every sense of joy felt while seeking validation online whereas, there is a withdrawal when deprived of constant stream of information. The repercussions of such interactions are intense for our fragile little minds. As millennials have coined the term F.O.M.O. which stands for Fear of Missing Out, we can only begin to imagine the extent of their dependence on these inadvertent tools of social connection. In the many stages of evolution, generations and up-gradations that these software(s) have undergone, man hasn't genetically evolved to process alarm quite the same way.
Bells were used to alarm a city when a household caught fire or an enemy tribe had seized the kingdom. Now they are used to notify us of uninvited news and content that raises false alarm, feeds background noise to our sub-conscious activity and lures us into corporate profits.
The world is too inter-connected and well-informed for its own good. We have news reaching us from every direction as long as we're connected. And somehow we tend to remember the bad more than the good. You open your news feed while sitting in the toilet, and early in the morning you receive notifications about the global tensions, political unrests, social injustices, world recession, celebrity scandals, work crisis, and so much more. The problem isn't you knowing; the problem is the anxiety levied upon you when there isn't much you can do about it. If that information was real and vital in precipitating action, it was worth-while. But in most cases it isn't. When we are doing research or chalking out a plan, the information is searched for and received. It doesn't have to come to us, this way.
The cross-connectivity that enables information to travel at the speed of light has surely raised awareness and understanding. But it has also been speculative, unsupervised and scandalous. It has promoted the ills of instant gratification and dwindling attention spans. The proportional exposure and availability of content promotes our generation towards doing that which is more entertaining than inspiring, more rewarding than reasonable, and more engaging than evolving. It has also lead to unrest in communities by expediating the process of spreading lies, propaganda and rumors.
In the many layers of this dark truth, there lies the gravest of all - breach to personal privacy and cyber-bullying. Hidden behind the veils of anonymity and protection, many individuals have abused the ease and freedom to speak and express oneself through these platforms. Even with numerous security plug-ins and features available, abuse at hands of those whom we so easily allow to connect with us isn't unavoidable.
Having said all that, I still believe that hope isn't all lost. After all social media, like any other technology is just a tool and in itself useless. It's only the way we choose to use it that affects what happens to us and those we're connected to. Fire can cook food and keep us warm, but it can also burn down homes and destroy lives.
In the follow-up of this INSIGHT, you can wait to see another very detailed and precise, but hopefully, not too long a blog-post regarding SUGGESTIONS on how to stay connected and yet alleviated from the perils of this wide web. Hope this was an interesting and helpful read. Feel free to share your views, counter-perspectives and other valuable suggestions in comments and have a good day!
Excellent piece of work. And the title of the blog is also very witty.