Do people not actively curate what they like? E.g. using more of "Not Interested". I generally follow artists because they have great taste. I am very religous in disliking if a particular post is not benefitting me in consuming it.
I do that heavily. Still, instagram decides to nuke my preferences quite often. Right now I'm on tik tok garbage, two weeks ago I had arabic muslim stuff (like videos in mosques, prayers etc). I don't use it at all when that happens, so they loose out. Give me trail running and outdoor shit and I'm happy, very easy!
Algorithms are terrible with that. For example, there was this girl on TikTok who made fun things with her hair. It was fun, I marked it as I liked it. The first few times I enjoyed the exact same joke. Then when it became too frequent I indicated that I wanted less of it. The algorithm immediately thought that I didn’t care about fun things at all. I did this about 3 times, and my feed became really boring. The same in every single social media.
And it’s even worse, because when I flagged clear lies, my feed became more bland. So at the end I’m incentivised to consume lies.
I managed to train Facebook out of showing me ads.
It took about two years of monthly clicking on "I don't want to see content from this page again" for it to stick, but now I haven't seen an ad in forever. Either I exhausted all companies in my area that advertise with Facebook, either the algorithm has stopped showing them to me.
Was not able to read fully but I think it is something that combines elements of both. It’s designed to be addictive and also its effects depend heavily on how it’s consumed
Ironically (pure) nicotine is not that bad for the health, it’s just really addictive so it have been added to cigarettes for just this.
It can even have some good benefits if you are chronically stressed. I wonder if it could be an alternative to benzodiazepines for occasional use.
I never took nicotine so I don’t know how quick the addiction would come. With benzodiazepines it’s a really hard addiction but not if you take it once in a while.
The problem with nicotine is the instant effect. If you use patches, the take up and let down is so slow as to not be noticed. Inhalation is much more addictive. Quitting is actually super easy, just a couple days of irritability. YMMV. If you want to try nicotine, anything but oral/lingual is ideal.
what is done though is "smoking" tobacco with ammonia, smoking as
in exposing to the fumes, which will "crack" the nicotine and makes it more kicking me more addictive.
More and more social media sites don't let you just follow "your friends".
They start automatically shoving suggested accounts in your face along with ads. On Instagram and FB both every 3rd or 4th post is a "suggested page". Also the algorithm has deemed that I don't need to get posts from the actual real people I follow unless I specifically go to their pages to see.
This. Old Facebook was okay. Planing parties with friends, connecting with people you haven't seen in years and so forth. But when I noticed they put suggested posts in my feed and just hiding posts from friends, it wasn't worth the time anymore. Also lot of other problems (showing off how good your life is to get likes and so forth. Just a lot of tiny issues)
Here are some key factors driving social media. The misincentives are obvious once you clearly see these.
1. It is fundamentally based on one of the strongest human impulses of community.
2. The economic model of social media is based on ads, which means they need to keep you on their platforms as long as possible.
3. They have vast troves of public, private, social and secret information on individuals.
4. They can modify their product every millisecond to adjust the product you experience based on all the factors above.
On the basis of the headline alone, I would say "cigarettes" because I have quit two different social media sites using the technique described in the book "Allen Carr's Easy Way To Stop Smoking"
Wouldn't this be consistent with social media being easier to quit than both junk food _and_ cigarettes? Given that, I'm not sure how can conclude which of them is more similar.
As an alternative take, my understanding of the difference between cigarettes and junk food is that cigarettes are more physically addictive than junk food (which at least to my naive medical understanding is more of a "psychologically addictive" substance than something that the body will literally start to reach poorly to withholding after repeated intake). I haven't heard of anyone ever suffering physical withdrawal symptoms from having to wean off of either junk food or social media, which makes them seem much more similar to me than either are to cigarettes.
As an alternative to either of the headline options, maybe it would make sense to compare it to alcohol? Unlike cigarettes, most people are not physically addicted to it when using, but unlike junk food, you still shouldn't be using it when driving.
The special properties of the addiction are what make it hard for the person to quit that is addicted.
These type of comparisons for social media seem like bargaining by the social media addict trying to find the least harmful addiction to frame their own addiction as.
I have quit social media, cigarettes, alcohol and I limit junk food far more than normal. Quitting social media has cut me off from many social circles and being in the know with even my own extended family.
But make no mistake though. Cigarettes are an order of magnitude harder to quit than any of these. Alan Carr's book is amazing because it is almost a type of hypnosis that gives you the will power to not cave when cigarettes start playing all the mind games of why you should just smoke one in the first month after quitting. You have to convince yourself it is easy and anyone can do it exactly because it is so hard.
Comparing social media addiction to cigarettes is just not helpful though. Cigarettes are much more addictive but social media is addictive in its own special way.
If anything social media and sex addiction have much in common. You can deal with the addiction by going cold turkey but then if you want to get back to a normal life you have to figure out something other than abstinence.
At least according to the “Easy Way” book, the physical addiction to nicotine only lasts on the order of hours. The book makes a compelling case that cigarette addiction is primarily psychological.
Alcohol, on the other hand, is physically addictive and the horror stories that I have read about alcohol addiction have been pretty upsetting.
Same as cigarettes, much of doomscrolling is just to calm down the anxiety of not doomscrolling. Anxiety that didn’t exist in our lives before social media and one caused directly by its consumption.
Thanks to social media, Facebook in particular, and sometimes Instagram, I have gotten laid. Thanks to social media I have gotten laid more than I otherwise would have, or probably should have.
I have not had the same experience with cigarettes and junk food.
Thanks to social media I got more and more depressed and anxious in my youth. My natural shame evolved into fantastic pathological shame. Took me only 10 years to fight against it and kinda feel normal again. Thank you social media
Edit: social media wasn't the cause, but a lot of fuel
Not saying it is your situation, but we often rationalize addictions and justify having them - often with some sort of utility. When I was a young smoker, I told myself smoking allows me to get laid as I would talk up to women in bars and clubs in the (calmer) smoking areas and it was easier to hit on them and get their numbers. While true, the negative impact of smoking in general does not outweigh that. And if I wouldn't have smoked, I could have just as well hit on women on the streets or in the noisy club. Just as you can get laid without social media.
Junk food addiction (your word, not TFA’s) is also not in the DSM V, so appealing to authority like that or hanging on the word addiction gets you nowhere as far as whether the comparison to social media is interesting.
For what it’s worth gambling addiction is in the DSM-V. What’s it’s direct route to biochemically alter the brain, like nicotine and food intake?
If you believe in "Junk food addiction" then you have the same problem. Trusting for-profit gurus and hip informal internet magazines instead of the available peer reviewed evidence.
Gambling addiction is not in the DSM-V, it's gambling disorder, and it's grandfathered in as the only behavioral disorder of it's kind.
> it has no route to directly biochemically alter the body or the brain (like nicotine and food intake)
that's not necessary to trigger dopamine in the brain and, in extreme cases, get you hooked on a particular activity because you feel a craving that you're unable to suppress (gambling is another good one, for some people it's just a fun activity, for others is an addition that they continue doing even when they know it's ruining them)
I'm pretty sure all things you experience in this world can "directly biochemically alter the body". This isn't all that pedantic a point either. Your body directly produces neurochemicals from sense data, and, that includes the photons bouncing off of a like button, the particular movement of a scrolling finger, or the sonic vibration of a phone notification.
It wasn't so long ago that people balked at food addiction too. We are now in an era of mass A-B tested and optimised heuristics, the things we can do to manipulate the human brain are more understood.
A father of a newborn child produces less testosterone...
From what I know this is not explained by just sleep deprivation. So here we have no direct chemical transfer altering the physiological state of a man via external stimulus.
So if a baby can chemically alter a father, why can't highly stimulating lights and sounds?
Many years back I had a pretty strong detox from smartphones and videogames lasting about 2 years. When I first played a mobile game, I was so stimulated by it I found it hard to sleep properly for the first few weeks of playing. Later on my brain adjusted but now I probably have some kind of habitual need for dopamine...
Doesn’t looking at porn cause a biochemical reaction in the brain? Just seems like the inputs are a lot more complex than you’re making them out to be.
I don't think there's much of anything you can look at, or do, or think about, without brain activity being somehow involved. What with the brain being where thoughts live.
I mean there is the introduction of a chemical into the blood stream that acts on neurons. This does not happen with screens and speakers. It is not meaningless. In fact it's a super important distinction.
By pretending that multimedia can directly alter someone's behavior you throw out the entire idea of human volition. Even if it were true on some level our entire legal code and indeed western society is based on the idea of humans making choices and being responsible for them. Unless they're directly altered like with psychocative chemicals (and sometimes even then). The stimuli you see and hear are not drugs and regulating them as drugs will do more harm and cause more use of force then it prevents.
> I mean there is the introduction of a chemical into the blood stream that acts on neurons. This does not happen with screens and speakers.
What are the actual mechanics behind how scary movies make people jumpy? Or behind news articles pushing people to "I'm literally shaking" levels of anger? Or to stick with the theme from ancestor comments, behind the thing I've heard called "post-nut clarity" (whatever it's actual proper name is)?
I’m going to try with a counter argument here that might seem trivial at first but encourage you to think a bit more deeply on it.
Multimedia consumption does directly alter your behavior.
You see an add for fries and you want fries and you go out and buy and eat them. If you hadn’t watched that video you wouldn’t have done that. Yes, it was still your choice to do so (avoiding the question of free will), but it was also the choice of the addict to shoot up one more time. Seeing the burger introduced psychoactive chemicals (endogenous ones): dopamine is one of the most relevant and well understood.
And to be clear - it’s not unique because it’s related to food and therefor a substance you put into your body like a drug. As others have pointed out gambling and porn addictions rely on similar mechanisms, and doom scrolling/compulsive news checking are tied to the same chemical mechanisms in the body.
From a medical perspective this is pretty well understood. Social expectations and norms that feed into regulations and laws are wildly subjective, so it’s not surprising that there is a lot of inconsistency in how and what is regulated and illegal when looked at from the perspective of biological mechanisms.
What is gambling? Does it need to involve money? What is money? Money is a human invention.
So is gambling about resources, power and status? If so then can gambling CS skins count? What about candy crush lootboxes?
If gambling is about risk, does parkour and base jumping count?
One of the most insidious forms of "gambling" I've seen is probably PvP matchmaking. I am fairly certain that games from Supercell have rigged their matchmaking to engineer a degree of frustration to keep you hooked. When you tie that to a ranking ladder it can get quite easy to get hooked
Cool story, homosexuality was a mental illness according to your Bible at some point...
Almost as if science was a fluid thing, almost as if we updated our knowledge as we go, almost as if this was only possible through debating opposing views, very weird....
But you're probably right we should stop even thinking about it, the DSM doesn't talk about it so why would we
I think there are arguments for both sides, and it is far from being discussed since evidence suggests that excessive social media use can lead to behaviors resembling addiction. There are issues like depression, anxiety, and poor sleep [1][2][4]. It triggers brain responses similar to addictive substances, reinforcing compulsive use[5][8]. Some studies argue that it may not meet the clinical criteria for addiction[3][7].
Newspapers, Electricity (let's call this a platform), Radio, TV did not penetrate 99% (don't quote me on the number) of the planet's population.
Social media did/does since 99% of the people can have a portable computer in their pockets.
(I am using '99%' very liberally - every person that can, has, and there are very few that avoid social media like the plague)
It feels like every next technology was had larger audience than the previous one (on its peak).
I remember a friend telling me about Instagram, and I was thinking 'how is this a good idea??' well, turns out it's not the best. And I fear that with Zuck becoming best friends with DJT he will eventually make his dream come true and make that 'instagram for pedophiles' (aka Instagram for kids). Then give it 10 years and let's see what DSM or ICD10 will say about that.
But hey.. money, amiright? Like the famous New Yorker cartoon about shareholders.
It's more like gambling
It’s almost exactly like a slot machine. You scroll down, and get a randomly scheduled “dopamine hit”.
But can we say that unpredictability is what makes it so addictive?
Could I interest you in an article about it?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36701907/
Do people not actively curate what they like? E.g. using more of "Not Interested". I generally follow artists because they have great taste. I am very religous in disliking if a particular post is not benefitting me in consuming it.
I do that heavily. Still, instagram decides to nuke my preferences quite often. Right now I'm on tik tok garbage, two weeks ago I had arabic muslim stuff (like videos in mosques, prayers etc). I don't use it at all when that happens, so they loose out. Give me trail running and outdoor shit and I'm happy, very easy!
Some platforms don't pay much attention to these instructions. LinkedIn is impervious to my suggestions.
Algorithms are terrible with that. For example, there was this girl on TikTok who made fun things with her hair. It was fun, I marked it as I liked it. The first few times I enjoyed the exact same joke. Then when it became too frequent I indicated that I wanted less of it. The algorithm immediately thought that I didn’t care about fun things at all. I did this about 3 times, and my feed became really boring. The same in every single social media.
And it’s even worse, because when I flagged clear lies, my feed became more bland. So at the end I’m incentivised to consume lies.
I managed to train Facebook out of showing me ads.
It took about two years of monthly clicking on "I don't want to see content from this page again" for it to stick, but now I haven't seen an ad in forever. Either I exhausted all companies in my area that advertise with Facebook, either the algorithm has stopped showing them to me.
The algorithm figured out that you will spend more time on the platform if you get annoyed. So what you like is not really taken into account.
I find Instagram in particular is garbage. Twitter / Youtube is much better with respecting your curation to some degree.
Was not able to read fully but I think it is something that combines elements of both. It’s designed to be addictive and also its effects depend heavily on how it’s consumed
Depends. I have quit social media, cigarettes, and nicotine at large. Nicotine was the easiest, cigarettes the hardest.
Ironically (pure) nicotine is not that bad for the health, it’s just really addictive so it have been added to cigarettes for just this.
It can even have some good benefits if you are chronically stressed. I wonder if it could be an alternative to benzodiazepines for occasional use.
I never took nicotine so I don’t know how quick the addiction would come. With benzodiazepines it’s a really hard addiction but not if you take it once in a while.
The problem with nicotine is the instant effect. If you use patches, the take up and let down is so slow as to not be noticed. Inhalation is much more addictive. Quitting is actually super easy, just a couple days of irritability. YMMV. If you want to try nicotine, anything but oral/lingual is ideal.
> so it have been added to cigarettes for just this
Erm, isn't nicotine naturally produced by the tobacco leaves? What are you on about being "added"?
gp was imprecise, it's not added indeed.
what is done though is "smoking" tobacco with ammonia, smoking as in exposing to the fumes, which will "crack" the nicotine and makes it more kicking me more addictive.
I didn't knew so yes, I was wrong, thank you !
Can't use social media as money in Jail. It's not like cigarettes, ramen or condoms.
I know DSM V, what is the ICD 10?
Broader scope than DSM
Administrated by WHO
Billing codes for doctors.
a catalogue for diseases
Insane Clown Disease?
I think most of the people overemphasize the harmness of social media.
I actually find connecting with my real-life friends a meaningful and satisfying experience.
But things are getting worse once I started to follow influencers and those I don't know in my real life.
More and more social media sites don't let you just follow "your friends".
They start automatically shoving suggested accounts in your face along with ads. On Instagram and FB both every 3rd or 4th post is a "suggested page". Also the algorithm has deemed that I don't need to get posts from the actual real people I follow unless I specifically go to their pages to see.
This. Old Facebook was okay. Planing parties with friends, connecting with people you haven't seen in years and so forth. But when I noticed they put suggested posts in my feed and just hiding posts from friends, it wasn't worth the time anymore. Also lot of other problems (showing off how good your life is to get likes and so forth. Just a lot of tiny issues)
Did you read any books about it?
Junk cigarettes - it has the addictive quality of nicotine.
All of the above.
Here are some key factors driving social media. The misincentives are obvious once you clearly see these.
1. It is fundamentally based on one of the strongest human impulses of community. 2. The economic model of social media is based on ads, which means they need to keep you on their platforms as long as possible. 3. They have vast troves of public, private, social and secret information on individuals. 4. They can modify their product every millisecond to adjust the product you experience based on all the factors above.
5. most of them allow to target arbitrary content including political disinformation based on 3., and including unhinged hate speech
On the basis of the headline alone, I would say "cigarettes" because I have quit two different social media sites using the technique described in the book "Allen Carr's Easy Way To Stop Smoking"
Wouldn't this be consistent with social media being easier to quit than both junk food _and_ cigarettes? Given that, I'm not sure how can conclude which of them is more similar.
As an alternative take, my understanding of the difference between cigarettes and junk food is that cigarettes are more physically addictive than junk food (which at least to my naive medical understanding is more of a "psychologically addictive" substance than something that the body will literally start to reach poorly to withholding after repeated intake). I haven't heard of anyone ever suffering physical withdrawal symptoms from having to wean off of either junk food or social media, which makes them seem much more similar to me than either are to cigarettes.
As an alternative to either of the headline options, maybe it would make sense to compare it to alcohol? Unlike cigarettes, most people are not physically addicted to it when using, but unlike junk food, you still shouldn't be using it when driving.
Each addiction has its own special properties.
The special properties of the addiction are what make it hard for the person to quit that is addicted.
These type of comparisons for social media seem like bargaining by the social media addict trying to find the least harmful addiction to frame their own addiction as.
I have quit social media, cigarettes, alcohol and I limit junk food far more than normal. Quitting social media has cut me off from many social circles and being in the know with even my own extended family.
But make no mistake though. Cigarettes are an order of magnitude harder to quit than any of these. Alan Carr's book is amazing because it is almost a type of hypnosis that gives you the will power to not cave when cigarettes start playing all the mind games of why you should just smoke one in the first month after quitting. You have to convince yourself it is easy and anyone can do it exactly because it is so hard.
Comparing social media addiction to cigarettes is just not helpful though. Cigarettes are much more addictive but social media is addictive in its own special way.
If anything social media and sex addiction have much in common. You can deal with the addiction by going cold turkey but then if you want to get back to a normal life you have to figure out something other than abstinence.
At least according to the “Easy Way” book, the physical addiction to nicotine only lasts on the order of hours. The book makes a compelling case that cigarette addiction is primarily psychological.
Alcohol, on the other hand, is physically addictive and the horror stories that I have read about alcohol addiction have been pretty upsetting.
Same as cigarettes, much of doomscrolling is just to calm down the anxiety of not doomscrolling. Anxiety that didn’t exist in our lives before social media and one caused directly by its consumption.
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Thanks to social media, Facebook in particular, and sometimes Instagram, I have gotten laid. Thanks to social media I have gotten laid more than I otherwise would have, or probably should have.
I have not had the same experience with cigarettes and junk food.
Thanks to social media I got more and more depressed and anxious in my youth. My natural shame evolved into fantastic pathological shame. Took me only 10 years to fight against it and kinda feel normal again. Thank you social media
Edit: social media wasn't the cause, but a lot of fuel
A hella lot of people have gotten laid with cigarettes, when it was cool.
Also the article is about kids. They have time for this to become a problem.
Not only was it cool, it was also social. I met a lot of people through smoking that I wouldn’t have done otherwise
Not saying it is your situation, but we often rationalize addictions and justify having them - often with some sort of utility. When I was a young smoker, I told myself smoking allows me to get laid as I would talk up to women in bars and clubs in the (calmer) smoking areas and it was easier to hit on them and get their numbers. While true, the negative impact of smoking in general does not outweigh that. And if I wouldn't have smoked, I could have just as well hit on women on the streets or in the noisy club. Just as you can get laid without social media.
[flagged]
Junk food addiction (your word, not TFA’s) is also not in the DSM V, so appealing to authority like that or hanging on the word addiction gets you nowhere as far as whether the comparison to social media is interesting.
For what it’s worth gambling addiction is in the DSM-V. What’s it’s direct route to biochemically alter the brain, like nicotine and food intake?
If you believe in "Junk food addiction" then you have the same problem. Trusting for-profit gurus and hip informal internet magazines instead of the available peer reviewed evidence.
Gambling addiction is not in the DSM-V, it's gambling disorder, and it's grandfathered in as the only behavioral disorder of it's kind.
> it has no route to directly biochemically alter the body or the brain (like nicotine and food intake)
that's not necessary to trigger dopamine in the brain and, in extreme cases, get you hooked on a particular activity because you feel a craving that you're unable to suppress (gambling is another good one, for some people it's just a fun activity, for others is an addition that they continue doing even when they know it's ruining them)
I'm pretty sure all things you experience in this world can "directly biochemically alter the body". This isn't all that pedantic a point either. Your body directly produces neurochemicals from sense data, and, that includes the photons bouncing off of a like button, the particular movement of a scrolling finger, or the sonic vibration of a phone notification.
It wasn't so long ago that people balked at food addiction too. We are now in an era of mass A-B tested and optimised heuristics, the things we can do to manipulate the human brain are more understood.
I mean there is the introduction of a chemical into the blood stream that acts on neurons. This does not happen with screens and speakers.
A father of a newborn child produces less testosterone...
From what I know this is not explained by just sleep deprivation. So here we have no direct chemical transfer altering the physiological state of a man via external stimulus.
So if a baby can chemically alter a father, why can't highly stimulating lights and sounds?
Many years back I had a pretty strong detox from smartphones and videogames lasting about 2 years. When I first played a mobile game, I was so stimulated by it I found it hard to sleep properly for the first few weeks of playing. Later on my brain adjusted but now I probably have some kind of habitual need for dopamine...
Doesn’t looking at porn cause a biochemical reaction in the brain? Just seems like the inputs are a lot more complex than you’re making them out to be.
> cause a biochemical reaction in the brain?
That's rather meaningless.
I don't think there's much of anything you can look at, or do, or think about, without brain activity being somehow involved. What with the brain being where thoughts live.
I mean there is the introduction of a chemical into the blood stream that acts on neurons. This does not happen with screens and speakers. It is not meaningless. In fact it's a super important distinction.
By pretending that multimedia can directly alter someone's behavior you throw out the entire idea of human volition. Even if it were true on some level our entire legal code and indeed western society is based on the idea of humans making choices and being responsible for them. Unless they're directly altered like with psychocative chemicals (and sometimes even then). The stimuli you see and hear are not drugs and regulating them as drugs will do more harm and cause more use of force then it prevents.
> I mean there is the introduction of a chemical into the blood stream that acts on neurons. This does not happen with screens and speakers.
What are the actual mechanics behind how scary movies make people jumpy? Or behind news articles pushing people to "I'm literally shaking" levels of anger? Or to stick with the theme from ancestor comments, behind the thing I've heard called "post-nut clarity" (whatever it's actual proper name is)?
I’m going to try with a counter argument here that might seem trivial at first but encourage you to think a bit more deeply on it.
Multimedia consumption does directly alter your behavior.
You see an add for fries and you want fries and you go out and buy and eat them. If you hadn’t watched that video you wouldn’t have done that. Yes, it was still your choice to do so (avoiding the question of free will), but it was also the choice of the addict to shoot up one more time. Seeing the burger introduced psychoactive chemicals (endogenous ones): dopamine is one of the most relevant and well understood.
And to be clear - it’s not unique because it’s related to food and therefor a substance you put into your body like a drug. As others have pointed out gambling and porn addictions rely on similar mechanisms, and doom scrolling/compulsive news checking are tied to the same chemical mechanisms in the body.
From a medical perspective this is pretty well understood. Social expectations and norms that feed into regulations and laws are wildly subjective, so it’s not surprising that there is a lot of inconsistency in how and what is regulated and illegal when looked at from the perspective of biological mechanisms.
Q: Is a cast iron frying pan more like a crow or a bluebird?
A?: Neither, because it isn’t a bird.
Q: Is a cube more like a square or a circle?
A?: Neither, as it isn’t a 2D shape.
Q: Is a lightsaber more like a rapier or a pistol?
A?: Neither, as lightsabers are not real weapons.
Pretending a problem doesn't exist just because it has indirect chemical reactions instead of direct chemical reactions is dangerously stupid.
Whew, sex and gambling addicts will be thrilled to learn they’re not actually addicts.
What about gambling addiction?
You'll find it's actually "gambling disorder" and it's the only behavioral disorder of it's type grandfathered in to the DSM.
What is gambling? Does it need to involve money? What is money? Money is a human invention.
So is gambling about resources, power and status? If so then can gambling CS skins count? What about candy crush lootboxes?
If gambling is about risk, does parkour and base jumping count?
One of the most insidious forms of "gambling" I've seen is probably PvP matchmaking. I am fairly certain that games from Supercell have rigged their matchmaking to engineer a degree of frustration to keep you hooked. When you tie that to a ranking ladder it can get quite easy to get hooked
Cool story, homosexuality was a mental illness according to your Bible at some point...
Almost as if science was a fluid thing, almost as if we updated our knowledge as we go, almost as if this was only possible through debating opposing views, very weird....
But you're probably right we should stop even thinking about it, the DSM doesn't talk about it so why would we
I guess you're ignoring the part where this has been a highly studied issue over and over and found lacking.
Perhaps this right here is the very process of thinking about it.
I think there are arguments for both sides, and it is far from being discussed since evidence suggests that excessive social media use can lead to behaviors resembling addiction. There are issues like depression, anxiety, and poor sleep [1][2][4]. It triggers brain responses similar to addictive substances, reinforcing compulsive use[5][8]. Some studies argue that it may not meet the clinical criteria for addiction[3][7].
There is need for further investigation
[1] Is social media bad for you? The evidence and the unknowns - BBC https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180104-is-social-media-... [2] Social Media Addiction Statistics - The Lanier Law Firm https://www.lanierlawfirm.com/social-media-addiction/statist... [3] Is social media addictive? 'Digital detox' study suggests not - Science https://www.science.org/content/article/social-media-addicti... [4] Research trends in social media addiction and problematic social ... https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9707397/ [5] The Addictiveness of Social Media: How Teens Get Hooked https://www.jeffersonhealth.org/your-health/living-well/the-... [6] Our Social Media Addiction - Harvard Business Review https://hbr.org/2022/11/our-social-media-addiction [7] Special Report: Is Social Media Misuse A Bad Habit or Harmful ... https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.pn.2024.0... [8] Addictive potential of social media, explained - Stanford' SCOPE https://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2021/10/29/addictive-potentia...
What about gambling? Definitely addictive without the mechanisms you described above.
I have heard social media described as the attention slot machine.
Yes and No.
Newspapers, Electricity (let's call this a platform), Radio, TV did not penetrate 99% (don't quote me on the number) of the planet's population. Social media did/does since 99% of the people can have a portable computer in their pockets.
(I am using '99%' very liberally - every person that can, has, and there are very few that avoid social media like the plague)
It feels like every next technology was had larger audience than the previous one (on its peak).
I remember a friend telling me about Instagram, and I was thinking 'how is this a good idea??' well, turns out it's not the best. And I fear that with Zuck becoming best friends with DJT he will eventually make his dream come true and make that 'instagram for pedophiles' (aka Instagram for kids). Then give it 10 years and let's see what DSM or ICD10 will say about that.
But hey.. money, amiright? Like the famous New Yorker cartoon about shareholders.
yes. In fact, its probably worse.
Technofeudalism
https://archive.ph/ImFdw
That links to a paywall for me…
Oops! Try this one:
https://web.archive.org/web/20250123085124/https://www.newyo...