The Digital Confine - A Retrospect on Social Media
Written on October 21st , 2020 by {"login"=>"jcbitshyd", "email"=>"journal@hyderabad.bits-pilani.ac.in", "display_name"=>"Journal Club, BPHC", "first_name"=>"", "last_name"=>""}Hey there! You've probably come here from Facebook. And you were probably on Instagram before? Oh, what's that? WhatsApp notification? It comes as no surprise that we have become slaves to our phones. Our phones decide what time we go to bed. They dictate how we spend our lunch hour. And although it may not be obvious, they do, for the most part, influence our opinions and how we think.
So why is it just so damn hard to stay away from our phones? We know they're taking up 6 hours of our day, we know it's time better spent on something else, and we're not kidding anyone when we say we don't understand why our head inevitably aches at 7 in the evening. Nevertheless, we scroll away.
"It's not you; phones are designed to be addicting."
A year or so ago, I watched a Vox video of that titled that described the many, many ways phones kept us hooked. For starters, push notifications. Yes, those useless notifications you get about a friend's friend tagged in his friend's friend's post. Did you know, push notifications were introduced to enable you to check your phone less? The idea was that by giving you a glimpse at all of your unread messages, it would save you the hassle of actually having to unlock your phone and open your messaging app. I know what complete crap.
Nevertheless, notifications have evolved into tools that try to mimic the social interaction our lonely souls crave. Another way these metal boxes manage to keep us glued is the magic of color. Remember when Instagram and Google changed their logos? That's no coincidence. Our brains find bright, warm colors like reds and yellows, and oranges very hard to ignore.
Now here's a trap we've all fallen prey to- infinite scrolling. Sites like Instagram, Facebook, and Youtube have this ability to feed your posts endlessly, tricking you into spending more time than you intend to. Since there are no visual cues to tell you you've reached the end or to stop, your desire to terminate your "phone break" decreases to the point of non-existent. What's worse, you don't even realize how much time has gone by until it's too late. Even though you have an assignment due, or a gross amount of T2 prep left, your brain doesn't want to stop. It doesn't believe it's wasting a significant amount of time while looking at 5-Minutes Crafts compilations on Facebook, and that after a point, all those camping hacks add up. Yeah, you can make a DIY shower out of jump rope and stuffed toys, but you got nothing else done.
Phone overuse has reached such a pervasive level; there is a debate in the medical community that it might be a legitimate addiction. Yes, the gambling kind of addiction. Here's why that might be true. Some of the telltale signs of an addiction include a loss of self-control, impulsiveness, obsessiveness, withdrawal, and a tendency to relapse. Sound familiar? Think about the last time you stayed away from your phone for more than one or two hours. Yeah, I don't remember either. In discussion with a few people, we found that most of us always had to have our phones on us and spent anywhere between three and six hours on it every day. On average, that's over two months a year! An awful lot of time spent refreshing the same three apps on a piece of metal and glass.
After talking to many people, I think it's safe to say that our phone overuse stems from two significant feelings- FOMO and habit. It's so hard to put your phone far away from you, because what if someone texts you and it's urgent? What if you missed someone's birthday? What if there's a surprise quiz at ass o'clock and someone pings you about it? While there is some rationale behind this FOMO, most of it is, let's face it, crap. This continual habit of checking for messages has led us to define ourselves as nothing without that constant thumb action. We feel empty, dopamine deprived, worthless, lonely, and detached without these vessels of validation.
All this discussion begs whether this is such a problem, why is nothing being done about it? And if we're doing nothing about it, is it a legitimate problem? Sure, you'd probably be able to make more time for the things you enjoy, so besides dependency being wrong in principle, is there that much at stake? I feel like the answer to that is, at this point, no. But here's one way to look at it, our addiction and our dependencies are bound to keep growing, so how late is too late before robots take over the world, Ultron style?
Most of you readers will be no stranger to the movie "The Social Dilemma," a frankly very opinionated, one-sided documentary on social media and the repercussions of its manipulation. While the film covers many different ways, social media exploits its users through data mining and surveillance. What stood out to me the most was the claim that social media tries to change our opinions and polarize us. The documentary took the example of conspiracy theories and how fake news is propagated as real; it's turning people against each other, against their governments. In some cases, it is instilling in them such hatred for beliefs differently opinionated that this hatred is manifested in riots, rapes, beatings, and even killings.
All jokes aside, the way social media is attacking and changing our opinions and our addiction to our phones is very much real. While my sleep-deprived 3 AM avatar has managed to cleverly veil everything in top quality humor (if I do say so myself), I urge you to become aware of these problems and take steps, however small, towards overcoming them. That said, also know that the scale tips both ways; it is not too hard to become obsessed with the amount of time you spend on your phone, become upset by it, and trigger what Mark Manson famously calls "the feedback loop from Hell." It's important to take cognizance of how we're still chained to a corporate anarcho-capitalist web (pun intended) that profits from hype, polarization, and mistrust. And maybe that realization starts with looking deeply at ourselves and our relationship with how we talk to the world - via social media.