Learning how to moderate our habits is one of the most important skills a person can learn. If taken to an excess, even a good habit that brings you fulfillment and joy can start to negatively affect you. Social media is not exempt from this rule. An addiction and overconsumption of it, is a real issue that most commonly afflicts the younger generations who have practically grown up with a phone in their hands and social media constantly feeding them information. However, a tool can still be learned and mastered so that it provides more benefits and less problems. With the right knowledge, social media can become the tool that can bring people together and increase our knowledge about topics through civil discussion and discourse. Social media can be a useful tool to connect with other people from around the globe to share passions or discuss ideas; however, social media can be a festering cesspool of toxicity and illogical arguing that can lead to a decline to mental health.
Social Media allows people to be more interconnected than they ever have been in history. For the first time in human history, people can not only converse instantly from almost anywhere in the globe, but it is also the first time in recorded history where people can share almost every detail of their private life with the world. A 2017 poll from the United Kingdom’s Royal Society for Public Health that had respondents from ages fourteen through twenty-four state what the effects of social media had on their lives and on their mental health. Out of the five social media platforms they surveyed, Instagram came up the most negative of results. Due to Instagram being primarily used to post pictures of events or people, most participants stated that Instagram leads to feelings of anxiety, depression, body shaming, and the fear of missing out. Coupling these problems with the reported decrease in the quality and quantity of sleep of most younger people and the stresses of going through school can drastically increase the degrading mental health of younger individuals. However, in the UK study Instagram was the worst social media platform that caused even worse feelings of anxiety, depression, and so forth. Why does a simple app that allows people to only share photos with each other seemingly lead to such distress in younger people? Alex Hern from the Guardian may have the answer, “If Facebook demonstrates that everyone is boring and Twitter proves that everyone is awful, Instagram makes you worry that everyone is perfect – except you”. Instagram has multiple filtering programs on it that turn almost anyone into a model given the proper angles and the decent lighting. These features create a false image of people’s lives and body images.
Image 1. The image on the right is the posted Instagram image and the image on the right is the same image with the only differences being different angles, lighting, and the lack of post image editing.
As image 1 exposes, there can be a true disconnect with people’s reality and the false reality they create when they post their photos. Stephan, a twenty-four year old from London highlights why Instagram is different from other social media platforms, “The problem with Instagram is that you almost exclusively share content that is meant to reflect positively on yourself. On Twitter or Facebook, you see much more content that isn’t, ‘Hey, look at my great life.’”. Another key problem that was more concentrated on Instagram was FOMO, fear of missing out. To explain simply, FOMO is experienced when someone sees friends, family, or even complete strangers do activities without you. This effect causes people to set false and unrealistic expectations of what their life should and set unrealistic expectations for themselves. “ There’s the friend whose wedding I wasn’t invited to; I found out about it through the app. There’s the friend who is looking fantastic after every workout and lets us all know. And there’s the friend who lives in New York, apparently over in London for the weekend without telling me,” Alex Hern. This fear of missing out can be a very hard problem to solve, since it hits the hardest when the feeling stems from a post from a beloved family member or cherished friend having a great time without you. The fear of missing out can have a very dangerous effect on the psyche of an individual, that fear can lead to feelings of worthlessness and self loathing that are just compounded on by the highly edited and staged posts of people online. Additionally, FOMO can lead to someone taking extraordinary risks or spending mountains of money in the effort of outdoing someone else’s post and then leading to someone else outdoing their post. This continuous cycle of one-upmanship is very dangerous and at the individual level very costly. Additionally, the cycle of outdoing each other’s posts is often a source of entertainment for many people, and when people are entertained they are hooked. Californian psychologist Louis Mark Carrier has found a link between social media usage and disrupted sleep schedules. Carrier found that people who are more so addicted to their phones than to social media, Carrier states that, “ . . . people who are addicted to their devices are going to be waking up a lot in the middle of the night, especially if they don’t turn off their ringer, or if they keep the phone close to them — some people even have the phone in bed with them, keeping notifications on”. Carrier then explains that the problem isn’t that people go to sleep late, the problem is that the constant notifications from the phone disrupt both the quality and duration of sleep; additionally, cell phones, and most devices with a screen, emit blue light which has been proven to lengthen the time it takes for someone to fall asleep. So, not only will phones delay when someone falls asleep, it will also constantly disrupt the quality and already diminished quantity of the very vital process of sleep. All the negative health effects of social media lead to people not only being out of touch with reality since they spend so much time in their custom tailored reality, but it also is associated with increased stress, depression, and decreased sleep. These compounding effects lead to people being more irritable and angry since they are more stressed and depressed than normal and they haven’t gotten the proper amount of sleep which has been proven to lead to increased irritability. The heightened feelings of hostility result in people not being calm or collected enough to interact with each other. All social media suffers from people not being courteous or respectful to other users of the same platforms. Social media is well known for being a place where people constantly argue with each other, with some people having fairly civil and informative discussions about the topic in the post or the video. However, some people’s discussions lead to a constant back and forth of people spouting off their foundationless opinions and denouncing the other person’s ideas even when they are clearly wrong or in the wrong. This often leads to a us versus them mentality that can lead to whole societies being split on issues that aren’t as black and white as the leaders of the sides say it is. This can lead to people being more and more antisocial and hostile towards others, thus depriving them of their basic human need for social interaction and thus heightening their already heightened irritation and anger. Social media is very correlated with the decline of mental health in many young adults from around the world. The decreased mental health in people has caused them to be more hostile towards others and thus venting their anger on others or even on themselves. Social media has been seen to warp our perceptions of ourselves and others, but most of the time we know that there are filters and editors that warp that picture or post. But what if our perception and news gets distorted from the very top of the editing chain?
As social media grows, so does its influence on how people see the world. In this ever advancing age, news media has continuously shifted, with traditional forms of news media like newspapers becoming more and more outdated and obsolete. In a 2018 article by the Pew Research Center, social media has now overtaken newspapers in total media consumption. The study asked adults where they get most of their news from. Additionally, the study also combined the percentage of people using social media and the percentage of people using news websites. The two forms of media almost overtook television news with television news edging out with only an additional six percent usage, however the study has also remarked that television news has declined since 2016.
Image 2. The graph clearly shows social media surpassing printed newspapers and also shows the the rapid decline of television news and the rapid growth of news websites.
As image 2 shows, our sources of news are increasingly becoming more and more digitized. The results of this growing trend is the increasing fragility of where we get our news sources and who we get them from with social media is very vulnerable to both censorship and echo chambers. One of the more prominent social media sites that has been well known to ban people is Twitter. Recently, Twitter has banned the account of Unity 2020, an alternative third party movement. Bret Weinstein, the head of the movement, has thoroughly explained that Twitter gave him no tangible reason as to why they banned his account, additionally Twitter has censored, blocked, the post of the New York Post’s article of the Hunter Biden controversy. In an senate hearing, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey openly announced that they have lifted the ban on the New York Post’s article on Hunter Biden, but in reality the ban on the article was not lifted until much later in the week of the hearing. Abigail Marone, a rapid response official on President Trump’s re-election campaign tweeted, “Jack Dorsey of Twitter just told Senator Cruz that anyone could now share the NY Post’s bombshell stories on Twitter. Dorsey is lying”. Additionally, in 2018 a online activist group known as Project Veritas has released many videos that seem to implicate Twitter and other social media platforms deleting or limiting users’ posts or even deleting whole accounts. Banning accounts is fine, some users just use Twitter to bully and harass others and those accounts do deserve to be banned; however, the article explains that Twitter and other internet companies refuse to comment or explain in depth their moderation practices and how personal bias in the moderation teams might compromise those practices. However, social media companies are not entirely to blame for our skewed perception of the real world, sometimes it is the blame solely rests entirely on the user. The algorithms that run social media actively try to put users into something known as an echo chamber. An echo chamber, or confirmation bias, is a post or an article that confirms our own opinions and often manifest with the users’ feed being directed to a certain side in politics. This can trap users in an ever expanding bubble that confirms what they believe, which often means a rush of dopamine. This triggering of dopamine is what Science journalist David McRaney believes is why we are addicted to social media, “The fact that social media platforms confirm what we already believe is the reason many people use them in the first place”. These echo chambers often skip fact checking in order to continuously pump dopamine into our brains and hook us on that platform. These echo chambers not only perpetuate the practice of unhealthy social media habits, but also perpetuates disinformation and destructive biases that plague our modern world. Another effect of social media and just a general inevitable consequence with our increasingly digitized world is how social media has altered how many young college students write and how many people young and old are starting to process information differently. There is a very clear difference in many people’s writing style when they write something online and when they write for an academic paper. In a study of Michigan State undergraduates where they were asked to make a diary entry for almost any type of writing they do. The study found out that, “ . . . students often described their social, out of class writing as more persistent and meaningful to them than their in-class work was”. This subtle change in student’s writing styles is neither negative or positive since formal writing is now only relegated to academic writing and literature, but the implications could mean a decline in grammar and sentence structure that is necessary for students in highschool that need to put together well formatted papers in order to apply to college or to write their first resume. Additionally, due to the way information is presented on both the internet and social media people are now processing what they read differently and less carefully. Nicholas Carr, an author that has written many books about how the internet affects many facets of our lives, writes about how technology is rewiring our brain to crave instant and condensed sources of information that we don’t have to think critically about. He explains that the internet and by extension social media has been, “ . . . chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation”. The implications of this new trend are potentially troubling. With many younger people being raised with the internet as a very common tool, they no longer have the ability to study and contemplate the words they read, which can spill over to having the inability to think critically about the problems they face or the words they hear. With the effect of echo chambers subtly nudging us to favor one side of the argument and social media platforms being known to ban posts or users who don’t conform to their biases. These compounding effects cause further political and societal divides that put everyone at each other’s throats with both sides refusing to make a compromise. These effects also create an us versus them mentality that can lead to a dehumanization of a fellow citizen and can lead to people developing radical ideas about their beliefs that can turn very violent. In an interview with Medal of Honor recipient Dakota Meyer he stated, “ . . . but I just think about like in that moment if I can find a way to relate to him in that moment, a man I’m taking his life, we all in America can find a way to connect with each other. If we don’t connect with each other’s because we choose not to”. The power to end societal divides is in the hands of the people. If everyone were to just sit down and civilly discuss with each other their points of and why they think they are right, then many of the racial, political, and socioeconomic problems of our modern society can be solved and the execution of that solution can really begin in earnest. Social media has a grip on many parts of our lives, and is able to not only influence our mental health, but can also influence how we see the world by influencing who we interact with and where we get our information. However, social media is just a very tricky and disruptive tool, but with the proper discipline and habits, the negative effects of it can either be lessened or even negated.
Social media can become a very good way to connect with people from almost anywhere, but only when healthy social media habits are formed. There are ways to lessen or completely avoid the feelings of FOMO, depression, and anxiety that is correlated with social media when someone forms healthy social media habits. Like with many aspects of life, moderation is key. Learning how to moderate oneself on social media can be a very challenging endeavor, mostly because social media has been engineered to keep users addicted to it. The BBC interviewed many former software engineers who worked for prominent social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Former employees of Facebook have likened the platform to a slot machine that keeps its users to keep scrolling and keep wasting their time. Addiction to anything is hard to beat, but with a proper knowledge and self discipline, someone can kick their addiction to social media. licensed professional counselor, Sannyu McDonald Harris, suggests forming habits that not only allow someone to be able to limit how much they use social media. Habits like only using it for a limited amount of time and not using it before bed, and most importantly learning how and when to just take a break from social media. Additionally, Harris suggests forming habits that allow someone to enjoy life outside of social media by focusing on bettering relations with friends and family and just generally living life in the moment. And when someone is able to kick their addiction to social media, that is when an individual can start utilizing social media for its original purpose of interconnecting and informing people. Even though echo chambers and censorship may make using social media as a source of information difficult, it still can be done by simply keeping an open-mind and fact-checking sources that might sound dubious. Admittedly, in this ever increasing world keeping an open and patient mind can be difficult in these modern times, but it is a necessary attitude that continued exposure to opposing view-points can only foster and nurture. Having and sustaining an open-minded attitude allows someone to pierce through the veil of political propaganda and only further their own knowledge of the world and its peoples. Also, being opened-minded lets someone start to think critically and even critique sources of information that they traditionally use to stay informed about events in the world. However, being open-minded can only get someone so far, fact checking and corroborating facts is truly how someone breaks through the walls and barriers social media companies put up. By fact checking, someone can find the truth behind all the perspectives and “facts” they constantly hear. The world today constantly bombards us with perspectives and news stories that are purposely arranged to only see one side of the true story. By challenging pre-held beliefs and attempting to suppress as much bias as possible a person can dig through the biases, the agendas, and misinformation that are inherent in all media we consume. By questioning everything, a person can truly find where their truth lies and start forming their own beliefs and ideals about the world. And by allowing oneself to be open to and cautious of different perspectives, a person can start joining more and more communities of diverse and interesting people. By joining and being a part of communities of people that not only challenge what you believe and force you to think critically of your opinions, but also make sure that when they force you to do so, they do it civilly and only want to further their own knowledge about the subject. Joining new and different communities has other benefits besides just being able to the collective knowledge of everyone else, but the sheer act of varying who someone interacts with fulfills the base human need to socialize which often involves making new friends which has been proven to help people cope with depression and anxiety and lessens the feelings of FOMO. Also, using certain social media platforms that utilizes voice chats is also very beneficial since humans find voice to voice interactions much more meaningful and understandable since the nuances of human speech can easily be lost through just a wall of text, and the voice to voice interaction humanizes the person behind the screen allowing for more civil and informative discussions. Social media shouldn’t be shunned or feared. People only need to be educated about how to use it in a healthy and honest way that benefits every user of that platform.
Social media can be a tricky and elusive tool that requires an educated and learned user to utilize it to its highest degree. Users of social media who are not educated on how to healthy use it, will experience all the negative side-effects social media brings with it. Depression, anxiety, a whole new fear spawned from seeing people do things without you, all of these feelings and mental states being correlated with social media usage due to people creating false perceptions of them self because of highly edited and highly deliberate pictures of others who make their life seem more glamorous and interesting than it really is. Additionally, social media’s effect on people’s sleep schedules makes people more irritable and thus more volatile towards each other. Adding onto social media’s already negative effects, through censorship and echo chambers social media companies distort our perception of the world. Because of these skewed perspectives, people start developing a polarized view of others which can lead to an us versus them mentality because their echo chambers do not allow them to consider or respect the other side’s opinions. However, these negative side effects shouldn’t discourage someone from using social media. The best way to make social media a more enjoyable mode of communication is by forming healthy social media habits. These habits mostly just mean being able to self regulate their usage of social media and having the ability to enjoy life outside of the social media world. Also, developing and keeping an open-mind is crucial to seeing through all the lies and agendas social media and news media is laced with. Social media is a great way to connect with other people from around the world, but without the proper knowledge and discipline the negative effects of social media can overwhelm someone to the point of mental degeneration.
- Keller, Josh. “Studies Explore Whether the Internet Makes Students Better Writers”.
- Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”.
No comments:
Post a Comment