You Have a Notification!
Social media, often described as one of the fastest ways to access information, certainly has substantial benefits. But reaching information so quickly also comes with disadvantages. For example; Understanding whether a published post is telling the truth or not is not always easy, and it can also push us toward wrong or unwanted decisions. It is worth remembering that one of the biggest claims in the lawsuit filed against Facebook founder and owner Mark Zuckerberg in 2018 was that the public was manipulated via Facebook over whether to choose Trump or Clinton in the upcoming elections, and that Trump won as a result. As you can see, the power of social media today has grown too large to underestimate. The best thing we can do to avoid bad decisions is to research a topic before believing the posts we see.
One of the biggest problems with social platforms is that companies design them to be addictive, and without even realizing it we find ourselves spending hours inside them. So much so that we often unlock our phones wondering what time it is, take a quick scroll through Instagram, and then lock the screen without ever checking the time.
Companies that understand human psychology well do everything they can to keep people using their platforms, and one of the most effective methods is undoubtedly the notifications sent to our phones. Notifications like “Person A liked your photo”, “Tap to see Person B's first photo”, and so on spark our curiosity, and having our photo liked feels good at a subconscious level. Of course, turning off notifications might seem like it would help us stay less addicted, but when there are no notifications, the constant thought of “am I missing something?” still gets the better of our curiosity, and we may end up using them even more. Users going to extremes over likes on social media—and many of them doing all kinds of nonsense—must have bothered Instagram as well, since the company has already started working on making like counts visible only to account owners.
I had been meaning for a while to write something about social media use and share my thoughts with you, but I could never quite decide exactly what to write. One of the biggest reasons I wrote this piece was the recently released Season 5 episode of the Black Mirror anthology series I follow closely—Smithereens. In an episode that criticizes many aspects of social media in a simple, plain voice, if you pay attention you can see that the critique is not only in the main story: in many scenes people use apps frequently and mindlessly.
Black Mirror, which has successfully criticized social media not once but many times, has a few more related episodes that I am sharing with you at the end of this paragraph. My favorite quality of these episodes is that after watching them, they somehow create awareness about the personal information we share on social media and how much time we spend using it. The episode titles are; Nosedive, Be Right Back, and Smithereens.
In short, the most important point to keep in mind is that while using social media we also need to develop our own thinking, and we should not believe everything we see blindly, without any research or reflection. Remember that for us social media should not be an end used for gaining likes / followers / view counts, but a tool for quickly accessing accurate information and staying connected with the people around us.
If we are wondering whether we use social media more than we should, the easiest way to track this is to use the “Screen Time” option on our phones to access daily or weekly usage reports for apps, and if we think we are using them too much, we can put a stop to that trend. Remember that the first requirement for breaking an addiction is being aware of our situation.
Thank you for reading this article where I shared my thoughts on social platforms—see you in my next posts, take care!
If you understand the trap, escaping addiction is very easy.
- Allen Carr