If you are on social media, you are being harmed
This sentence is from the TED Talk “Unfollowers: A mindful approach to social media”. Do you know those sentences that stick in your head? This sentence somehow remained in my head. Maybe it is because I have already thought about it several times, maybe somehow it is strong and fearful, it seems to appeal to my conspiracy theory side: even when you are careful, you still are losing.
When I was about 18 years old, not sure the precise age, but something around this time, I gave up watching TV: one time I remained three straight years without seeing TV, until one day in Italy, I wanted to learn more about their culture, and started again to watch TV. My family is quite close to TV. When a friend of mine asked me “what changed in your house?”, she was referring to the financial condition, I replied, joking, “the TV set is bigger!”, and it is true. I am not here to talk about TV. But they share similar human weaknesses: they distract us! In the past, I used to find normal to be distract, and it seemed like happiness: happiness is the ability to not notice the nuance and hardship of life; adapting a work I am reading about Flow, it may be a flow state, not much productive, but still a flow. That is what social media does to us: it gives us distraction, as so we can escape from reality; most of the time, the issue is that reality keep coming back. Nothing against distraction, we are all humans, and from time to time, a break is nice!
There are essentially two groups of people “sinking in the social media” [adapting a term from Sergio Cortella]: consumers and content creators; and the middle man is the social platforms, which takes advantages of this by showing ads and more. The workings are so subtle that we cannot see it. And it how good engineering works: did you know that supermarket organizes things as so maximizes the sells?
Shortly, I always had problems with social media. I used to joke that I understand that social media has its benefits, which I am still trying to find, but the price you pay is too high. Imagine you want to get healthy, and the food you have with vegetables is pizza: indeed, some pizza will have tomato; but remember all the bad things that eventually come together. I used to have simple phones for quite a while. Using my close network as clock, I was a later to adopt any technology, some I had just dismissed, such as Orkut. My fear was losing sight of what really matters. I know that life is sad, life is tough, life is unfair. Most people go to a cycle of drinking, and similar; I am not talking about abusive use of alcohol, people drink “to forget about life for a while” [Billy Joe]
I believe, like TV, social media works on the unconscious[1]: some estimates that about 90% of our action are on the unconscious level somehow, this number may vary, but still, it is something above 50%. In one experiment, people were asked their opinion about a topic: they found that their option was correlated with the latest news, people are just replicating, unconsciously, the latest news, and sure it is their opinion. In another experiment, they gave people strong reasons to see their opinions were stupid, they could not believe that they held their option at first place; in another experiment, people were asked about if the companies should let it clear that they use DNA on their food, they said yes! The point is, every food has DNA, it is life! See how people have no idea about their own actions.
In my case, I have noticed the gravitational pull from social media in several occasions. One is when you post something, and you get anxious for the reply, comment, and likes of “someone”, like when you make a joke, and you wait for someone to laugh, even though the person that now laugh with you, later will laugh at you; you are so desperate for the validation that even the clown in town is okay for you; have you noticed how hard it is not to gossip? I believe social media tamp into very old human circuits. Even though we are modern man and woman, we still have a brain that tries to survive; have you ever gotten angry with you for being angry? It is a fight between modern society codes, wherein you should be emotionally mature, control you anger, and old circuits (e.g., amygdala).
Is there a way to use social media healthy? Not sure. My very first post on Facebook was about using this platform wisely, I wanted it to add to my life, not take way. My current mission on Facebook “sharing topics I am enthusiastic about, and possibly contributing to my network”. Am I succeeding? Not sure, it seems not. Here goes a couple of reasons:
· It is hard to fight the battle of Ego. Tasha Eurich in her book about self-awareness talks about the strong correlation about narcissism and social media; we are all victim of our own images;
· People are too distract to pay attention; I am on several groups, the groups generally does not serve their purposes; on a group of students that holds scholarships, I believe, they should be at least minorly interested in scientific articles, even if it is general, aftermath, they are future scientists: the only posts that get engagement, mine, are about something like “this is an absurd”, it is amazing that whenever I post something for discussion, hoping I would find other geeks to geek out, failure!
· The whole system is designed to grab your attention, at all cost; if you want to inform yourself, you will just see posts similar to the one you have already seen; I used to save a link to my profile, so I could go straight, it seems it is no longer possible; should you want to post, you have to navigate through a sea of posts about foods, babies and dogs suffering;
In essence, social media somehow plays with our biggest weaknesses, such as our fear of being left out of the herd, of being dismissed. Some are calling this “the culture of cancellation”: the pain of being cancelled somehow, and I can relate, I was just cancelled from a scientific group, for posting too much, at least I believe that was the reasons!
Even though voices in my head say about the benefits of social media, I am still to find it. Would you sell peanuts to everyone you know? I believe not! I believe somehow you have an idea about who likes peanuts, and avoid annoying others. What we do, and I am on this list recently, when I try to publish my work online, is selling peanuts to people that are allergic to peanuts! I heard about people that succeeded on social media, I mean, work; I always heard about people that got rich on the stock market. Why we give so much value to those “stories”? maybe they resonate to us, and helps our confirmation bias to appear as truth. Not say that social cannot be used as a marketing tool, as I used to say in the past regarding mining information, but for sure we should ask how much it costs us? Not talking about ads, talking about how much energy you have to put it for a single drop of result; any matter has energy to feed a city, the problem is how much you need to give in of energy to trigger this chain reaction, and get our energy back. Maybe we should make similar calculations: how much social medias are talking from you, and how much you are getting back.
[1] I used to joke that an invisible wave comes out of TV, and affect your brain.
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