Social Media Addiction — Real or Fake?
A lot of people joke about being addicted to their phone or addicted to social media, but how many of them are actually addicted? Parents are probably the people that complain the most about social media, saying their children are addicted to their phone, but is this behavior really addiction. The two things parents are concerned about when it comes to social media addiction is how much time their child spends on screens and their child’s refusal to cut back on the screen time (Miller). Even children and teenagers themselves call themselves addicted to their phones, but the difference is they are using it colloquially instead of literally. It is tempting to call this addiction, especially since our devices stimulate the reward centers of the brain in a similar way to substance abuse, but there are also key differences (Miller). These differences are explained by Dr. Matthew Cruger.
There are contradicting findings to whether or not social media addiction is real or not. Caroline Miller, a renowned Positive Psychology coach, believes that there is no such thing as internet or phone addiction. She is backed up by Dr. Matthew Cruger, a neuropsychologist, who says that “with addiction you have a chemical that changes the way we respond, that leads us to be reliant on it for our level of functioning. That’s not what’s happening here….We don’t need more and more screen time in order to be able to function” (Cruger). His findings show that the basic difference between “internet addiction” and substance addiction is that when someone is addicted to alcohol they are dependent on it to be able to live their life. However, he does say that there might be addict-like behavior when children are required to stop their screen time, when they insist on more screen time, and when they spend their time off-screen thinking about when they will get back online (Miller).
On the other side, Mark Griffiths, Daria Kuss, and Zsolt Demetrovics believe that internet addiction exists. They have looked at anecdotal case studies that show that “addiction to social networks may be a potential mental health problem for some users” (Griffiths et al.). They do admit that there is not much evidence on the addictive qualities of social networking sites, but there is some. One article, written by Suren Ramasubbu, talks about the five different stages of digital addiction, and how there are studies that show which portions of the brain are involved when engaged in social media (Ramasubbu). This is especially critical in young adult brains because they are still developing and too much social media use can be overwhelming and even dangerous.
Depending on who you ask and what studies you look at, you will see people saying that social media addiction is a real and worrying thing, and you will also see others saying that it is not actually an addiction.
Works Cited
Griffiths, Mark, et al. “Social Networking Addiction: An Overview of Preliminary Findings.” NeuroImage, Academic Press, 21 Feb. 2014, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780124077249000069.
“Internet Addiction.” ChildSafeNet, https://www.childsafenet.org/internet-addiction.
Miller, Caroline. “Is Internet Addiction Real?” Media and Tech, Child Mind Institute, https://childmind.org/article/is-internet-addiction-real/.
Ramasubbu, Suren. “Biological and Psychological Reasons for Social Media Addiction.” The Huffington Post, 13 Mar. 2017, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/biological-psychological-reasons-for-social-media_us_58c279a7e4b0c3276fb78388.
