Month: September 2020

As if the universe itself was following my blog posts, it made me practice what I have been preaching. On Friday last week I dropped my phone and it was broken beyond use. My mind immediately realized the irony of the past two weeks. I had been writing a blog post about social media dependance  in humans, and I myself was not changing my habits at all. As I looked down at what was once my phone, and now a shattered screen with pixelated lines everywhere, I knew that now I was gonna experience what I had been advocating for in my blog. I have not used any social media this entire week and I will not be getting a new phone until Sunday. In my long and heroic hiatus from social media, these are some of the things I realized.

The most evident thing I noticed within the first few hours of not having a phone was how often they get pulled out. Every time  a silence or  change of scenery would occur, I noticed that the people I was with would all check their phones at the same time. All at once everyone just synchronously pulled out their phones and began to scroll. I just sat there and observed this behavior that I would otherwise not pick up on because I myself would probably join this unspoken phone time out from reality. Phones make It easy to escape the moment temporarily. It takes some of the stress and pressure off of conversations because people do not necessarily need to be talking. Immediate entertainment and escape in the matter of seconds. It makes sense why so many people are glued to their cell phones.

 

Another unsettling observation I made was how phones and social media not only quiet the scenery and crowd around us, they also quiet our minds. This week I have found myself really reflecting on events from my day and forming opinions and objectives. Instead of scrolling through Instagram before bed, I spent my last hours of consciousness just thinking. In movies such as The Giver, you see societies where governments feed their citizens pills and medication to silence their individual thoughts to keep them oppressed. As crazy as it sounds, not having a phone reawakened my mind and my sense of individual thought and reflection. It kind of felt like a form of enlightenment. The moments I would have usually filled with social media I now spend evaluating and reflecting. My days felt a little longer too because I was not procrastinating on my phone so I had time to fill which before was filled up. There were no posts or videos to take my mind off the thoughts in my head.

 

As pathetic as this may sound, not having a phone made me feel disconnected. I share this with you guys because this is my blog about some of my experiences, and if I am not honest about how I feel then I am misdirecting my readers and giving them false insights. Not having my phone made me feel less connected to the campus around me and my friends and family back home. A lot of the interaction we have is through our online presence. We have our real life figure, but also this other representation of ourselves which is our called our virtual identity. I lost my virtual presence this week and I lost connection with a lot of people. I only really saw my best friends on campus. The lesson here is that the most meaningful relationships are the ones that are formed in real life with people you care about who also care about you. I would defiantly recommend taking a few days to stay off your phone unless you need to and just experience what life is like without these convenient escapes from reality in out pocket. It helped me get in better touch with myself and learn more about the people around me. I am not saying life is better without social media, I simply trying to point out how much it changes our everyday lives.

 

 

Picture Sources:

https://www.saatchiart.com/art/Painting-SOCIETY-IS-A-BURDEN-INDIVIDUALITY-IS-A-FREEDOM/888876/4574701/view

https://medium.com/@stanovsk/one-simple-hack-to-take-control-back-from-your-phone-166a2033cdbc

 

In this week’s post I would like to focus on why so many human’s have become so inseparable from social media. Like many other users, I don’t want to admit that I am “addicted” per se, only that I enjoy using it so much that I do not notice the fact that I subconsciously check my phone five times a minute. In reality I probably am addicted to social media or close to it. A lot of people in our country are actually, about 10% (Hiliard). This percentage mostly accounts for teenagers and young adults. What makes social media addiction so dangerous is its availability. Someone might get dirty looks if they smoke a cigarette out on the street, however if that same person were to be scrolling through social media no one would notice, because everyone else is also staring down at their phone.

Disapproved by society                                  Approved by society

 

In addition to its easy access, there is an unlimited amount of content on these social media apps. Not only is there unlimited content, there is unlimited content which is specified to only show pictures and videos in categories you have showed interest in. The more you use social media the more it is able to learn about you and therefor show you media which you are more likely to enjoy seeing. This is a similar concept to selective advertising, which many companies use to sell products to consumers who are more likely to buy. In order to understand how our brains can be become addicted to something that is not even consumed, smoked, or drank, I decided to do some research on what social media addiction is.

What I found was that similarly to the way that one becomes addicted to cigarettes and other addictive substances, rewards from social media platforms create dopamine, and trigger the reward section in our brain. The reward center in people’s brain is most active when they are receiving positive feedback about themselves. When someone posts a picture of themselves and receives positive feedback through comments and likes, the reward section of the brain is stimulated and dopamine is released (Hiliard).

In conclusion, it is easy to see why people can become so hooked on social media without even being aware it is happening. I mean it seems like such a fun harmless premise. Share pictures, like pictures, stay connected, and learn things…awesome. If only that was the case. It is a combination of the convenience and the rewarding feeling which makes social media such an addictive platform. What sets these apps apart from other addictive substances is that there is no negative stigma around them, and most people are unaware of at the addictive effect it can have. Next time you find yourself looking to social media for a mood boost, be aware of how that feeling can contribute to addiction. One of the hopes for this blog is that the more we learn about why and how social media is so compelling for humans, the better we will become at distancing ourselves from these bad habits.

References:

Hiliard, Jena. “Social Media Addiction.” Addiction Center, 18 June 2020, www.addictioncenter.com/drugs/social-media-addiction/.

Picture Source:

Your Brain on Dopamine: The Science of Motivation

Other two are stock photos.

     I’m willing to bet that wherever you go in a public setting today, you will find people fixated on a screen. At a nice restaurant you can find customers making sure to capture a picture of their food before they themselves begin to eat. The first thing people do when they get to an attraction site such as the State of Liberty is to get a picture at the right angle of them there. The saying “photo or it didn’t happen” is starting to become a very common theme in our world today. If you were to look back ten years ago, everyday life would look a lot different. In 2010 for example, a busy day in New York City would be filled with people being present. Everyone would be looking around and talking with each-other. This was a time before social media controlled our thoughts and actions. People judged others off of their perceived character and features, not their followers and posts on Instagram.  Fast forward 9 years to 2019, and you would be in a very different setting. Crowds filled with heads fixated downward at the virtual world beneath them. We are slowly losing touch with the world around us. 

     In today’s society it is possible to communicate and share with anyone on the planet in a matter of seconds. New opportunities to gain attention and fans. Celebrities can now share pictures, videos, and messages with supporters in a casual and personal manner. Social media clearly has a lot of positive features to it. It is entertaining, convenient, and if used in the right way it can create movements aimed to better our society. An example of this is the Black Out Tuesday movement from earlier this year which aimed to show support of the BLM movement and pay respect to those who were killed by police brutality. However, with all the benefits it has to offer, it is easy to loose countless hours to these platforms. Social media is highly addictive and hard to quit. My goal by creating this blog is to learn more about why humans are so strongly compelled to social media and explore the extent and effect to which different people use these apps. 

     The major 5 major platforms of social media are Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, and Snapchat.  The goal of all these apps is to create the biggest following possible and then post entertaining content which paints whatever picture of yourself you would like to portray. My goal in creating this blog is to further understand why humans are so captivated by social media by paying more attention to the use of technology around me, asking people questions about how they use social media, and being more attentive to my own habits with social media use. Everything I find and any theories I develop will be shared here in this blog and you guys will all be here to join me in this journey of hypothesizing, learning, experimenting, and concluding. Hopefully by the time I type my final period of this blog series we will all have a better understanding of human’s dependance on social media, and will be more aware of the role it plays in our own lives. 

Picture Sources:

Top 3 U.S. states international tourists visit

Phone Eats First