Swiping Your Energy Away
By: Thomas Shuck
We all do it. It’s become a part of our daily lives. The Swipe. The non-stop, toxicity-absorbing, dopamine hit from swiping through your feed might SEEM harmless, but are we really getting a return on our investment of energy/time into these devices?
To understand the current quagmire that has become social media we need to go back to the early days of social media. You remember them. The “feed” of what your friends were up to. Which college party was going to be the best for the weekend’s festivities. Or perhaps you wanted to get the word out that you were beginning a new exercise regime. It was organic. It was meaningful. It held value. I put energy into the platform and felt like there was a return on my effort. We all did.
But then on came the marketing efforts of the companies. I can’t blame them. They need to make money as well. Feeds that were once chronologically centered on people or relevant organizations were replaced with algorithm driven content streams peppered with paid advertising or controversial news posts begging for engagement. “Suggested” posts and news stories curated to stir controversy became the primary topics zooming horizontally or vertically through our devices.
Did Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey ever envision platforms that have evolved THIS FAR beyond what they originally built? I wonder. Of course as companies go public and receive financial backing, they cast aside whatever ethical shackles that might keep the ship along a more altruistic course and instead veer in the direction of profitability. The worst part? They are only going to get worse.
Take Meta, for example. One doesn’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out what’s happening on that company’s front. A couple minutes of looking at the slides depicting its earnings broken down into geographic regions and it’s clear that if you have a smartphone, a pulse, and a facebook account, they are making a TON of revenue from your browsing habits. Living in the USA or Canada? Congratulations! Meta makes between $48-$60 per user, per quarter. No wonder we can’t pay $5 or $10 per month to eliminate the advertising. They are printing money off of us.
How is this possible? Marketing. Your data, encompassing your search habits, where you visit, posts/comments, and I’d speculate right down to conversations in your house collected by your smart tv (I always wondered why they were so cheap!) and communicated back to God knows where, is all quantified, correlated, and deconstructed into data that makes us marketable targets for… just about anyone willing to write them a check.
The other evening I was bored so I decided to tally up the total posts that populated my feed which I didn’t actively “follow.” Initially I saw a 50% balance between accounts that I followed, whether those be people or organizations I subscribed to and the promoted/”suggested” posts. As the evening wore on, the promotional posts increased well into the majority. By the time I was finished after 9pm, only 25% of my swiping views were of accounts that I had any interest in following. The reminder? Paid advertising.
The worst part is that I can’t pay Meta a nominal fee to remove me from their marketing efforts and get my previous experience back. Those $48-$60 quarterly revenue per user have become the lifeblood of their business model. All it “costs” the user is their energy. They will literally keep the charade ongoing until something (or someone) breaks. When is that? Not anytime soon.
Speaking of ongoing, TikTok champions itself on keeping the pleasure chemical dopamine hits ongoing throughout the user’s swiping experience. A nonstop feed of voiceover songs, choreographed dances & silly pet videos has monopolized that platform and user base into an army of swiping addicts. But why dopamine? Let’s examine that.
I mentioned dopamine earlier in the article but didn’t expand upon it. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that was discovered in 1957 by Arvid Carlsson. In essence it is a messenger within our nervous system that helps us communicate with ourselves. It is made in the brain, during a two step process where the amino acid tyrosine is converted into dopa and THEN into dopamine. It helps to govern learning, motivation, heart rate, sleep, and even our mood. Just as it is produced in our brain, our behavioral choices can lead to dopamine releases: drug use, sexual activity or even eating comfort food can release dopamine.
So what is the big deal with all this dopamine? People have been eating tasty food and procreating for millenia. Why is this an issue NOW? If a hit from this chemical is as easy as opening an app on our phone, why must we seek out companionship or romance? Those activities fall by the wayside and become unnecessary menial tasks compared to the ease and efficiency of pleasure derived from the swiping. Spending an hour making your favorite meal? That’s wasteful. An evening of courtship with that special someone? Ha! Who needs that when you have a new viral dance to indulge upon?
Our population, though moving in an agnostic direction, must recognize the ENERGY it is pouring into these platforms. Though social media’s official (public) goal is to keep us all connected, I fear it only achieves the goal at keeping us connected to our devices and at the whims of Big Tech. We as consumers need to put our devices down, live in the moment, and perhaps figure out a better way to go about this human condition. Failure in doing so will have us watching our lives pass by in a manner wasting our most precious resource of all: time.
