Conformity: The Dangers of Social Media

     

            

            Everyday, our lives revolve around social media. According to Pew Research Center, around 72% of U.S. adults use social media. A survey conducted by the Mayo Clinic of 750 teens showed that 45% are online constantly, and 97% use major social media platforms. In all of social media, the 'scrolling' platforms appear to pose a tremendous issue.

            Why should we care? Social media acts as a silent ghost. It seeps its way through our culture and media, slowly sucking adolescents into its addictive trap. Psychologically, social media, indeed, acts the same way as gambling, and thus, as you can infer, can pose the same addictive dangers as well. It connects so well to gambling, but instead of a cash prize, it gives the viewer a rush of dopamine. Social media and slot machines both serve in a variable-ratio reward system, which was developed by psychologist B.F. Skinner. He found that slot machines reward randomly and every time you pull that lever, you know there may be a chance at winning that cash prize. The same exact mechanism is used in apps like TikTok and Instagram. When the child views pleasing stimulus, their dopamine rushes. However, if this were to happen with every video they saw, it would get boring. So, the social media's algorithm diversifies the content, and knowingly puts videos that poses as a sort of interlude onto the next dopamine-boosting video. Then, this algorithm is randomized, allowing for the dopamine-boosting videos to occur at anytime. The dopamine-boosting video acts as the equivalent of the cash prize, and the more boring videos act as the loss. Moreover, if children do not find the content to be satisfying, they can simply swipe and it goes away! This poses as a terrible threat to children's attention span, making them quit anything that does not grab their attention immediately. This actually explains why book reading has taken such a decrease, and also in fact explains why this generation finds movies from the 1950s and 60s or even 70s to be boring. 

            So why does this pose such a danger to our society? As social media use increases, more trends occur. Trends in social media is a recurring theme that appears where users all create content that involves the same activity. This has shown to be absolutely detrimental, because to be popular, you have to conform to whatever the current, popular trend is. This even took a hit at schools recently when children tried sizing each other up in stealing school supplies. It went from stealing teachers' pens and pencils to stealing paper towel dispensers and expensive equipment. These kinds of things should not be taken lightly, or viewed as futile in the grand scheme of things. In the long run, the grand scheme is simple. Make money off of dumbing people down. Get more and more people involved in trends and platforms, and lure them away from the real world. Why live in the real world that is full of pain and suffering, when we can hide in our iPhones? Especially in times like these, the importance of vigilance and awareness of the real world cannot be stressed enough. These are difficult times we all live in, and if we are not paying attention, we will all become brainwashed sheep running to the next politician who promises to do things for the 'greater good of the people', and will promise to fix things. We cannot let ourselves be fooled. We must rise against the herd. 

    I will now close with a passage from Friedrich Nietzsche:

The herd man in Europe today gives himself the appearance of being the only permissible kind of man, and glorifies his attributes, which make him tame, easy to get along with, and useful to the herd, as if they were the truly human virtues: namely, public spirit, benevolence, consideration, industriousness, moderation, modesty, indulgence, and pity. In those cases, however, where one considers leaders and bellwethers indispensable, people today make one attempt after another to add clever herd men by way of replacing commanders: all parliamentary constitutions, for example, have this origin.  Nevertheless, the appearance of one who commands unconditionally strikes these herd-animal Europeans as an immense comfort and salvation from a gradually intolerable pressure.  -Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Sources:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/01/18/digital-crack-cocaine-the-science-behind-tiktoks-success/?sh=69c94c0378be

https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/tween-and-teen-health/in-depth/teens-and-social-media-use/art-20474437#:~:text=Social%20media%20is%20a%20big,%2C%20Facebook%2C%20Instagram%20or%20Snapchat.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/us/devious-licks-tiktok.html?LibGuardSafe