Why you should worry about social media addiction
I am a 90’s kid. We were lucky to witness the modern technological era while growing up. We saw people get used to sliding and bending phones from half brick phones and to smartphones later. When we were small we discovered something new everyday, and still we do! There’s not much of a difference even now, we are equally eager just like we were back them to find out the new gadgets released and follow the new trend. That’s why we watch the live broadcasts of leading tech companies every year. As I’ve seen that trend has only gotten more common in the past few years and will increase in the next coming decade. In the present, over 3.5 billion of the population has access to smart devices. They are used for various applications like business, engineering, research, entertainment, social and educational purposes. Some start using laptops, high tech smartphones & devices like smart watches because they need those to work in an efficient manner in the ever growing business world or in their respective fields. But there are large numbers of people who enter the smart world because everybody is doing it! Maybe there’s a need to catch up to the speed to survive but a lot of them are using them blindly without a proper understanding about how deep the internet is or how badly the internet can influence you. So a majority of these people are using these new technologies primarily for social media and playing games which are not that important.
I know that using social media is important for some to keep in touch with your loved ones who are living far away and a mobile game does supply that extra relief which most of us expect from our leisure activities. But the harsh truth is that we don’t realize we are doing slowly harming ourselves by using and depending on them too much. Here are some of the main damages it can cause to your personality, health & behavior.
Low self-esteem —
Social media creates a comparison between individuals by the number of likes, number of followers, and number of comments. This comparison leads to differentiating people into levels. This division is potentially harmful. Subsequently these people try to spend a lot of time on meaningless ways because of this influence & because they need acceptance from the social media crowds. This is another example that anyone can create or destroy personalities inside the World Wide Web.
Fake news —
“Grow up, Raj, there’s no place for truth on the internet”- a quote by one of my most favorite television characters, Howard Wolowitz sums up the problem very well.. Social media is often used to create false opinions among the society. This is very effective in that manner because a majority of people using these media sites do not do a background check on the source of news and verify whether it’s accurate or not. Thus anyone can make false accusations; spread violence remaining undercover, change the opinion of the society for their own benefit, and most importantly other forms of manipulation. A quote by Adolf Hitler is surprisingly explains this scenario for a certain extent! “If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed”. All you need is to wait patiently until the masses dig the fake news and spread all over the internet by concomitant sharing! It’s ironic that it’s very simple to execute with a good knowledge about the social media platforms.
Time —
Today most of the teenagers spend all their leisure time on social media. These platforms have affected the daily routines of the youth in a bad way.
A study surveyed a sample of approximately 50,000 students from the 8th, 10th and 12th grades from 1976 to 2016, representing more than 1 million teenagers. It found in the mid-2010s, the average 12th-grader spent approximately two hours a day texting, two hours a day on social media, and two hours a day generally surfing the internet. That amounts to six hours per day online.
(Source-https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/guid/866DB40E-A262-11E8-99D4-B12939332848)
According to the study, 60% of teens — those between the ages of 13 to 17 — say that spending too much time online is a “major” problem facing their age group, with about nine in 10 teens dubbing it a problem. More than half of teens (54%) say they spend too much time on their cellphones, and 41% say they overdo it on social media.
(Source- https://qz.com/1367506/pew-research-teens-worried-they-spend-too-much-time-on-phones/amp/)
If you monitor the time you spend on social media you should have noticed the weight of that wasted time. I try my best not to use social media like a lunatic but I find myself wasting at least 2 1/2 hours a day using these type of applications (mainly Whatsapp). If you think about the productive ways that you could have spent those hours except spending it all on something not that valuable, so far it has been a good motivation for me to stifle from accessing these sites everyday.
Anxiety & Depression —
Unfortunately social media has the power of making a perfectly happy person completely vulnerable and depressed! Craving for attention in the world, seeing other peoples happiness when you’re going through a tough time, getting less likes or comments on your posts than someone else, creates a division and a serious issue. Think of a person with who’s facing many internal struggles. if he or she faces this isolated situation also in the virtual world, they would feel even smaller about themselves. That can lead some of those to break and eventually to depression. The ironic part is that even though social media was introduced to make us closer, it has now created a whole new level of jealousy, hatred and a platform for crime!
Do you know whether you’re addicted to your social network or not? Think when was the last time you went a full day without checking your social media accounts? What if your favorite social networks completely disappeared tomorrow; would it make you feel empty?
Cyber Crimes & Dark Web —
Unfortunately a lot of us who are using the internet do not have an adequate knowledge about the working and how to protect themselves in the virtual world. There’s a whole side of web called the “Dark Web” which most of them doesn’t even know about. I personally don’t like to comment about what type of a place the dark web is. There is a chance where you could be dragged into one of these parts of the internet by accident bu frequent & careless use of social media. The “Blue whale game” was a result of such activities. Internet is full of malware, applications written for spying, viruses. If you don’t have the right knowledge to avoid these, there’s a possibility you might be the victim of a well-planned cyber-crime. Rape, Blackmailing, Scandals, hacking personal information, cyber bullying are just few of the worst case scenarios of this nature.
(18+) content —
Social media is not 100% free of pornographic material. Sometimes, Kids and teenagers get exposed to these type of content through social media for the first time. This is a serious issue because this exposure might be the cause of a change in mentality or the first step he or she might be unknowingly taking steps to be a sex criminal. According to researches, all the main social media platforms contain a significant amount of pornographic material. Banning of the app “Tik Tok” most recently in India because the spread of (18+) material on the platform is one of the examples for this problem. The following are some interesting facts about the amount of (18+) content in the whole internet.
• In 2015, worldwide, there were more than 2 billion Web searches for porn.
• 20 percent of mobile-device searches are for porn.
• 90 percent of boys and 60 percent of girls are exposed to Internet porn by age 18.
Read more about the content of pornography in social media — (https://fightthenewdrug.org/porn-problem-on-social-media/)
Social manipulation —
Social media is immensely powerful. With the right knowledge and the tools the impact one can put on the society is momentous. For some who’ve mastered the art of manipulation, the internet is a platform where dangerous acts could be performed. As an example news spreaded in social media is believed to have altered the results of previous presidential elections of the United States. In countries like India, Sri Lanka, people tend to change their opinion with the masses of the virtual world very often. I’ve seen thousands of times where the news has been altered to point out a certain parties opinion which is far from the truth. Some of the internet news providers could be biased and working for a certain group of people and the mass majority won’t even know about that! Only a few number of people would go through a recheck of the content that they see in social media. Several weeks ago I found this interesting YouTube video about checking the quality of the content you see in social media. If you are interested I highly recommend you to watch that. (https://youtu.be/MUiYglgGbos)
Due to these reasons a certain group of people can dumb down entire nations with false data or acquisitions. This is cyber manipulation. This has the potential of changing the course of a society for both good and bad! Do not let these people mislead you & the society. Someone can do this easily using a faked identity and we won’t even know who’s responsible in the end.
Brain chemistry —
We all want to participate in actives that will result in us being accepted and well liked. Actively using social media elevates this and cause a wide-spread reaction across our brains’ reward center. At the University of California Los Angles’ researches used fMRI(functional magnetic resonance imaging) to see exactly how teenagers’ brains were lit up when experiencing an app that resembled Instagram, where their photos received likes. “The same brain circuits that are activated by eating chocolate and winning money are activated when teenagers see large numbers of “likes” on their own photos,” says the study. The part of the brain that showed the most activity is called the striatum called the nucleus accumbens. The use of these apps also trigger the hormones and transport them to the pleasure sensors of our body. With time and use of these apps, a time comes where you can’t spend time without using those apps. This stage is where you’re seriously addicted. Everything you do have become a part of the social world. You start doing things just because you can put it on social media. You begin to do less celebrating and more suffocating just because you want to do it to show to the world and not for your own pleasure. You start capturing all those moments in your device but none in your heart and not really living the moment but trying to capture it to put in a social media platform.
Many social media platforms have the option to turn on push notifications, which makes your phone vibrate for notifications from the app. Receiving vibrations from your phone has been linked to activating the reward center in your brain, especially when it comes to receiving messages. A study in the journal Computers in Human Behavior looked at the prevalence of phantom vibrations (fake vibrations) in undergraduate students. Those who had a more dependent reaction to receiving messages were more likely to believe their phone was buzzing again when it actually wasn’t. This might cause problems if you’re always checking your phone because you think you have notifications to look at.
Earning Money —
A lot of social platforms pay the owners of popular pages or channels for their work & creativity based on the number of interactions with their content and the views. This is a good thing considering the organizations and individuals who put a lot of effort on educating, entertaining world citizens. But the unfortunate part is people trying to earn money by counterfeit methods. This results in plagiarism, distribution of pornographic material, violence, piracy. This might be bad influence & encouragement on the younger generations entering the virtual world. A perfect example of this is the birth of click farms. (Check the video by Dr. Derek Muller on click farms if you’re interested — https://youtu.be/oVfHeWTKjag)
Another possible threat in this context is hacking into servers to sell data for the highest bidder. To train neural networks & AI bots, companies need large data sets. The results are much promising if the data is taken from real accounts. Therefore hackers aim these types of data sets and steal them for money. These large data sets sold for hige amounts of money.
I’ll mention one of my own experiences here on fraud accounts. A person I know once applied for an online competition. It was a voting contest and the person with highest Facebook votes was given a brand new motorcycle. My friend and another person was in the front leading the contest. A day before the closing of the votes, the other person gained another 2000 votes surprisingly and won the competition. But later it was informed that the other person has hired a service which makes fake profiles and sells those votes for money to win the competition. Lucky for my friend that company double checked whether the votes were legit or not! But, think if they didn’t?
Speed and Openness —
Internet does not have a controller. Therefore most of the platform is 100% open to the public. This openness can be tremendously effective and harshly bad as well. It is open to anyone to access. Even the parts of the internet which is not open can be shared by someone who has access to those areas in another way. In this way sensitive information, private data could be leaked and used for wrong purposes. This has caused a lot of issues in the past and it will create some disturbing situations in the future for sure.
Other common issues —
· Lack of true passion
·Peer pressure to change
· Lack of social interaction
· Having unrealistic expectations
· Unhealthy sleeping patterns
· Less reading
· Encouraged narcissism
· Unhealthy relationships
· Envy
· Loneliness
· Faked identities
· Worse at multitasking
· Fear of missing out from the majority
My advice for you is to start spending more time in the real world. Your family, loved ones are the true friends that you have. Treasure them! Spend less time on the internet and reduce spending time meaninglessly. But to do all that first you must reevaluate the position where you’re right now! Think thoroughly where you stand, will it drive you mad to live without Facebook or Instagram? Try to be brave and delete unnecessary accounts, or at least deactivate them. That will change your live for sure! There is a new community forming up who are anti-social media. Quitting social media was one of the bravest and wisest decisions I made when I was In high school. In Sri Lanka advanced level examinations are real tough. You can’t afford to lose a lot of time on unnecessary activities. When I told my friends that I’m quitting social media, most of my friends said that I’m crazy and begged me to stay active there. Only few of my friends agreed with me and followed my actions. The results paid off! Only the ones who admitted that social media is not a place where we should be spending a lot of time, did get very good results, while the friends who recommended I stay active on social media got very bad results. Check this video by Dr. Derek Muller on anti-social media to get a better understanding on the bad effects and why you should spend less time on social media. (https://youtu.be/KAo2nmVlfOA)
Social media has become a new threat for productiveness in life, workplaces and to eventually to move forward as nations. Read a book. Write a poem. Play outside. Spend time with your loved ones. Don’t waste your time because there is a lot of important work to do in real life than checking where your friend went last weekend! I hope you learned something from this article & it was a good impact on your life.
