Social media and us - Part 1

Let take a deeper look into what social media is to us and how is it impacting.

Photo by Becca Tapert on Unsplash

This a new series on social media and us. This part one.

We use it every day. We contact our friends, share photos, and moments. It's a nice feeling to feel connected all the time. It feels like a new home. It almost feels like we can not live without it. Even if we are out of this online social network, we do miss out of information updates and much fewer interactions.

Something which did not exist a few years ago has become absolutely necessary in our lives. It’s time to think about how it impacts our happiness levels, motivations, biases, information input, social lives and more. Let’s try to understand by taking a very closer look.

The fact that we can put the message out there with a click of a button and that message is accessible on most parts of the planet is incredible. It's such a powerful tool. Everyone gets access to this tool without any efforts. As it is with all the tools, it is not the tool which creates the impact but it is the way the tool is being used that matters.

The creators of social media want us to be addicted to it. Get hooked. Use it all the time. They have advantages by doing this. I am not going to talk about the business advantages behind social media. You can watch this beautiful documentary The Social Dilemma for that. let’s focus on what it is to us. We as a system, use this tool every day, how is it affecting us? What are the behaviour and psychological changes?

The feed section

There is a lot of content that is being created. This content seems like they do build our knowledge and general awareness. It’s not very true. With the ability to share photos of life moments, we feel connected but it comes with the cost. If observed, we find a lot of things that are happening to us and affecting us without us even noticing it. Let’s think about it.

Perception is the filter for our knowledge growth. There is nothing as truth. Nothing real or unreal. Everything is our perception. What we believe to be true or real is real. Our perception is built on the experiences and information we take in. The magnitude of change in our perception depends on the source of information. The more we trust the source, the more our perception impacts the information has. It’s important to build our perception in a way it’s good ourselves and the world around us. The main difference between a philanthropist and a terrorist is the way they perceive the world.

People's opinion on a certain aspect changes our perception of that aspect. So we should consider the opinion of the people who we perceive to be right. But social media has given a platform for anyone to shout out their opinion loud to the entire world. We scroll through the feed and consume their opinion, even though we never asked for their opinions. Anyone can post. Most of the time we don’t notice the source. We consume. It has a very huge impact on our perception. Creators hold this powerful tool to change people's perception of their benefits. We fall prey, unknowingly, which is why it is so dangerous.

In my past experience in consuming information from feeds on social platforms. I have gotten obsessed with the things I like. I started hating the things I dislike.

Both obsession and hatred are toxic. On the flip side, these negative emotions of ours are taken advantage of to show more hatred posts we dislike and prideful posts of the things we love. Thus making us love the platform and come there whenever we need some satisfaction when we are stressed. How can we give someone who is wanting to take advantage of our emotions to mould our perception? How dangerously can it impact us? It scared me.

It’s a common observation that we do connect with people with whom our dislikes match more than our likes. We hate something, a friend hates that too. We both spend a lot of time talking about why that thing is not good and why we hate it. Ranting, appreciating others' ideas against that thing. We feel connected. We feel connected cos we hate the same things. This connection is stronger than the connection happens when our likes match. It’s unfortunate. Eventually, we hate the thing more than we did before that conversation. Hatred is not a good emotion. It is cancerous for our happiness. This weakness of ours is utilized by social media algorithms which pushes us to the relevant posts. This not only increases our negative emotions but also creates polarity in society. Haters and fans. Meme wars. Anger posts. Hatred speeches. We spend all our valuable time and energy watching hatred posts and speeches to please our hatreds. To feel good, to feel safe that there are people who hate what I hate. This is a disaster for our wellbeing

We all do know that the feeds are generated by algorithms which constantly watch our activities and recommend what we would like to see in it. This design is very successful. Its like small bites of happiness on each post. It makes us scroll more. There is no end to the feed section. They always load as we scroll. Thus leading to infinite, mindless scrolling. It’s not a definite time we know that we will be scrolling, unlike a movie which is about 2 hours. Small sessions of scrolling through the days add up to a lot of time. Our time should be spent cautiously, being more aware as it is the most important asset.

Our mind is incredible. It has no limit. No boundaries. A focused mind is invaluable. We can get anything done. Our perception, motivation, will power, addictions, desires, anger, reasoning ability everything comes down to what we feed it, what we think about. Focusing the entire mind to do one single thing that we want to give us the most results. By focusing I mean thinking about the one thing all the time. No other worries to distract. Nothing else should matter enough to distract. I would like to term it as spending mental energy.

Spending our mental energy on the things we really care about is very important. It is as important as time. It’s valuable. Scrolling through the feed which is just created to grab impressions is junk. Think about it. Most of the content creators on the social platform wants to increase their impression on their post, increase followers, become influencers. They care about their post success more than what impact it could cause on consumer minds. But our mental energy is valuable. Why should we spend it on the post which is created for their own benefits? Why should we give for free, what are we getting back from it? Imagine there are hundreds of posts and we consume everything and spend out energy for their benefits. It's a disaster. If you want to know about something, dig it up. Find the right source. We all have access to the internet. There tons of books which provide detailed information on whatever we want. Tons of great blogs, research papers.

It reduces our attention span as we get used to thinking about 100 different things in 1 min with scrolling through the feed. We lose the ability to focus on one thing for a long time. This is a disaster. Our work efficiency decreases.

We get used to small videos, contents and microblogs. It gets harder to read an entire book, long detailed blogs, and research papers. If we can think for a while we realise it is already happening to an extent with us. Even though feeds could contain many good facts, it doesn't help. Reading random facts which are 10-20 words doesn’t constructively build our knowledge. Since anyone can post anything, a lot of noise is generated which is always contradictory to one another. The source is never reliable. Books, long reads and many of that will build our knowledge, intuition, perspective, reasoning capabilities.

We don’t have to know everything which is irrelevant to us. But sadly we don’t have control of what we consume when we scroll through the feed. Too much information to process. Most of it is junk. We are what we consume. Checkout Information input article for a detailed explanation of how the information we take in affects us. Media has news. Always. Something or the other will be trending. Some are very disturbing. Like most of the new papers are filled with crimes and unpleasant full activities, our feed sections also have become a source of them. We don’t have to think about every bad thing that is happening around us. It’s not like we can do something about the tons of problems we come across. We can focus on one good problem. There is no point in checking news which fills us with worries and panic which otherwise would have not affected us. It makes us think about all the problems around the globe that are our own problem. We end frustrated, agitated. If done daily, there will be a hormonal imbalance in our body. It affects the way we behave and respond to an event in our daily lives. We become more reactive.

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This content might be a little disturbing as it is against social media. I am sorry. These are my observations which might help us to think again about the activity we do daily. Feel free to leave comments. Share it if you like it.

In the next blog post of the series is about Social media profiling and Push notification. Subscribe to be notified.

-Prashanth

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