Social Media
CHRISTMAS DEBATE
The use of social media has become a part of most everyone’s day. Many of us check our media with the same routine casualness with which we brush our teeth or make our breakfast. It is an integrated part our lives. However, we often fail to truly contemplate how pernicious our wholesale consumption of social media might be to our health and productivity.
Despite an occasional sheepish admission that our screen time was 5 hours a day last week or that we are walking into our morning class like a zombie, in fact, because of that late night TikTok binge, almost nobody admits they are addicted to social media with the same gravity that someone would admit to a drug addiction. Yet, there is a growing consensus in the scientific and tech communities that social media activates the same neural pathways that addictive drugs depend on. In fact, it is deliberately designed to do so.
While the downsides of daily drug use are highly visible, social media is more quietly disrupting our lives. Our iPhones quantify our relationship with it through the screen time feature. Look at your screen time, your pickups, your notifications... It becomes apparent that the use of our phones is only rivalled in frequency by biological functions, like breathing or taking steps. On a yearly basis things look even more concerning. If you multiply your screen time by 365 and divide it by your waking hours per day (average is 16), you are left with the number of days you dedicate entirely to your phone. For example, a four hours of phone use per day equates to just over 91 waking days a year of staring at a screen in our hand.
It is in the business interest of social media companies to make their products as addictive, or ‘engaging,’ as possible. It sets up a situation where tech companies’ incentives run counter to the wellbeing of society at large. The amount of time we spend on social media is the only issue—it is what that time is doing to people’s wellbeing as a whole. Social media has been documented to contribute to increased risk of depression and suicide, the sapping of user’s attention spans, and increased political polarization in society at large, among other negative side effects.
Try to evaluate your stance;
One, is the widespread and frequent use of social media even an issue itself, and two, what is there to be done about it if it is? Should we regulate social media as if it was an addictive drug? If so, do our governments have the ability to keep up with tech companies through regulation? What could that regulation even look like? Or, can we regulate our own personal social media consumption without regulatory intervention?