It’s hard to believe that something so detrimental to society and the mental health of millions is so popular. The world as we know it today is centered around technology, which major tech companies benefit from while the rest of us are slowly being consumed. We are pawns to these companies who profit off of our vulnerabilities, addictive behaviors, and well-being. The three main goals of technology companies are the engagement, growth, and advertising goals. The engagement goal’s purpose is to drive up the usage of the consumer and keep them scrolling. They are able to do this through tactics of persuasion, including having a new post or item appear at the top of the user’s screen whenever they refresh their page. When you hear the ding of a notification, do you reach for your phone out of impulse? This is a commonly shared experience among us, and is a term in psychology called positive intermittent reinforcement which creates an unconscious habit in the brain stem that humans don’t realize. For example, a gambling addiction and the possible reward that the slot machines bring. To read that social media can have the same effect that gambling does on our brain may seem like a stretch, but we live in an addiction manipulation based technology environment now rather than a tool based one. The difference between these environments is that the tool based one contains objects that are waiting to be used, while the addiction manipulation environment controls us and chooses when we use objects such as social media and our phones in general. Persuasion is defined as the ‘process of changing our attitude toward something based on some kind of communication.’ Lieberman and Falk found that the more persuasive participants thought a message was, the more the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, and amygdala were activated. These parts of the brain are in charge of many basic functions including decision making, empathy, moral judgments, and sense of self.
Technology companies use these psychological techniques to manipulate their users into engaging more in their products. The growth goal is to keep you coming back to the app and inviting as many people as possible. Have you ever received an alert from an app stating that you can get 10% off your next purchase if you invite 3 or more people to join? Well, that is how the growth goal is stimulated. There is a technique called ‘growth hacking’ which is a discipline and field where teams of engineers hack into peoples psychology so they can get more groth, user sign ups, and engagement. For example, Chamath Palihapitiya is a founder and CEO of Social Capital and pioneered many growth tactics that were used to help Facebook grow rapidly, and are still used today. He helped with the use of scientific A/B testing of small feature changes that manipulate users to grow attached to social media more and more through small, yet significant altercations and subliminal messages to get people to do what technology wants and profits from. Finally, the advertising goal is the company’s way of making as much money off you as possible from advertisements. This goal is done through algorithms which are technical means of sorting posts based on relevancy and prioritizes which content a user sees first according to the likelihood that they will engage in such content. In big tech companies, algorithms are very important and are constructed by many people to keep the user intrigued and showing them ads that they will most likely be interested in and purchase from. We are casually being sold from one company to another. When it comes down to neurolly, social media is arguably a drug. As humans, we have a basic biological imperative to connect to other people which directly affects the release of dopamine in the reward pathway, encouraging us to find mates and populate our species. This dopamine is released when we connect with others through social media which is great, but we have looked past the detrimental effects it has, for the release of dopamine is what gets us hooked and later addicted to our phones.
Addiction of any kind is extremely dangerous, especially when addiction to social media feeds the brain of unrealistic beauty standards and lies. Social media is slowly killing a whole generation’s self worth and esteem. Between 2011 and 2013, there was an increase of depression and anxiety within American teenagers. US hospital admissions for self harm also grew by 62% in older teens, 18 and 19, and skyrocketed 189% in younger teens, 13 to 17, since 2009. US suicide rates also continued a trend causing an increase in 70% of older teens and 150% in younger teens, also since 2009. It is not a coincidence that the rates of US self harm and suicide within teenage girls has increased by an insane amount since 2009, which just so happens to be the start of a technological age. Generation Z, people born from 1995 to 2012, is the first generation in history to be on social media at such a young age considering these children grew up during the rise of technology and social media. This is not a change that we can just easily adapt to like other changes throughout our lives. This change is taking over the world little by little and killing us and our self image slowly. We are letting AI and technology take over our lives and it is only going to get worse from here.
It would be biased to write a paper on technology and only point out the negatives, so I would be lying if I said that we do not benefit at all from technology nowadays. Social media specifically, connects people from other sides of the world in ways that were never possible. This allows for a greater sense of cultures and unites the world in general. This also can promote activism and social change throughout areas of the world after seeing the damage done in one country. However, the easy access to other people and their lives through social media can serve harmful events such as kidnapping, child grooming, and human trafficking. This connection of the world can also encourage poor behaviors and violent trends.
Technology is a ticking time bomb and can explode any second, causing an effect as extreme as world war. Cleanse your mind by joining the movement against social media and delete your platforms.