Have you ever taken a short break from studying to reply to one Whatsapp message, or send one Snapchat streak, or check one Instagram story, only to look up and realise the break lasted 30 minutes? Have you ever noticed that you spend so many hours scrolling through your feed that you run late to appointments, or can't complete assignments, yet you can't help but repeat the same cycle daily?
If social media is the cause of your unproductivity and late nights you aren't entirely to blame. The average millennial spends 2 hours and 23 minutes on social media and checks their phone 157 times per day.
Facebook’s market value is above $500 billion, yet none of the 2.41 billion users on the platform pay for signing up. Alternatively, networking sites make money through adverts. The longer you spend on the site, the more effective the site becomes as an advertising space, the more revenue it can generate from advertisers. The longer you scroll through social media, the more information the site can collect about your interests and choices. This explains why after a while the ads that pop-up on your feed become spookily aligned with your tastes. This is why networking sites spend millions of dollars in designing the most addictive user interface possible.
The refresh feature on apps like Instagram is works on the same principles as a casino slot machine. You pull down the screen to refresh the same way you pull down the lever of a slot machine. The unpredictability of whether there is something new to see is what keeps you hooked.
Like casinos are windowless with no clocks to keep the attention of gamblers, social media feed is infinite and endless, which is why you can scroll for hours on end. The bottomless design is for continuity and gives you a glimpse of the next post so you have to check it. Think about it- the feed design on Facebook could in page format like Google search results; but that would keep you from skimming through search results indefinitely.
Ever since the creation of the ‘Like Button’ in 2005, users across platforms use likes as a means of quantifying their social ‘score’ and seek validation. When you receive social validation the brain registers the incident as positive and worth repeating. Would you still use a platforms like Instagram if the ‘like’ and ‘comment’ features were disabled.
Abhijit Naskar, one of the world’s most celebrated neuroscientists, said “Technology will destroy this planet mentally, if responsible individuals do not come forward to advocate for responsible use of technology.” According to HootSuite, the number of social media users grew by 202 million between April 2018 and April 2019. At this rate, networking platforms will have more incentive than ever to take full advantage of the addiction-prone nature of the human brain. From the spreading of fake news to cyberbullying, social media has the potential to destroy the foundations of society and change the nature of our societal structures and interactions for the foreseeable future.
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