Why you keep checking your notifications every minute
July 2019.
I was scrolling down through Instagram when I got a red banner at the top. “No Internet Connection,” it said. My hands froze. My heart rate increased. And then, all hell broke loose. I was running around the house -immediately setting up an alternate hotspot, suddenly fixing the wifi became the top priority.
The connection was fixed within an hour.
But with all this running around, panic and trauma, I felt a question deep inside me- what is this internet doing to me? Why was I facing the same withdrawal symptoms felt by people with substance dependencies?
The target demographic for these social media sites is people between the age of 18–24. The Centre of Collegiate Mental Health did an extensive study of students from all around the globe and found that excess social media use by students is leading to evermore number of people struggling with anxiety, depression, and stress.
Social Media is a drug that almost all its users are addicted to. 83% of 18–29 year-olds having a smartphone use social media for an average of 2 hours. This percentage becomes all the more concerning when we understand that it is greater than the voter turnout in most countries.
Anything that so many of us are engaged in, should be subjected to critical observation. But it simply isn’t the case here. It becomes the norm in our everyday lives-something which is inalienable to most of us, something as normal as drinking water or having food.
The dark side of social media can generally be broken down into four main parts.
Highlight Reel
Social Media is one large highlight reel of our life where we show only the best and the brightest of ourselves. Now, the problem begins when we start to compare our day to day lives with the highlight reel of others.
Almost every one of us has felt sad when they are sitting in front of their tv and they scroll down an image of their friend holding a martini at the beach. A dose of hormones immediately kicks in. All sorts of emotions flood our brains. We feel little. We feel sad.
Social Media is one such reel where everything is happy, people are happy, people having the best lives. However, we fail to understand that those people aren’t always this way- its just one snapshot of their life.
Social Currency
Likes, comments, followers and shares- all of these have turned into social currency. This is known as the “Economy of Attention” where every like and comment is a recorded transaction attributing value. This may be great for selling albums or clothes.
But in the case of social media, we are the product and others are attributing value to us. 65% of social media users have taken down a photo because it didn’t get enough likes. In other words, we are taking a product off the shelf because it wasn’t selling fast enough. However here, we, the users are the product. This is causing us to estimate our self-worth on the basis of what others think of us and then leaving it out for everyone to see.
We are obsessed with getting more and more of this social currency and take as many as 300 photos to get a perfect selfie and then wait for the perfect time to post. Even the most popular platforms are starting to understand this problem. Snapchat is based on the principle that whatever you share is private and Instagram is testing a feature that hides likes from others.
Fear of Missing Out (FOMO)
FOMO is the actual social media anxiety we feel from the fear that we are missing out on a particular connection, event or opportunity. Research done found that 7/10 students would get rid of their social media if it weren’t for FOMO.
Online Harassments
We have all heard about internet trolls. In a study done by Pew Internet research, it found that 40% of people have experienced online harassment. The number jumps to a staggering 73% for women, Muslims, and people of color. It is the actual terrifying part of social media.
Endless notifications get us engaged even further. One cannot focus because of the sheer volume of notifications popping up on the top of the screen. Social Media is an addiction. We tell ourselves lies like “ Just one more post..just one more minute..just one last time.” We feel anxious if we don’t have access to it and are getting more and more trapped every day.
Its high time that we have a serious discussion on social media and invent tools to keep us in check. Because if not, we cannot even assess the damage it would cause to millions of lives around the planet.
