The New Cocaine: Social Media
Just like most of you, I, too, have spent years of school and college debating whether technology is good or evil, and most of the times we were told it depended on how we use it.
It was later that I found out this wasn’t quite true about social media, because The Tech Giants have designed these sites addictive, to keep you scrolling for hours, and push you through a dose of dopamine after every few minutes when you feel like leaving the app, and the reason is obvious, every minute you spend online is making money for them. It means once you dived into this deep sea of entertainment, before long, you lose control, and then it’s completely up to the algorithms where to take you and for how long.
A study in 2012 concluded:
“The mobile is already controlled by habit, not by necessity” (Oulasvirta et al., 2012, p.108)
Down here, I will take you through some of the evils the social media has cursed millions of kids, adolescents and adults with.
1. Addiction:
Addiction has been defined as a persistent and intense urge to engage in certain behaviors, despite substantial harms and other negative consequences. Sounds familiar?! Yes, you have experienced that! You’d be surprised that research has found that:
“Eighty-four percent people worldwide are addicted to smartphones.”
If you’re not addicted to your phone, put it on the table in front of you and see how long can you resist picking it up!
You’d be happy to know that none of it is your fault, because:
Studies have shown that the constant stream of retweets, likes, and shares from these sites cause the brain’s reward area to trigger the same kind of chemical reaction seen with drugs like Cocaine.
2. Waste of Time:
The opportunities that the modern technology has poured out on us, are not hidden from anyone. One can learn almost anything in his spare time through all the free courses available on YouTube and other websites. We have free access to millions of books online. In spite all of those, we see an acute decline in reading books, due to prevailing of social media overuse.
A study on “Exploring the Effects of Social Media on the Reading Culture of Students in Tamale Technical University” has found:
“In the late 1970s, 60 percent of 12th-graders said they read a book or magazine almost every day; by 2016, only 16 percent did.”
“Kalpidon et al. (2011) concluded that as social media such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter gaining popularity, they are increasingly becoming dangerous as they create modes for students to procrastinate their reading and other projects.”
That’s how we are ruining our lives and of the generations to come, with these little trivialized tools, only for the sake of making some billionaires even richer.
Here is a clearer picture of how much time has been wasted on social media websites:
“People are spending an average of 4.8 hours a day on their mobile phones, according to app monitoring firm App Annie.
Of that time, seven out of every 10 minutes was spent on social, photo and video apps, with TikTok leading the way, the report suggested.”
3. Decline in Productivity:
Focus of mind is considered the top factor in productivity. You cannot perform well the simplest task with a distracted mind. And that’s exactly what social media does to us: It interrupts us during our working time, which severely affects the performance. The statistics speak for itself:
“Four out of five employees access their private accounts during work time and spend up to 2.35 hours a day on social media, depleting their productivity by an estimated 13 per cent. In a recent blog post, the Bank of England reported that it takes office workers an average of 25 minutes to get back on task after an interruption.” (1)
4. Accidents:
All the major causes of accidents, such as over speeding, drunken driving, red light jumping etc. are connected to distraction, either being the cause of the distraction or the aftereffect of it. And guess what is the biggest cause of distraction now? You guessed it right: “Mobile Phone”
“Perhaps consider a 2015 study of pedestrians in Midtown Manhattan: 42 per cent of those who walked into traffic during a “Don’t Walk” signal, were wearing headphones, talking on their mobile or looking down at an electronic device.” (2)
5. Sleep deprivation:
The sleep and productivity are directly proportional to each other. Your sleep quality doesn’t affect your work more than your work affects your sleep. One of the disastrous factors of a messed up circadian rhythm is “overuse of mobile phone”.
“It’s been conclusively proven that the longer your screen time during the day, the worse you sleep at night.” (3)
6. Anxiety and Depression:
The grass always looks greener on the screen. Yeah, it’s true! Watching the pictures of all the families smiling and laughing, taken on some fine day, camouflages the fact that every family has problems, and makes you think that all the people except you, are happy. When you see every filtered photo of your friend, more beautiful and more reacted to, if injects you with a false sense of inferiority complex and that leads to depression and anxiety.
“Study conducted on smartphone users revealed that users that overuse smartphone experience higher level of depression, trait anxiety and state anxiety compare to normal smartphone users.”
7. Suicidal thoughts:
The depression caused by overuse of social media also grows into suicidal thoughts, specially among teenagers and adolescents.
“A study has shown that teens “overusing” social media with five hours or more of daily engagement were 70 per cent more likely to have suicidal thoughts or actions than those who reported one hour of daily use.”
8. Facilitates Laziness:
“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”
The common desk jobs and comfortable lifestyle have caused enough of health problems to us. The social media made it even worse.
No wonder why the social media has been taken responsible for a number of health problems, such as stress, obesity and high blood pressure.
Citations:
(1) Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 13, issue 4, July 2008, pp.937–958
(2) Journal of Community Health, vol. 40, issue 4, August 2015, pp.789–792
(3) Social Media Use Before Bed and Sleep Disturbance Among Young Adults in the United States: A Nationally Representative Study, Sleep, vol. 40, issue 9, 1 September 2017
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