If sitting
is the new smoking, social media is the new cocaine.
About
social media, a former Mozilla employee, during an interview with BBC’s
Panorama programme this week, said that ‘it's as if social media companies are
taking behavioural cocaine and just sprinkling it all over your interface and
that's the thing that keeps you like coming back and back and back.’
As a saying
about advertising from the nineteen-seventies goes, if you're not paying for
the product, you are the product. They addict you, record your viewing habits,
and then trade your time, i.e. sell your data to advertisers.
Every day, three
billion Snapchat snaps are exchanged, three hundred and fifty million photos
uploaded on Facebook, and close to a hundred million photos shared on Instagram.
That mindless scrolling through our social media feeds! That endless checking
of our phones! Facebook, Instagram,
Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Snapchat, Tumblr, Pinterest, Reddit. The list is
not exhaustive.
They say
their aim is to help you connect with the world, although conversely we have
lost the real connection. We have books – iBooks, Kindle, etc., but we don’t read
them. We have hundreds of friends, albeit on Facebook and other social media
platforms, but we don’t talk to them. The more online friends we have, the less
real friends we have.
A report by
the Education Policy Institute in the UK last year suggested that moderate use of
Facebook, Twitter, and other social media channels may have some benefits for
children in building up their resilience, developing their social skills, and also
enabling them better access to emotional support and help.
But then some things in moderation don’t work. Social media, for most of us, is one of them, hence we invent syndromes such as ‘Facebook Addiction Disorder’ and ‘Facebook depression,’ and their bogus solution (one of which is called digital detox). It’s a collective failure.
But then some things in moderation don’t work. Social media, for most of us, is one of them, hence we invent syndromes such as ‘Facebook Addiction Disorder’ and ‘Facebook depression,’ and their bogus solution (one of which is called digital detox). It’s a collective failure.
