The War On Social Media: ‘A New Public Enemy Number One?’
In 1971, US President Richard Nixon declared the war on drugs by announcing drug abuse to be “public enemy number one.”
A reaction to the concern about the widespread availability of drugs and their effects on young people and local communities.
Fast-forward 50 years, and we might face a different crisis:
“There’s a substantial body of research showing a strong association between smartphone addiction, shrinkage of the brain’s gray matter, and “digital dementia,” an umbrella term for the onset of anxiety and depression and the deterioration of memory, attention span, self-esteem, and impulse control (the last of which increases the addiction)”.
- Gurwinder, Tik Tok is a Time Bomb
Yes, scary results. But there are no surprises here.
Everyone with a smartphone spends most of their time on social media apps, and the main incentive of their makers is this: To feed you the most attention-grabbing information.
Why? Because their revenue model completely depends on views and clicks. In other words, attention is what sells — as more views, means more ad revenue.
According to the latest statistics, we spend an average of 2.5 hours per day on social media, most of which is on our phones. This adds up to a total of 5 years and 4 months over a lifetime.
As a result, social media usage has become the activity that takes up most of our time after sleeping and working.
Let’s call it an addiction?!
Of course, an addiction is only an addiction (by definition) insofar as the behavior causes harm and has negative consequences on someone’s life.
Here’s (at least part of) the list:
- Social media harm our ability to focus
- Spending time on social media breeds envy
- Social media provoke and promote negative communication
- Social media consumption is passive and is no place for learning
Want to Focus? Get Your Phone out of the Room
“Instantaneous access to the world’s knowledge through the internet was supposed to educate and inform us, but instead, it has created society-wide poverty of attention.”
- Tiago Forte, Author of Building a Second Brain.
According to research by Gloria Mark, author of ‘Attention Span,’ our attention spans have significantly decreased over the last 20 years.
Observing how long someone switches tasks on a screen, it turns out our attention spans have decreased from 2.5 minutes (in 2004) to 75 seconds (in 2011), to now 43 seconds — relatively stabilizing the past few years.
With Facebook as the first global social network launching in 2003, and platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and now Tiktik joining the attention economy within the same timeframe, is it a stretch to label them as culprits? — at least in part.
After all, it’s now almost common knowledge that these platforms have engineered their services to be as addictive as possible to hijack our attention.
Social apps have made our phones like portable slot machines, manipulating our motivational system to always look for the next dopamine hit. And just like casino gambling, their makers make sure we’re being fed variable amounts of dopamine, using ‘intermittent reinforcement’.
“…intermittent positive reinforcement can encourage the victim to persist — for example in most forms of gambling, the gambler is likely to win now and again but still lose money overall.”
Casinos take advantage of our most primal instincts as we’re evolutionarily wired to seek predictable patterns, but are purposefully hard to find in slot machines.
Imagine our hunter-gatherer ancestors, trying to figure out what bushes to return for good berry picking, or where to find the best hunting spots. Predictable patterns help us secure resources more effectively which is good for survival, and (like casinos) social media engineers have figured this out.
We keep coming back to Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok because we instinctively know we’re going to get a dopamine hit but we don’t know when we’re going to get it. Like a hunter anxiously watching the tracks of a deer.
If you’re a knowledge worker, working on a laptop most of the time, this must be familiar:
While looking at your monitor an uncomfortable feeling starts to creep up, making you want to get distracted from the task at hand. You need a break (or at least you take one).
Before you know it your phone is in your hand, staring at your screen, but you‘re not exactly sure why and what you’re looking for. No new (or important) messages to be found and your phone didn’t buzz…
Let’s face it, checking your phone has become an unconscious habit. And because it’s now a habit, you will keep finding yourself back there — even when there’s nothing to find.
Yes, most often you’ll find a delicious dopamine snack, but here’s the catch: When you go back to work, your ability to focus has been compromised due to “Attention Residue”.
The idea is this: Our brain can’t easily shift its focus from task to task, or from distraction to task. Some of our attention is left behind, and it takes time before we’re fully refocused again. In fact, every time our attention has been pulled away, it takes on average 23 minutes before our full attention is back on a task.
Okay, so let’s just turn our sound and notifications off?
The idea is right. And it certainly helps us have fewer immediate distractions. But it’s also been proven the mere presence of our phones in the room is enough to reduce our ability to fully concentrate on something we’re trying to aim our attention at.
It’s like a mental splinter in your field of focus, subtly nagging you if you don’t get it out.
The Social Comparison Machine
“Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what’s going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them”.
An aspiring goal. However, due to our human nature, platforms like Facebook have an unexpected side effect: Social Media is a social status comparison machine that breeds envy.
As early as 2013, a study demonstrated the passive following of others on Facebook triggers feelings of envy. More importantly, research revealed that people driven by envy are more likely to experience poorer mental health and well-being.
Specifically, this envy turns out to be mostly triggered when users see their online ‘friends’ post about new experiences.
And it makes sense.
By constantly offering windows into the lives of others who have (or appear to have) particularly exciting lives, we can also constantly compare ourselves. On Instagram, for example, we’re bombarded with the ‘perfect’ lives of others, leaving us feeling we’re missing out on experiencing life to the fullest.
In a strange way, this comparison is addictive in and of itself. We often feel the need to constantly check in to see what others are doing, leading us to spend even more time there.
For most of human history, this was incredibly important. In smaller tribes, we needed to constantly check the activities of others to learn better ways of hunting, gathering resources, or more effective strategies for attracting a mate. Moreover, we had to constantly check our position in the tribe to see if we weren’t lacking behind and staying relevant.
In other words, social comparison is a product of evolution and is deeply rooted in our human psyche. In the age of the internet, however, instead of comparing ourselves to a small community of people, we can instantly compare ourselves to more than 7 billion individuals.
“What drives the world isn’t greed. It’s envy. Our lives are objectively the best Humanity has ever had. Yet complaining and dissatisfaction are high as ever.
Humans don’t want their lives to just be better. They want them to be better than their neighbours, and their parents, and the people they see on social media.
This way a highly connected life is influencing your expectations and envy through comparison”.
- Charlie Munger
But here’s the reality: Social media is mostly a warped, filtered world that contains no representation of the actual reality of someone’s life.
Don’t let your happiness be dependent on the fictional lives of others fed to you by the social comparison machines.
In the words of Theodore Roosevelt:
“Comparison is the thief of joy”
The Home of the Wicked
On the latest appearance of Jordan Peterson on the Joe Rogan podcast, he shared an interesting idea: What if social media platforms provoke and promote disagreeable, dishonest, aggressive, and manipulative behaviors?
Let’s look into some research to back this up:
“The present study investigated the relations between the Dark Triad personality traits (i.e., Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy), distinct dimensions of self-disclosure online (i.e., honesty, amount, positive valence, and intent) and selfies related behaviours (taking, posting, and editing selfies). The results indicated, that all three Dark Triad components were positively correlated with posting and editing on social networking sites”.
— Sanecka 2018.
In other words, of all of the people you follow on social media, those who have a Dark Triad personality tendency are the most active.
Quite disturbing… as Narcissism (those who believe themselves above others), Psychopathy (those who do not value others in any way), and Machiavellianism (those who use the information to manipulate others) are not the behaviors that you want to expose yourself to.
Looking at internet use in general, previous research found a strong relationship between the Dark Triad personalities and the use of aggressive internet communication, such as using swear words, cyber-trolling, and cyberbullying.
Ever felt like the comment section of a Twitter post or YouTube video was like a snake pit? As people with Triad tendencies are more likely to have compulsive (and even addictive) internet use, they might be dominant within online discourse.
Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, where people mostly share updates about their lives, can be particularly popular among narcissists (or people with narcissistic tendencies).
This is because a narcissist’s main effort is to achieve and maintain a high perceived social status (while having no problem with putting others down). Which can be achieved by updating their social media pictures and statuses frequently, with the goal of getting as much as possible followers, likes, and comments.
Narcissistic behavior on social media is all about showing how well you’re doing compared to everyone else — no matter what.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that everyone sharing a lot on Instagram is a borderline narcissist. The point is that the way social media is built incentivizes narcissists to be more present, and can provoke narcissistic behavioral tendencies within anyone.
While social media has allowed us to connect and share with people all around the world, it may have also led to a greater opportunity for negative online communication and inauthentic sharing.
It has become the home of the wicked.
Fast Food for the Mind
Okay, so let’s say you’ve got your phone use under control, unfriended all the vaguely familiar and toxic people in your network, and filled your timeline with ‘useful’ and ‘inspiring’ content for true connection and learning.
Here’s the truth:
Most of the content you consume on social media never sticks because of normative dissociation: when a person is fully absorbed in an activity but lacks self-awareness and reflection.
“Experience sampling and interviews revealed that sometimes, becoming absorbed in normative dissociation on social media felt like a beneficial break.
However, people also reported passively slipping into normative dissociation, such that they failed to absorb any content and were left feeling like they had wasted their time”.
In a way, scrolling down your newsfeed is like rolling down the drive-thru: Quick and easy, but an unhealthy solution for something that should nourish you. Instead, you feel shitty afterwards, and regret going there in the first place.
The point is, spending time on your socials is the opposite of being actively engaged with something you might want to remember. You’re simply not processing what you’re consuming.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with aimlessly feeding yourself with funny, unproductive, entertaining content once in a while. The goal can sometimes be to have a brainless break.
The problem is the addictive nature of these platforms, slowly nibbling away time that we could otherwise have to spend learning, enjoying with friends and family, or any other activity that makes us feel alive and engaged with the world.
And if we’re not careful, we become like a true addict: In denial that we have a problem at all, as the presence of social media gradually (and unconsciously) has gotten more foothold in our lives.
Up to a point we reflexively turn to their use to fill any empty space, but deep down feel like it never really feels like time well spent.
Public Enemy Number One?
Medium writer Srinivas Rao summarised it perfectly:
“Excessive use of social media gradually erodes our attention and shifts it from rewarding activities like expressing our creativity and doing deep work — to comparison, envy, and status anxiety”.
So, should we campaign for a complete eradication of social media from people’s lives? — like Nixon tried in the 70s on drug addiction with complete prohibition and heavy punishments.
Maybe not.
If anything, the war on drugs is now seen as a complete disaster that didn’t reduce the use and availability of drugs at all.
It was also based on the black-and-white presumption that all drugs are bad and drugs are always bad. But just like many of the black-listed drugs at that time, forms of social media may have great benefits in the right setting. Like building global communities, staying in contact with friends, or even creating new friendships.
For this reason, we shouldn’t act too quickly and announce social media to be the new ‘public enemy number one’. Still, we do have to admit there are undeniable problems.
Having the most effective drug abuse policies in the world, we might learn from how the Swiss and Dutch governments tackled the epidemic: interventions based on prevention, rehabilitation, and therapy.
So do we need to have social media rehab clinics and therapists?
Who knows what the right solutions are.
However, let’s start by informing everyone about the dangers, and then collectively find and develop solutions to transform social media into its rightful purpose:
To give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.
