Why social media should be categorized as a drug
Yeah I said it! it had to be said , social media is a drug and we should treat it as such.
How many times have you opened instagram to check out your favorite celebrity today? or gone to twitter to see whats trending. three maybe five times, research shows that on average a person spends 135 minutes or one Adam Sandler movie using social media. Given we spend 8 hours asleep 2 hour eating and a couple more hours on the toilet after that, I personally think that that is a long time to be spending on something that won’t necessarily help you.
I’ve always loved apps being an app developer myself and the one thing that we in the app making industry value the most is making people come back to our app. Making the app viral as we call it. We make it look pretty ,we make endless feeds to make sure the user always has something to see,we even go as far as hiring attention engineers who help us make the app more addictive by borrowing concepts from casino games.
This activity that started out as a harmless bid to get more users on our platforms has resulted in the creation of attention hungry,attention lacking,lonely, depressed individuals and it is the responsibility of programmers and all of us app users to address these issues especially social media addiction.
What social media does is it creates broken reward pathways for a minimal effort like one thumb tap. So every time you post a pic and it gets some likes your brain immediately rewards itself by releasing dopamine making you happy, not to say that happiness is a bad thing but constant bombardment of this hormone and your brain cannot get enough and you end up being hooked just like a drug.
Other than addiction other effects of social media include:
- Reduced concentration:
Research shows that spending a large potion of your day in a state of fragmented attention,that is , spending your time constantly interrupting what you’re doing to check instagram or reddit or facebook , can lead to reduced concentration making you not do what’s really important in your life like that assignment or paper you’ve been meaning to do. With a large demographic of social media users being young people in school this might lead to a society of people with no skills.
2. Loneliness and isolation
Most pictures on social media are curated and choreographed and everyone in the photo looks perfect. Constantly seeing this could make you feel like your life sucks leading to loneliness and depression which might lead to suicidal thoughts.
3. Anxiety
Our brain is not wired to be in close contact with more than 100 people.So when you are constantly exposed to millions of people online this has been proven to lead to that feeling of anxiety. Anxiety cases in college campuses has increased tremendously since the onset of ubiquitous social media use.
Proposition on how we can end this
To end this we need the contribution of both developers and the users of these platforms. I’m not going to ask you to quit using social media but with the following approaches we can atleast try to mitigate it’s effects
- App developers need to be more upfront
Just like in drug commercials where the pharmacists have to tell you the side effect of the drug we developers also need to tell the users the effects of using our products.
We also need to set time limits for the hours a person can use the application to ensure that people do not get addicted.
2. Moderation is the key
As app users we need to know that when we use these social media platforms we are taking a sort of drug.I have nothing against drugs being a marijuana user myself we just need to know that this drug has it’s effects and hence we need to treat it as such.
Try and limit the amount of time you spend online and instead try focusing on that thing you’ve been wanting to do.
3. Government regulations
Just like government has regulations on drugs it also needs to set up such regulations for social media use that make sure it’s citizens are protected from the many dangers our society is facing from it.
Closing remarks
I know we all love going on insta and twitter. I myself love checking out @thatblokejesus on twitter and @gretathunberg ranting at old men always makes my day but we need to take into consideration what social media is doing to our brains. Not using our phones constantly leads to you accomplishing more tasks like writing your first medium article (like I’m doing) and generally being happier.
Comparison is the greatest thief of joy.
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