Trading your Attention+Time with a Virtual world?
Before starting, try this experiment :
You know your mates right? Your classmates, hostel mates & many other closed ones, you know them in and out. You know how they’ve seen one of the low phases of their lives, you know they’ve felt sad and what not, quite often.
Now open their social media accounts…..Always happy, smiling, travelling?
Ha..isn’t that a Virtual No-Wrong/No-failure world that has been created by all of us?
Okay, has this ever happened to you? You just felt a vibration in your pocket and thought there was a notification, but actually, there wasn’t? There's a term for this, Phantom Vibration, which shows how highly one is addicted towards these notifications from social media sites. You’ll see why this happens and why your brain perceives this sensation which is not even present.
Also many of you would second me on this line that “Our concentration level and attention span” has been reduced a lot. Back in our high school days and early college days, we could’ve read pages and pages to gain knowledge about any new topic. But Now it's reduced to a mere video…….in 2x.
What has social Media(insta, fb, twitter etc) has become these days?
A constant exposure to your friend’s( follower’s) beautifully curated, well-edited positive portrayals of their lives or just say, “fantasy side” of their lives, sometimes makes one feel a little inadequate or dissatisfied with their own ones.
What is everyone doing?
Just trading the two most important things which we have with us (Time+Attention) in return of hum of dissatisfaction, worry, uneasiness and what not. Read it more to know which part of our brain is most affected by excess use of social media.
Facts :
More than 80% people in the age group of 18-25 are using some form of social media and more than 2.4 hours per day is spent on social media by any user, why not talk about something that takes so much of your time?
Ahh C’mon Paari, I use it only for memes, funny stuff. Though it doesn’t reflect my professional/ personal life, what's the Harm?
You know there’s a hard-hitting reality to what these social sites bring with them. There are long-lasting, well-documented and significant harms that it brings to your Brain. Studies have shown that kids who use a lot of social media, have less developed Prefrontal Cortex, part of our brain that’s responsible for Rational thinking, memory, problem solving, making effective plans and many other things. Is this harm not enough?
Social Media is one of the fundamental Technologies of the 21st century, how can we just ignore/reject this and go back in time?
The answer to this question is beautifully explained by Dr. Cal Newport, Author of DeepWork, in one simple word that this is “Baseless”. Did you know that these Social Media sites have “Attention Engineers”, who borrow principles from Casino gambling techniques to make it as Addictive as possible and also sometimes exploiting human insecurities on an everyday basis.
According to an article by Harvard University researcher Trevor Haynes, when you get a social media notification, your brain sends a chemical messenger called dopamine along a reward pathway, which makes you feel good. Dopamine is associated with drugs, food, love, gambling, … and now, social media.
Bias towards the negatives :
You would be well-off than many others you know & you maybe perfect with your skills, but your brain generally focuses on the negatives and always compares you to the better ones( would love to discuss this some other day in detail ), making one feel more dissatisfied with their lives and adding to them these likes, hate messages or comments( also known as social currencies ).
Generally products/goods are traded and made money, but here, A study reveals that most teens have this mindset that here “you’re the product” and these social currencies (likes, comments etc) attribute value to you in person, isn’t that insane?
Some disturbing facts :
- Psychologists at Trent Nottingham University reveals that we spend Twice as much as time as we think we do on these social media sites.
- Many researchers show direct link of excess social media usage to Mental issues like anxiety, depression and many other things.
- Pretty direct to observe how Teen depression and Suicides have skyrocketed to 40% and around 35% more, respectively, in the previous decade.
- More than 75% active users of social media prefer online chats rather than a real face to face conversation.
Again most of us would still feel like it's NOT doing anything to me, In fact I use it to be updated with news and latest things happening around & also to catch up with my friends.
Then well and good, we really can’t use this technology better than that. If you use it mostly for comedy, pets, motivation, nature…..aah, that even sounds so good na?....then that’s great. But if your group chats/ posts are more like judgement rather than good opinions/ news then it’s a black flag maybe? “How disgusting, how can someone post that stuff”, “Look what they achieved in that small age, what are we doing with our lives?”, “Look how that guy’s followers fell down because of that comment, should’ve kept shut”.
So finally coming to the conclusion, we can’t just leave social media, it has actual withdrawal symptoms like ,”Am I missing on something”, “I guess I’m not updated enough” and so on.
And this is a beautiful place too, you meet like minded people and can have a good reach if people love your work/art and can also meet the right opportunity when the situation demands. But what we can do is schedule our timings to use it? We do have a schedule for eating, exercising and other things, then why not for using these sites?
It’s not necessary to use these sites as soon as we wake up with one eye closed :p, It’s not necessary to keep refreshing and check random posts.
The point I want to make is, “We monitor what goes inside our body and what we eat….why Not monitor what we’re putting in our minds? You will agree with me that there’s too much info overload and disturbing news these days which is “unverified”.
In a line : “Be Kind to your Mind”.
A beautiful trick by Bailey Parnell was, “Ask yourselves how you felt after that social media scroll?”, “How did you feel seeing all the stuff”.
If you are able to read this then you’re probably in the top privileged people around the world in terms of security and opportunity, be happy for that.
Did you know, Squirrels plant Thousands of new Trees each year by merely forgetting where they put their acorns/food. Haha...so keep doing your stuff and be carefree, you may be helping someone else, who knows?
Some similar articles/videos I’ve come across :
- Google Executive about attention Engineers
- How Tech is Being used to manipulate consumers
- Dr. Cal Newport on Social Media
- Bailey Parnell
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If you’ve come till here, Thank you for your precious time.
If you think this can help someone, share it with your friends. I’ll upload more of my thoughts and random write-ups, soon, you can also check my Portfolio Website & Blogging site.
Have a Beautiful Day :)
