Addictions: Social Media & Mobile Phones Fall From Grace
by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
ZeroHedge.com
Nov 24, 2017
Identifying social media and mobile phones as addictive is only the first step in a much more complex investigation.
For everyone who remembers the Early Days of social media and mobile phones, it’s been quite a ride from My Space and awkward texting on tiny screens to the current alarm over the addictive nature of social media and mobile telephony.
The emergence of withering criticism of Facebook and Google is a new and remarkably broad-based phenomenon: a year or two ago, there was little mainstream-media criticism of these tech giants; now there is a constant barrage of sharp criticism across the media spectrum.
Even the technology writer for the Wall Street Journal has not just curbed his enthusiasm, he’s now speaking in the same dark tones as other critics: Why Personal Tech Is Depressing.
The critique of social media and mobile telephony, has reached surprising heights in a remarkably short time. Consider this article from the Guardian (UK) which compares Facebook and Google’s social media empire to world religions in terms of scale, and unabashedly calls them addictive and detrimental to health and democracy: How Facebook and Google threaten public health – and democracy.
A decade ago, social media was considerably different. One of the first social media sites to break into the mainstream was My Space, which began as a forum for bands to post new songs and interact with their fans. This was a great tool for thousands of musicians who had few ways to publicly post their songs and establish public communications with their fans. My Space was a useful idea, and even I posted a few songs my friends and I had recorded.
Around the same time frame, Facebook was limited to college students. I recall reading about FB and going to the site to see what it was all about: the splash screen asked you for your college affiliation.
Mobile telephony featured tiny little screens and an awkward double-click method of texting that only teens could master.
Keeping up on mass-media related technologies is part of my job as a blogger, as bloggers inhabit a little village of the mass-media world that seems to be shrinking as social media expands. I joined Twitter in June 2008, about two years after its initial launch, and Facebook in 2009.
I was struck by this quote from the above Guardian article:
“The term ‘addiction’ is no exaggeration. The average consumer checks his or her smartphone 150 times a day, making more than 2,000 swipes and touches. The applications they use most frequently are owned by Facebook and Alphabet (Google), and the usage of those products is still increasing.”
Wow! Do you check your mobile phone 100+ times a day? Even if this is an exaggeration, it still represents an addictive attachment.
I think we can safely call anything that people interrupt sex to do (like check their mobile phones) addictive.
What’s the source of social media and mobile telephony’s addictive power?
I think we can start with the innate attraction of distractions and novelty. The higher the density of inputs in our environment, the more quickly we become bored and fidgety. So we turn to our phones for distraction and novelty.
Being social creatures, we want to stay connected to our tribe, group, family, etc. Social media and mobile phones feed this desire directly.
But social media and mobile telephony have peculiar qualities that are unlike actual face-to-face interaction. They don’t require the same kind of commitment or engagement; it’s understood everyone can log off at any time.
The Rest…HERE
