New York City Mayor Eric Adams on Wednesday officially declared social media as an ‘environmental toxin’ and ‘public health hazard’, putting it in the same category as tobacco and guns. With this, the Big Apple becomes the first city to issue an advisory against social media.
Adams further criticized TikTok, YouTube and Facebook, blaming the three platforms for mental health issues in children. His observation is based on latest surveys saying that teen depression levels have hit their highest levels in a decade. In the advisory, the New York mayor added that parents should impose ‘tech-free times’ for children. The Democrat also urged teens to consider turning off their notifications and tracking their emotions while online.
The city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene also identified unrestricted access to and use of social media as a public health hazard
“Today, Dr. Ashwin Vasan is issuing a Health Commissioner’s Advisory, officially designating social media as a public health hazard in New York City,” Adams announced during his State of the City address. The advisory cited a 2021 survey stating that on weekdays 77% of New York City high schoolers spent three or more hours per day in front of screens, not including homework.
New York City mayor declares social media a public health threatUnmute
Adams added that the platforms are “fueling a mental health crisis by designing their platforms with addictive and dangerous features.”
“We are the first major American city to take this step and call out the danger of social media like this. Just as the surgeon general did with tobacco and guns, we are treating social media like other public health hazards and ensuring that tech companies take responsibility for their products,” Adams said.
Despite the headlines, the impact of social apps on adolescent mental health isn’t so clear.
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Every generation has its moral panic and for Gen Z — teenagers today — it is, undoubtedly, social media.
This article is part of ‘Being 13,’ a project that examines what life is like for teenage girls in the age of social media.
Still, neuroscientists and psychologists who specialize in the teenage brain put it plainly: Yes, social media is of concern because the rapidly developing adolescent brain may be uniquely vulnerable to what the platforms have to offer. But the science is not nearly as settled as some of the most dire headlines would make it seem.
“This is really the first truly digital generation, and we have yet to see how much effect this has,” said Dr. Frances Jensen, a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “The Teenage Brain.”
“We can get snapshots,” she added.
What we know is that the brain matures from back to front, a process that starts in infancy and continues into adulthood, Dr. Jensen explained. And during adolescence, there is a particular flurry of activity in the middle part of the brain, which is associated with rewards and social feedback.
“Areas that have to do with peers, peer pressure, impulsivity and emotion are very, very, very active,” Dr. Jensen said.
Mitch Prinstein, the chief science officer at the American Psychological Association, said that “other than the first year of life, this is the most significant and important change that happens in our brains in our entire lives.”
In scientific terms, what is happening has to do with synapses (the connections that allow neurons to send and receive signals), which grow stronger, while connections that are no longer needed are pruned. (It’s “use it or lose it,” Dr. Jensen explained.)
At the same time, the long-distance connections between brain cells in various parts of the brain are becoming insulated in a fatty substance known as myelin, which allows for messages to travel through the brain much more efficiently than they did before. That “myelination” process is not complete until the mid- to late 20s, Dr. Jensen said. That means that during adolescence, signals do not always travel through the brain rapidly enough to help kids regulate their emotions and impulses, she explained.
Likewise, the prefrontal cortex — which sits behind the forehead, and which is responsible for tasks like weighing consequences and planning — is still maturing in the teenage years.
“The adolescent brain is kind of like a car that — when it comes to the desire for social feedback — has a hypersensitive gas pedal, with relatively low-functioning brakes,” said Dr. Prinstein, who testified before the Senate on the subject earlier this year. “The brain’s inhibition center that says, ‘Maybe don’t follow every single drive and instinct you have’” isn’t fully developed, he said.
Some studies have tried to measure the question directly, using brain imaging, including a paper published in January (on which Dr. Prinstein was an author), which found that 12-year-olds who habitually checked their social media accounts experienced changes in the areas of the brain associated with social rewards, though it is unclear what caused those changes, or what they mean.
Experts who are studying teens and social media are observing that girls are being hit harder by the current crisis in teen mental health; they say that female hormones may factor in, but the connection to social media use has not been proven scientifically. “Hormones are modifying this process,” Dr. Jensen said. “But in ways we don’t fully understand.”
She is eagerly awaiting results from the ongoing Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development, or A.B.C.D. study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, which is using brain imaging technology to show how development is affected by a range of experiences, including various types of screen time.
Researchers are still tracking the A.B.C.D. study participants into young adulthood, however, and the ever-changing social media landscape compounds how difficult this all is to study, Dr. Jensen said. The apps and sites adolescents are using today are different from those they used just a few years ago.
Yet both Dr. Jensen and Dr. Prinstein noted that social media is not inherently good or bad — a sentiment even the recent public health warnings have echoed. Instead, they sought to emphasize that the changes happening in adolescents’ brains may make them particularly drawn to these platforms and more susceptible to the potential pitfalls.
When tweens start obsessing about their social lives — talking endlessly about their peers and who sits at the “popular table” — that is a sign that they are maturing normally, Dr. Prinstein said.
“That’s how their brains were meant to develop, based on centuries of the social context in which we have all grown up,” he said. But now, adolescents are experiencing those changes in an online world that is “creating the opportunity for reward and social feedback incessantly,” he added. “And that’s the combination we’re concerned about for teens.”
As a former Twitter employee, I watched Elon Musk undermine one of the Internet’s most paradoxical, special places.
A little more than a year ago, Elon Musk began his reign at Twitter with an elaborately staged pun. On Wednesday, October 26, 2022, he posted a tweet with a video that showed him carrying a sink through the lobby of the company’s San Francisco headquarters. “Entering Twitter HQ—let that sink in!” he wrote. At the time, I was a coder for Twitter’s language-infrastructure team. (If you’ve ever used Twitter’s translation feature, or are using Twitter in a language other than English, that was us.) I saw Musk’s tweet when it was shared in a company-wide Slack channel. He looked like a giddy warlord entering an enemy stronghold he’d besieged for months.
There were no more updates until the next day, when a Twitter employee shared a tweet from CNBC: “Elon Musk now in charge of Twitter, CEO and CFO have left, sources say.” The ambiguity of the phrase “have left” was soon clarified by a Timesarticle reporting that Twitter’s C.E.O., C.F.O., and general counsel had been fired, along with its head of legal, policy, and trust. Originally, the acquisition had been slated to close on Friday, but Musk pulled a switcheroo by “fast-closing” the deal on Thursday afternoon. This maneuver allowed him to fire the executives “for cause,” which denied them severance and stock options. The vibe in the office was jokey and un-self-pitying. Everyone seemed in for some grim comedy while it lasted.
Musk filled the vacant leadership suite with his lawyer-fixer Alex Spiro and a few others whom the employees collectively called “the goons.” Some key internal managers kissed the ring and enlisted themselves as Musk’s lieutenants; another reportedly puked into a trash can when asked to fire hundreds of people. Half of the workforce was laid off, but those whose roles turned out to be somewhat critical were then begged to return. Some unlucky engineers were dragooned into launching the new Twitter Blue feature, which would charge users $7.99 per month for a “verified” check mark; the rollout was catastrophic. “We are excited to announce insulin is free now,” a newly verified account impersonating the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly tweeted; the pharma’s market valuation went down by billions that day. Twitter Blue was the first in a series of pratfalls that would slash sixty per cent of the company’s advertising revenue and lead to an exodus of users to other platforms.
I wasn’t laid off, but anyone with functioning nerve endings could see that staying would offer no joy. At 12 A.M. on the day before Thanksgiving, Musk sent an e-mail with the subject line “A Fork in the Road.” He wrote, “Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore.” The e-mail included a link to a Google form that needed to be filled out by 5 P.M., East Coast time, the next day. It had one question—“Would you like to stay at Twitter?”—that had one answer: “Yes.” I am not hard-core. I took the exit.
The next day, I went to Twitter’s headquarters one last time. During the first week of the takeover, we employees had felt like extras in an episode of the show “Silicon Valley,” but the comedic aspect of the affair had ended. In the office, every conversation started with each of us asking, “Did you click ‘Yes’?” The prevailing mood, somehow, was quietly celebratory: if you had quit, it felt freeing to be no longer subject to the whims of a mercurial techno boy. (Of course, a sizable number of employees had no option but to stay, to keep their work visas.) Those who had opted in seemed almost apologetic. In a strange reversal, those of us who were quitting felt sorry for those who had chosen to remain.
After leaving the monolithic Art Deco building on Market Street, I biked around San Francisco, listening to a Twitter Space hosted by the journalists Katie Notopoulos and Ryan Broderick. It ran for almost four hours, and was joined by nearly two hundred thousand people. Listening to a cast of early Twitter employees, journalists, and Twitter users of all stripes speak nostalgically about the platform affirmed what I’d long suspected: many Twitter users hate Twitter the way New Yorkers hate New York—they don’t. It was as if people had gathered to mourn a common foe whom they had publicly reproached yet privately appreciated. They were stunned by Twitter’s sudden and unceremonious death, given that they’d been sparring with it just days ago. The speakers eulogized the careers that had been made, the friends who’d been discovered, and the memes that they’d indulged on the platform. “Tweeps are just hanging out in Slack saying nice things to each other until their access is cut off,” the journalist Casey Newton tweeted, on the day of the layoffs. “Twitter employees get endless shit, but the ones I knew—they worked hard, their work mattered, and they never stopped trying. Not until the moment their screens went blank.”
During my time at Twitter, the employees I met were ludic and easeful. Yet, even on quiet days, there was an undercurrent of vigilance. The platform was defined by a paradoxical mix of silliness and seriousness, the latter often undergirding the former. When I got hired, one of the first things I did when I received my laptop was log on to Slack and scroll back to January 6, 2021. I already knew from reporting by the Washington Post and the Verge that the call to permanently ban Donald Trump from Twitter had come from employees: “We helped fuel the deadly events of January 6th,” they wrote, in an internal letter. On Slack, I saw thread after thread of employees questioning executives’ milquetoast responses to the letter, especially after Facebook had banned Trump and YouTube had suspended his account.
I joined the company almost a year after the January 6th reckoning, but the culture of open criticism was well preserved. On Slack, employees weren’t afraid to directly mention the company’s co-founder Jack Dorsey, or its C.E.O., Parag Agrawal; if someone poked fun at @jack or @paraga, the executives often responded with sassy repartee. But, when Musk took over, questioning of him led to swift firings. A number of employees debated Musk’s actions in the company-wide #social-watercooler channel, and, the day after, we woke up to find many of their accounts gone. “So is this like a Candyman situation?” someone posted. “Mention Elon three times and we get deactivated?”
The idea of openness had expressed itself outside of the company, too, in Twitter’s significant yet underappreciated contributions to open-source and academic research. Bootstrap, a tool kit for building visual interfaces that was released freely by Twitter in 2011, is now used by twenty per cent of all Web sites. (Once you see its visual language, you’ll recognize it everywhere.) And countless useful tools had been built by other programmers using Twitter’s A.P.I., or application-programming interface—a way for outsiders to make use of Twitter’s data. Among other things, the A.P.I. allowed people to create automated accounts, from New New York Times, which tweeted “words when they appear in the NYT the 1st time,” to SF QuakeBot, which sends alerts when earthquakes occur in the Bay Area.
One of Musk’s changes was to introduce new pricing plans that made A.P.I.s unaffordable for many users. This seemed typical of the new regime. At pre-Musk Twitter, product decisions were usually made from the bottom up, or with careful A/B testing. But now there seems to be one “product person”—Musk—who is singularly unequipped to imagine what a typical Twitter user might want. On Twitter, users construct different gestalts of the platform through their own feedback and engagement; in this respect, Musk’s usage pattern is many standard deviations away from what’s ordinary. Click on any of his tweets to read the replies, and you’ll find an entropic mix of flattery, belligerent language, memes, and product shilling. Imagine the maelstrom of likes and mentions he gets every millisecond. There’s nothing “standard” about Musk’s Twitter experience. It’s like tasking someone who only flies on private jets with redesigning the commercial-flight experience.
Silicon Valley’s platitudinal phrases, such as “growth hacking” or “first-principles thinking,” make my hair stand on end, but the startup incubator Y Combinator has a pretty good one: “Make something people want.” It’s notable that some of Twitter’s most important features, such as hashtags and tweet threads, were invented by its users. But the changes being made now seem to be ones that Musk wants, or ones that he thinks users want. A good example is the short-lived removal of headlines from articles shared by users: rolled out this past October, the change made it so that a post showed only the art of an article that was shared, requiring users to click on the art to access the link. In August, when Fortunereported on the upcoming change, Musk tweeted, “This is coming from me directly. Will greatly improve the esthetics.” The day before the change went live, he posted, “I almost never read legacy news anymore.” (The platform has since brought back the headlines: at least for now, they’re present, but in a tiny font.)
A year after Musk’s Google form, we know that there will be no “Twitter 2.0.” In fact, Twitter no longer exists as a legal entity; it’s been merged into X Corp. (Hats off to editors everywhere who dutifully add “formerly known as Twitter” to mentions of the platform.) The over-all direction of Musk’s changes hasn’t been too surprising, but the magnitude of the shift—the sheer inanity of it—still shocks me. Wiping out billions in brand value by changing the platform’s name; decimating the developer ecosystem; testing out charging new users for the service. These decisions seem indistinguishable from acts of self-sabotage.
In October, after Hamas’s attack on Israel, a wealth of articles were written about X’s botched response: the platform had become a global disinformation reel, and had struggled to filter out hate speech and fabricated content. In many of the articles, the tone was not just condemnatory but wistful. Clive Thompson invoked the term “solastalgia,” which he described as a “form of sadness caused when one’s environment changes—changes so much that it is no longer recognizable.” I had resisted using the word “sadness” in my own thinking about Twitter because I felt it was too melodramatic for the demise of a social-media app. But that was the emotion I located in myself. Sadness wasn’t all I felt, of course. In June, it was reported that Ella Irwin, the head of the trust-and-safety team, had resigned; this was followed by another round of layoffs for the team in the first week of September. Firing the trust-and-safety team at X is as dangerous as it sounds.
I was still at Twitter in February, 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine. At work, there was a palpable sense of urgency. Like many others, I watched Volodymyr Zelensky’s video, in which he declared that he would remain in Kyiv, and started following the collection of academics, journalists, and eyewitnesses who would soon comprise “Ukraine Twitter.” As the number of translation requests for Ukrainian tweets surged, our team made changes to insure that the service could keep up, and addressed reports of mistranslation. I had no illusions that our efforts were anything grand. But it was somewhat gratifying to see a shout-out tweet from an engineering manager at Twitter, addressed to our team: “Feeling so proud of the Language Infra team at Twitter today. Their work is supporting the translation of 10+ millions of tweets a day from Ukrainian to dozens of languages around the world 🇺🇦.” It seems like things are different now. “Thank you Elon Musk for this Everything app: Now I can get all my misinformation in one place,” Scott J. Shapiro, a professor of law and philosophy at Yale, tweeted.
When you first join Twitter—or X—the timeline algorithm acts like a parrot hatchling whose job is to fetch the news and recite it to you on demand; over time, the baby parrot observes the articles you’re reading, monitors whom you follow, and learns from what you say. If you engage with noxious content, you end up with a naughty parrot who reads you the tabloids. If you tame your parrot well, it can become a pretty good curator of information—often, quite a funny one. Yet there’s only so much you can do if the parrot is unruly to begin with, or if the news it sees is fabricated. As a Twitter user, I stuck by the dictum to “follow judiciously and mute unforgivingly,” and I rarely saw hateful and divisive content. But it seems to me that, on X, the parrot has gone rogue; it’s stubbornly resistant to my instructions.
On the economist Tyler Cowen’s blog Marginal Revolution, Cowen has argued for “the robustness of Twitter,” writing that he still finds it essential for following recent events, such as the high-speed development of A.I. “You all should be long Twitter,” Cowen suggests. But Twitter was always more than a news source, or a conduit for information. It was a place where a sense of goofiness and comfort allowed communities to form—Weird Twitter, Philosophy Twitter, BTS Twitter. Such communities allowed users to find the platform endearing, even as they called it the “hellsite.” Communities allowed Twitter to survive and even thrive despite being a money-losing business; they made it a place not just for breaking news or smart threads but for casual yet vital interactions—congratulating fellow-writers on their book launches, hearing friends grumble about mediocre Thanksgiving dinners.
Community can be a fuzzy, sentimental notion. But, on Twitter, communities are concrete. The platform’s recommendation algorithm is powered by “SimClusters,” a representation of overlapping communities that, according to the company, “range in size from a few thousand users for individual friend groups, to hundreds of millions of users for news or pop culture,” and are “anchored by a cluster of influential users.” Pre-Musk Twitter leaned into fostering such communities; the month before the acquisition, an all-hands meeting featured a presentation from the company’s head of global K-pop and K-content partnerships, whose responsibilities involved promoting collaborations between Twitter and key players in the K-pop industry. But if a community can be fostered it can also fade. Every time a high-profile user leaves the platform in response to Musk’s antics, a critical node in the social graph is removed. I wonder whether Musk understands that to undermine communities is to weaken the principal element that sustains the service. To monitor the health of a social-media platform, you can ask a question you might also ask of an indie-music venue: Is it still cool to hang out there? Since the takeover, for many people, it doesn’t “feel good” to be on Twitter. Friends are leaving, and tweeting feels like shouting into the void.
What does the future hold? It seems likely that users will still come for breaking news, and for expert threads, and for the memes recycled by dedicated joke accounts. Some weirdness will persist—and yet the weirdos will be gone. The platform will have lost its élan. Twitter’s laughably unserious name belied its seriousness. But X, with its overbearing name, may not prosper unless it undertakes the serious work of maintaining a platform on which people want to be.
Recently US Surgeon General Vivek H Murthy spoke about the ill effects of social media on kids. He says technology companies should put better protections in place and help parents because social media is affecting the mental health of children. They are getting bullied, anxious, and depressed and they can’t seem to stop. All his comments are backed up by hard facts and research.
A week ago my younger son called me while I was at work to inform me that he wasn’t too happy with the limits we had placed on his internet usage. The reason being his friends got to do much more, so these rules were unfair. He’s not into social media yet but using the internet for games and research for studies and creating videos or graphics seemed to excite him, as did the prospect of communicating with his friends via Skype and Zoom calls.
That night I sat down with him to discuss the reasons we were doing this and also if he understood what safe internet or even social media usage is. For an about to be ten-year-old, he seemed to have quite a bit of clarity over it. “Well, right now I’m not asking you for a phone that most kids have. I’m willing to wait until I’m 13 only because I feel that when we surf the internet, many a time, a lot of inappropriate content pops up and it’s difficult to understand all that. This happens even when I’m playing games or surfing the net.”
When prodded a bit more, he revealed that he knew the internet and social media weren’t all about good things but it was a necessary evil and could I please understand that and give him more time to access the internet for school work? I agreed and at the same time, I thought that this conversation would have to be repeated quite frequently so that I knew whatever was going on in his mind and even in his peer group about these issues.
And then a friend’s daughter at 16, is heavily into social media with her Instagram page boasting almost 7k followers because of the fashionable pictures she posts, after boring a hole into my friend’s pocket with her demands for the latest fashionable stuff, A teen influencer if you may call her, as of late she’s started getting a lot of paid and barter deals from companies as is the norm when you manage to get a fan following.
So far so good. No harm done.
But there are also instances of children, especially teenagers who are hooked on social media and have faced instances of losing their sleep and thereby faring badly in academics because of constantly checking their feeds and also getting anxious and depressed when a picture or a reel didn’t fetch as many likes and comments as they thought it would.
Some have started existing in a virtual world where they wake up and post the first feed of the day, bleary eyed from their beds to their daily morning bathroom ablutions and then their breakfasts to when they’re studying and hanging out with friends and well, the list is endless. Their life is public and fodder for the public means if you get likes, you will also get dislikes in the sense that anybody can comment, troll or DM you what they feel about you and your life on the internet. The logic is: if you want to go public, dare to take whatever comes with it.
According to the Pew Research Center survey conducted from April 14 to May 4, 2022, a vast majority of teens have access to digital devices, such as smartphones (95%), desktop or laptop computers (90%) and gaming consoles (80%). And the study shows there has been an uptick in daily teen internet users, from 92% in 2014-15 to 97% today. In addition, the share of teens who say they are online almost constantly has roughly doubled since 2014-15 (46% now and 24% then).
A report in UNICEF says that too much use of social media can be unhealthy and has been linked to feelings of envy, inadequacy and less satisfaction with life. Studies have even suggested that it can lead to ADHD symptoms, depression, anxiety and sleep deprivation. With depression on the rise worldwide and half of all mental illnesses starting at age 14 though, the potential issues warrant further exploration.
Cyberbullying happens, as unsavoury remarks, being approached by strangers, violence through content showcased on social media, and exposure to nude videos and pictures that are strewn all over the internet, therefore anxiety and depression can set in because, at this age, children cannot and are not expected to know how to deal with all these factors.
A lot of parents I spoke to felt their child spent too much time on the phone or computer scrolling through social media feeds instead of getting real work done in the real world. They worried it could affect their grades and academic performance.
A real fear if there ever was any.
Recently US Surgeon General Vivek H Murthy spoke about the ill effects of social media on kids. He says technology companies should put better protections in place and help parents because social media is affecting the mental health of children. They are getting bullied, anxious, and depressed and they can’t seem to stop. All his comments are backed up by hard facts and research.
He adds that the love for one’s children is a unique kind of love and that as they near adolescence, there is more need to pay attention to how social, media can affect their health and well-being. His advisory says that nearly 70 per cent of parents say their job is harder now than it was for parents 20 years ago, mainly because of technology and social media and nearly all teenagers in the United States (95 per cent) use social media platforms — two-thirds use them daily and more than one-third “almost constantly.”
Murthy’s statement also clarified that as of now there is not enough evidence to conclude that social media is sufficiently safe for our kids. In fact, there is increasing evidence that social media use during adolescence — a critical stage of brain development — is associated with harm to mental health and well-being. He says policymakers and technology companies should establish age-appropriate health and safety standards that protect against exposure to harmful content and they should be transparent with the public, including independent researchers and parents, about what the data tells us about how social media is affecting our kids.
What can we do? Can we do anything at all now that social media and the life of our kids are intertwined? Dr Samir Parikh, Psychiatrist and Director of the Department of Mental Health and Behavioural Sciences, Fortis Healthcare, Delhi who has authored numerous books including one called How To Raise Confident Children, says firstly content can be incorrect and that can falsely influence and increase stereotyping. For this, they should be given media literacy training in schools. Secondly, if not balanced with outdoor or social activities and academics, the overuse can cause concern. Thirdly, peer influence and the pressure of conformity affects the individual self-development of children.
This tells us how important a concern this should be for parents of children who use the internet frequently and more so, social media use. While banning social media or phones or hovering around the kids 24/7 is certainly not a solution, what we can do is lay down a set of rules for its use. But how? Says Dr Anupam Sibal, paediatrician, Group Medical Director of Apollo Hospitals Group and also the author of Is Your Child Ready to Face the World, “It is important to have some clear parameters. How much time and what time of the day, needs to be defined. Absolutely no usage zones like the dining table need to be adhered to. Late night use is a no-no as the stimulation tricks the brain that it isn’t time to sleep and the sleep cycle is disturbed.”
The most important rule is of course the no-negotiation rule that because it is social media, the less used the better. While we as parents cannot always ensure this, the least we can do is try and keep regular checks and most important keep the channels of communication open and keep the discussions ongoing with the kids. It’s the least we can do for those we love so much and who we want to keep safe always.
For the rest, the government needs to take this up as a very serious concern and put checks in place before it’s too late.
Today’s teens and tweens have never known a world without social media. There are still a lot of open questions about how sites like TikTok and Instagram may shape their development — and stories focusing on the potential negative impacts of social media tend to dominate the news.
But a recent study published in JAMA Pediatrics is the latest in a growing body of research that suggests the relationship that young people have with social media is too complicated to be categorized as simply good or bad.
The study, which tracked 169 middle-school students, aimed “to better understand the links between how often teens check social media and how their brains respond to social feedback over time,” study co-author Maria Teresa Maza, a doctoral student at the Developmental Social Neuroscience Lab at the University of North Carolina, said via an email. The results show that the brains of teens who use social media more frequently show greater sensitivity to social feedback — but it’s not so clear whether that’s a problem.
The study scanned the brains of students from three public middle schools in rural North Carolina over the course of three years, having gathered self-reported data from the students about how many times per day they checked Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. While the students were in the scanner, they played a computerized game in which they would anticipate and receive social feedback, which was communicated via images of adolescents with facial expressions that could be positive, negative, or neutral.
“We found that certain regions of the brain showed different sensitivity to this social feedback over those three years, and that this changing sensitivity was different for the group of teens who checked social media habitually and those who did not,” Maza said. In other words, over the course of the study, the teens who checked social media more frequently showed greater activity in the regions of the brain related to motivation, control, and salience — how much a given stimulus stands out to an individual — while playing the game. Meanwhile, their peers who used social media less often became less responsive to social feedback.
The study establishes correlation, not causation, between participants’ neural patterns and their social media behavior. So it’s not clear whether checking these apps more frequently leads to greater sensitivity to feedback, or if young people who are more sensitive to feedback are also more prone to scrolling their social feeds. The study also doesn’t take a position on whether greater sensitivity to social feedback is inherently positive or negative. “Given how individualized social media behaviors and experiences can be, this sensitivity may be helpful for some and less helpful for others,” Maza said.
“For example, an increasing sensitivity to social information might prompt future compulsive social media checking,” she continued. “However, a greater sensitivity and awareness of social feedback — particularly digital feedback — might help teens navigate digital-social spaces better, which may be very important in their increasingly digital worlds.”
Maza said that she and her colleagues are in the process of launching a new study exploring digital media use starting with third- and fourth-graders, with the hope of better understanding the impact of digital media contexts on development. https://embed.actionbutton.co/widget/widget-iframe.html?widgetId=SPK-SUVBQA== Nick Allen, professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and director of the university’s Center for Digital Mental Health, said in an interview that the new study is an important one. “When you talk to young people about their experience with social media, it’s actually quite a varied experience,” he said.
Allen is the lead researcher partnering with Google on a study that looks at how smartphones may be affecting our minds and sense of well-being. The study, which is still ongoing, examines not only the potential risks of too much time spent on our mobile devices, but also the ways in which researchers might leverage smartphones to provide mental health support to more people.
Smartphones and social media are not going away, Allen said. “The key question is, how do we shape those technologies to maximize the benefits and minimize the risks?”
Allen said he thinks public education campaigns on social media use among young people, and even curriculums built into schools, could be helpful in the future. For example, as adult content becomes easily accessible for young people through social media, schools may want to have open conversations about sharing or restricting certain content.
“Some of those can be focused on kids, some of those can be focused on parents,” he said.
Other research suggests that many young people are already finding ways to use social media to manage their mental well-being. In a 2020 survey conducted by the nonprofits Hopelab and Common Sense as well as the California Health Care Foundation, more than 1,500 teens and young adults were asked about how they used digital media during the Covid-19 pandemic. Young people with depression were nearly twice as likely as those without depression to say they used social media almost constantly (34% vs. 18%) — a finding that could, in a vacuum, be interpreted as worrisome.
But the survey also found that 43% of respondents said that using social media actually made them feel better when they’re feeling depressed, stressed, or anxious, while just 17% said that social media made them feel worse. And 26% of people with depression said that social media was “very” important for getting support or advice, up from 11% in an earlier 2018 survey.
“There are aspects of social media usage, including displacement of healthy behaviors such as sleep, exposure to hate speech, and heightened social comparisons, that indeed negatively impact youth well-being,” Hopelab Chief Science Officer Jana Haritatos said via email. “At the same time, we also find that these social platforms serve as an important connector, information source, and support system for many young people, particularly those who may otherwise lack in-person alternatives, such as LGBTQ+ young people.”
Looking ahead, Haritatos said, “an important priority for the next generation of social media research is greater access to objective data” on how young people use platforms, so that researchers don’t rely exclusively on self-reported usage patterns. In addition, Haritatos said, “we need longitudinal research that dives deeper into the associations between young people’s identities and their use of social media platforms.”
In the end, it may turn out that what’s important when it comes to teens’ development is less how much time they spend on social media — and more what they see and experience when they’re online.
Summary: Researchers investigate why we “space out” and stop paying attention to the world around us when we become engrossed in social media posts.
Source: University of Washington
Sometimes when we are reading a good book, it’s like we are transported into another world and we stop paying attention to what’s around us.
Researchers at the University of Washington wondered if people enter a similar state of dissociation when surfing social media, and if that explains why users might feel out of control after spending so much time on their favorite app.
The team watched how participants interacted with a Twitter-like platform to show that some people are spacing out while they’re scrolling. Researchers also designed intervention strategies that social media platforms could use to help people retain more control over their online experiences.
The group presented the project May 3 at the CHI 2022 conference in New Orleans.
“I think people experience a lot of shame around social media use,” said lead author Amanda Baughan, a UW doctoral student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering.
“One of the things I like about this framing of ‘dissociation’ rather than ‘addiction’ is that it changes the narrative. Instead of: ‘I should be able to have more self-control,’ it’s more like: ‘We all naturally dissociate in many ways throughout our day – whether it’s daydreaming or scrolling through Instagram, we stop paying attention to what’s happening around us.’”
There are multiple types of dissociation, including trauma-based dissociation and the everyday dissociation associated with spacing out or focusing intently on a task.
Baughan first got the idea to study everyday dissociation and social media use during the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown, when people were describing how much they were getting sucked into spending time on their phones.
“Dissociation is defined by being completely absorbed in whatever it is you’re doing,” Baughan said. “But people only realize that they’ve dissociated in hindsight. So once you exit dissociation there’s sometimes this feeling of: How did I get here? It’s like when people on social media realize: ‘Oh my gosh, how did 30 minutes go by? I just meant to check one notification.’”
The team designed and built an app called Chirp, which was connected to participants’ Twitter accounts. Through Chirp, users’ likes and tweets appear on the real social media platform, but researchers can control people’s experience, adding new features or quick pop-up surveys.
“One of the questions we had was: What happens if we rebuild a social media platform so that it continues to offer what people like about it, but it is designed with an explicit goal of keeping the user in control of their time and attention?” said senior author Alexis Hiniker, an assistant professor in the UW Information School.
“How does a user’s experience with this redesigned app compare to their experience with the status quo in digital well-being design, that is, adding an outside lockout mechanism or timer to police their usage?”
Researchers asked 43 Twitter users from across the U.S. to use Chirp for a month. For each session, after three minutes users would see a dialog box asking them to rate on a scale from one to five how much they agreed with this statement: “I am currently using Chirp without really paying attention to what I am doing.” The dialog box continued to pop up every 15 minutes.
“We used their rating as a way to measure dissociation,” Baughan said. “It captured the experience of being really absorbed and not paying attention to what’s around you, or of scrolling on your phone without paying attention to what you’re doing.”
Over the course of the month, 42% of participants (18 people) agreed or strongly agreed with that statement at least once. After the month, the researchers did in-depth interviews with 11 participants. Seven described experiencing dissociation while using Chirp.
In addition to receiving the dissociation survey while using Chirp, users experienced different intervention strategies.
The researchers divided the strategies into two categories: changes within the app’s design (internal interventions) and broader changes that mimicked the lockout mechanisms and timers that are available to users now (external interventions).
Over the course of the month, participants spent one week with no interventions, one week with only internal interventions, one week with only external interventions and one week with both.
When internal interventions were activated, participants got a “you’re all caught up!” message when they had seen all new tweets. People also had to organize the accounts they followed into lists.
For external interventions, participants had access to a page that displayed their activity on Chirp for the current session. A dialog box also popped up every 20 minutes asking users if they wanted to continue using Chirp.
In general, participants liked the changes to the app’s design. The “you’re all caught up!” message together with the lists allowed people to focus on what they cared about.
“One of our interview participants said that it felt safer to use Chirp when they had these interventions. Even though they use Twitter for professional purposes, they found themselves getting sucked into this rabbit hole of content,” Baughan said.
There are multiple types of dissociation, including trauma-based dissociation and the everyday dissociation associated with spacing out or focusing intently on a task. Image is in the public domain
“Having a stop built into a list meant that it was only going to be a few minutes of reading and then, if they wanted to really go crazy, they could read another list. But again, it’s only a few minutes. Having that bite-sized piece of content to consume was something that really resonated.”
The external interventions generated more mixed reviews.
“If people were dissociating, having a dialog box pop up helped them notice they had been scrolling mindlessly. But when they were using the app with more awareness and intention, they found that same dialog box really annoying,” Hiniker said. “In interviews, people would say that these interventions were probably good for ‘other people’ who didn’t have self-control, but they didn’t want it for themselves.”
The problem with social media platforms, the researchers said, is not that people lack the self-control needed to not get sucked in, but instead that the platforms themselves are not designed to maximize what people value.
“Taking these so-called mindless breaks can be really restorative,” Baughan said.
“But social media platforms are designed to keep people scrolling. When we are in a dissociative state, we have a diminished sense of agency, which makes us more vulnerable to those designs and we lose track of time. These platforms need to create an end-of-use experience, so that people can have it fit in their day with their time-management goals.”
Additional co-authors are Mingrui “Ray” Zhang and Anastasia Schaadhardt, both UW doctoral students in the iSchool; Raveena Rao, a UW undergraduate student in the iSchool; Kai Lukoff, a UW doctoral student in the human centered design and engineering department; and Lisa Butler, an associate professor at the University of Buffalo.
Just as physicians became accustomed to wearing pagers 40 years ago or being tied to smartphones 2 decades ago, many have become active on social media as it entered their practices.
The 21st century’s primary communication channel has become such a part of everyday life that several members of the cancer care community formed Collaboration for Outcomes using Social Media in Oncology (COSMO), which held an inaugural, virtual two-day meeting last year.
Source: Adobe Stock.
COSMO began as a crowdsourced group of professionals interacting on Twitter regularly about 6 years ago, according to Don S. Dizon, MD, FACP, FASCO, head of community outreach and engagement at the Cancer Center at Brown University and head of the breast and pelvic malignancies program at Lifespan Cancer Institute.
Don S. Dizon
“It was an informal network of professionals who wanted to look at social media collaborations and really answer the question of why we need to do it now,” Dizon told Healio. “Instead of doing the lofty ‘because you should,’ or relying on altruism, we were just trying to get down to what can we gain professionally from it, but also outlining the risks more clearly.”
Two of COSMO’s planning committee members, Dizon and Deanna J. Attai, MD, FACS, spoke with Healio about the dos and don’ts of social media use among oncologists.
Attai, associate clinical professor of surgery at David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California Los Angeles, said Twitter has evolved over the past decade from a novelty among physician health care providers for sharing information at meetings to an essential tool for a variety of reasons.
Deanna J. Attai
“One is public health messaging, and I think this has been exemplified due to the COVID pandemic,” said Attai, who has held roles as working group and/or social media editor with Annals of Surgical Oncology, JCO Oncology Practice and ASCO. “I’m definitely seeing more and more physicians really embrace the use of social media to help get accurate information out.”
But in operating a Twitter account, for instance, there can be a fine line between tweeting from a professional or a personal point of view. For Attai, the take-home message is simple: own your content.
“Instead of now saying, ‘Keep your content professional,’ what I say is, ‘Yes, like it or not, as a physician, you’re held to a different standard by the public,’” Attai said. “If you want to put out pictures of you at parties or in a bathing suit at a beach, just own your content. And you must be prepared because that may have a negative impact on you professionally.”
Social media beginners may not understand that a simple “like” on a tweet can be translated as an endorsement and seen by fellow users, according to Attai. Depending on the subject matter — endorsing a tweet about a sports team would seemingly have fewer potential pitfalls than one from a divisive political figure — interacting with social media can lead to trouble a social media novice didn’t see coming.
Dizon embraces all social media channels and encourages everyone to do the same, but he also recommends beginners take some time before engaging.
“Come on in, the water is fine,” Dizon said. “No one is going to advise you to join all of the various platforms. (But when you do), observe, watch and listen until you’re ready (to engage).”
Once oncologists are comfortable interacting on Twitter and overcome any hesitations to join a platform or a conversation, there are many benefits that can help them professionally in practice, according to Attai and Dizon.
Attai has been a regular moderator of #BCSM (breast cancer social media), a weekly forum that began in 2011 as a place for providers, patients and others to discuss breast cancer questions and concerns. In 10-plus years, Attai’s biggest takeaway has been how the weekly Twitter meeting place has improved practitioner-to-patient communication.
“I think many of us feel we have great relationships with our patients, and we encourage them to talk about everything — their treatments, side effects, everything else. But it became apparent very quickly that online you see a very different side of the patients than you do in the exam room, kind of their unfiltered view,” Attai said. “Initially, I was the only doctor on the chat and I didn’t quite have a sense of what my role was or how I really fit in. I just did a lot of listening and realized that, in the office, we’re barely scratching the surface of the patient experience.”
Social media can also be a place for physicians to interact easily with peers who they may otherwise have trouble finding, according to Dizon and Attai. Becoming social media-friendly can lead to research collaborations, not unlike COSMO itself.
They also recommend that, for oncologists, it may be a place where they can easily disseminate and discuss factual information with others, talk about specific clinical research and, perhaps, play a role in increasing trial accrual.
Attai and Dizon said social media users should read information in posts carefully before sharing them and do a small amount of digital homework before fully engaging in a conversation.
“In surgery, one of the things they say is the reason surgery residency is so long is because you need to learn when not to operate, right? So, you don’t have to participate in every discussion. You don’t have to respond to every comment,” Dizon said.
“Most of us just want to have constructive and mutually beneficial conversations,” he said. “You want to take a couple seconds, especially when you’re new, to just make sure that’s a conversation you actually want to have.”
If used improperly, the metaverse could be more divisive than social media and an insidious threat to society and even reality itself.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Social media manipulates our reality by filtering what we are allowed (or not allowed) to see.
We live in dangerous times because too many people use social media to disseminate untruths and promote division.
Augmented reality and the metaverse have the potential to amplify these dangers to incomprehensible levels.
At its core, augmented reality (AR) and the metaverse are media technologies that aim to present content in the most natural form possible — by seamlessly integrating simulated sights, sounds, and even feelings into our perception of the real world around us. This means AR, more than any form of media to date, has the potential to alter our sense of reality, distorting how we interpret our direct daily experiences. In an augmented world, simply walking down the street will become a wild amalgamation of the physical and the virtual, merged so convincingly that the boundaries will disappear in our minds. Our surroundings will become filled with persons, places, objects, and activities that don’t actually exist, and yet they will seem deeply authentic to us.
Early augmented reality (AR)
Personally, I find this terrifying. That is because augmented reality will fundamentally change all aspects of society and not necessarily in a good way. I say this as someone who has been a champion of AR for a long time. In fact, my enthusiasm began 30 years ago, before the phrase “augmented reality” had even been coined. Back then, I was the principal investigator on a pioneering effort conducted at Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) with support from Stanford University and NASA. Known as the Virtual Fixtures project, for the very first time, it enabled users to reach out and interact with a mixed reality of both real and virtual objects.
This early system employed a million dollars’ worth of equipment, requiring users to climb into a large motor-driven exoskeleton and peer into a makeshift vision system that hung from the ceiling, all while they performed manual tasks in the real world, such as inserting pegs into holes of different sizes. At the same time, virtual objects were merged into their perception of the real workspace, the goal being to assist users as they perform the complex task. The research was a success, showing that we could boost human performance by over 100 percent when combining the real and the virtual into a single reality.
But even more exciting was the reaction of the human subjects after they tried that very first version of AR. Everyone climbed out of the system with big smiles and told me without prompting how remarkable the experience was — not because it boosted their performance but because it was magical to interact with virtual objects that felt like genuine additions to the physical world. I was convinced that this technology would eventually be everywhere, splashing techno-magic onto the world around us, impacting every domain from business and commerce to gaming and entertainment.
Now, 30 years later, I am more convinced than ever that augmented reality will become central to all aspects of life, touching everything from how we work and play to how we communicate with each other. In fact, I am convinced that it will happen this decade — and yes, it will be magical. But at the same time, I am very concerned about the negative consequences, and it is not because I worry about bad actors hacking the technology or otherwise hijacking our good intentions. No, I am concerned about the legitimate uses of AR by the powerful platform providers that will control the infrastructure.
A dystopian walk in the neighborhood
Let’s face it: We find ourselves in a society where countless layers of technology exist between each of us and our daily lives, moderating our access to news and information, mediating our relationships with friends and family, filtering our impressions of products and services, and even influencing our acceptance of basic facts. We now live mediated lives, all of us depending more and more on the corporations that provide and maintain the intervening layers. And when those layers are used to manipulate us, the industry does not view it as misuse but as “marketing.” And this is not just being used to peddle products but to disseminate untruths and promote social division. The fact is, we now live in dangerous times, and AR has the potential to amplify the dangers to levels we have never seen.
Imagine walking down the street in your hometown, casually glancing at people you pass on the sidewalk. It is much like today, except floating over the heads of every person you see are big glowing bubbles of information. Maybe the intention is innocent, allowing people to share their hobbies and interests with everyone around them. Now imagine that third parties can inject their own content, possibly as a paidfilter layer that only certain people can see. And they use that layer to tag individuals with bold flashing words like “Alcoholic” or “Immigrant” or “Atheist” or “Racist” or even less charged words like “Democrat” or “Republican.” Those who are tagged may not even know that others can see them that way. The virtual overlays could easily be designed to amplify political division, ostracize certain groups, even drive hatred and mistrust. Will this really make the world a better place? Or will it take the polarized and confrontational culture that has emerged online and spray it across the real world?
Now imagine you work behind a retail counter. AR will change how you size up your customers. That is because personal data will float all around them, showing you their tastes and interests, their spending habits, the type of car they drive, the size of their house, even their gross annual income. It would have been unthinkable decades ago to imagine corporations having access to such information, but these days, we accept it as the price of being consumers in a digital world. With AR, personal information will follow us everywhere, exposing our behaviors and reducing our privacy. Will this make the world a better place? I don’t think so, and yet this is where we are headed.
The metaverse could make reality disappear
Over the last decade, the abuse of media technologies has made us all vulnerable to distortions and misinformation, from fake news and deepfakes to botnets and troll farms. These dangers are insidious, but at least we can turn off our phones or step away from our screens and have authentic real-world experiences, face-to-face, that aren’t filtered through corporate databases or manipulated by intelligent algorithms. With the rise of AR, this last bastion of reliable reality could completely disappear. And when that happens, it will only exacerbate the social divisions that threaten us.
After all, the shared experience we call “civilized society” is quickly eroding, largely because we each live in our own data bubble, everyone being fed custom news and information (and even lies) tailored to their own personal beliefs. This reinforces our biases and entrenches our opinions. But today, we can at least enter a public space and have some level of shared experience in a common reality. With AR, that too will be lost. When you walk down a street in an augmented world, you will see a city filled with content that reinforces your personal views, deceiving you into believing that everyone thinks the way you do. When I walk down that same street, I could see vastly different content, promoting inverse views that make me believe opposite things about the very same citizens of the very same town.
Consider the tragedy of homelessness. There will be those who choose not to see this problem for political reasons, their AR headsets generating virtual blinders, hiding soup kitchens and homeless shelters behind virtual walls, much like construction sites are hidden in today’s world. There will be others who choose not to see fertility clinics or gun stores or whatever else the prevailing political forces encourage them to “reality block.” At the same time, consider the impact on the poorest members of society. If a family cannot afford AR hardware, they will live in a world where critical content is completely invisible to them. Talk about disenfranchisement.
You can’t ever leave the metaverse
And no, you won’t just take off your AR glasses or pop out your contacts to avoid these problems. Why not? Because faster than any of us can imagine, we will become thoroughly dependent on the virtual layers of information projected all around us. It will feel no more optional than internet access feels optional today. You won’t unplug your AR system because doing so will make important aspects of your surroundings inaccessible to you, putting you at a disadvantage socially, economically, and intellectually. The fact is, the technologies we adopt in the name of convenience rarely remain optional — not when they are integrated into our lives as broadly as AR will be.
Don’t get me wrong. AR has the power to enrich our lives in wonderful ways. I am confident that AR will enable surgeons to perform faster and better. Construction workers, engineers, scientists — everybody, young and old, will benefit. I am also confident that AR will revolutionize entertainment and education, unleashing experiences that are not just engaging and informative but thrilling and inspiring.
But AR also will make us even more dependent on the insidious layers of technology that mediate our lives and the powerbrokers that control those layers. This will leave us increasingly susceptible to manipulations and distortions by those who can afford to pull the strings. If we are not careful now, AR could easily be used to fracture society, pushing us from our own information bubbles into our own custom realities, further entrenching our views and cementing our divisions, even when we are standing face-to-face with others in what feels like the public sphere.
Being an optimist, I still believe AR can be a force for good, making the world a magical place and expanding what it means to be human. But to protect against the potential dangers, we need to proceed carefully and thoughtfully, anticipating the problems that could corrupt what should be an uplifting technology. If we have learned anything from the unexpected evils of social media, it is that good intentions are not enough to prevent systems from being deployed with serious structural problems. And once those structural problems are in place, it is extremely difficult to undo the damage. This means the proponents of AR need to get things right the first time.
Adding to the list of health concerns associated with excessive screen time, one study suggests that there could be a link between the length of time teenagers spend online and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
The two-year study, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), observed more than 2,500 high school students from Los Angeles.
Digital media and the attention span of teenagers
A team of researchers analyzed data from the teenagers who had shorter attention spans the more they became involved in different digital media platforms for the duration of the experiment.
The JAMA study observed adolescents aged 15 and 16 years periodically for two years. The researchers asked the teenagers about the frequency of their online activities and if they had experienced any of the known symptoms of ADHD.
As the teenagers’ digital engagement rose, their reported ADHD symptoms also went up by 10 percent. The researchers noted that based on the results of the study, even if digital media usage does not definitively cause ADHD, it could cause symptoms that would result in the diagnosis of ADHD or require pharmaceutical treatment.
Experts believe that ADHD begins in the early stages of childhood development. However, the exact circumstances, regardless if they are biological or environmental, have yet to be determined.
Adam Leventhal, a University of Southern California psychologist and senior author of the study, shared that the research team is now analyzing the occurrence of new symptoms that were not present when the study began.
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Other studies about digital engagement have implied that there is an inverse relationship with happiness. The less people used digital media, the more they reported feeling an overall sense of happiness. (Related: The social media paradox: Teens who are always online feel more lonely.)
The researchers concluded that the teenagers might have exhibited ADHD symptoms from the outset due to other factors. However, it is possible that excessive digital media usage can still aggravate these symptoms.
Fast facts about ADHD
ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder that is commonly diagnosed in children. However, it can also be diagnosed in older individuals. ADHD can be difficult to diagnose. Since several symptoms of ADHD are similar to normal childhood behaviors, the disorder itself can be hard to detect.
The symptoms of ADHD may include forgetting completed tasks, having difficulty sitting still, having difficulty staying organized, and having trouble concentrating or focusing.
Men are at least three times more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than females.
During their lifetimes, at least 13 percent of men will be diagnosed with ADHD, as opposed to only 4.2 percent in women.
The average age of ADHD diagnosis is seven years old.
The symptoms of the condition will usually manifest when a child is aged three to six years old.
ADHD is not solely a childhood disorder. At least four percent of American adults older than 18 may have ADHD.
This disorder does not increase an individual’s risk for other conditions or diseases. However, some people with ADHD, mostly children, have a higher chance of experiencing different coexisting conditions. These can make social situations, like school, more difficult for kids with ADHD.
Some coexisting conditions of ADHD may include:
Anxiety disorder
Bed-wetting problems
Bipolar disorder
Conduct disorders and difficulties (e.g., antisocial behavior, fighting, and oppositional defiant disorder)
Smart phones and tablets have become a cancerous growth in our lives – never leaving us, feeding off our essence, and sucking away our attention, life, and energy. Social media is like an aggressive form of brain cancer, attaching to our mind, addicting us to cheap dopamine rushes, replacing human interaction with a digital façade of living. Stealing away our time, technology has become a disease that infiltrates our mental and social health, leaving us depressed, anxious, worried, envious, arrogant, and socially isolated.
What we type and text to others causes over-thinking, rumination, and misunderstanding. The way we respond with type and text can be misinterpreted, leading to social strain in relationships. Digital communication lacks the natural flow of body language, eye contact, touch, voice inflection, tone, and real-life rapport. Accustomed to digital communication, people lose their ability to have adult conversations. This hurts everyone’s ability to work together, discuss ideas, solve problems, and overcome multi-faceted challenges.
Popular social media platforms prey on human weaknesses
On Facebook, the pursuit of likes and comments can become an addicting sensation. When the attention fails to come in, the Facebook user may feel unheard or undesirable. When the user sees their friends getting more likes, they may perceive other people having a better life than they do, leading to depressed feelings. (Related: Former Facebook exec: “Social media is ripping society apart.“)
On Twitter, communication is limited to short bursts. These bursts encourage people to engage in divisive language that is used in inflammatory ways and is easily misunderstood. Twitter is used to build a “following” which becomes a high-school-esque popularity contest that easily inflates egos and gives a platform to the most annoying ones in the bunch.
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Instagram and Snapchat have become more popular as well, making users anxious to show off their lives online 24-7. This infatuation with documenting every moment is an anxious, self-absorbed way to live and it does the person no good, because these technology gimmicks interrupt the actual moment and disturb the flow of real life. Do we really think that everyone cares about every picture, every meal, and everything that we do? As the digital world continues to bloat up with information, pictures, and voices, all of it loses its value and sacredness. Over time, no one genuinely cares. The louder a person gets on social media, the more annoying they are perceived.
Technology addiction destroys sleep, leads teenagers to other addictive substances
As parents pacify their children with screens, the children are exposed to constant light stimulation which excites brain chemicals. The colorful games and videos over-stimulate the child’s mind, making them addicted to the sensation. Consequentially the child becomes more restless and behavioral distress increases over the long term.
Technology has made our lives more selfish, isolated, and interrupted. Social media has preyed on our weaknesses, trapping us in its mesmerizing facade of happiness. According to SurvivoPedia, teenagers who spend more than five hours a day on their devices are at a 72 percent higher risk for suicide risk factors. In order to alleviate the mental health issues associated with social media, teenagers may turn to other addictive substances to take the edge off.
Additionally, these devices interfere with healthy sleep patterns — which are essential for proper brain development. The onslaught of blue light and electromagnetic frequency interferes with healthy melatonin levels in the brain. The things that we post online can keep us up at night as well. The addiction to check the phone for responses and likes can keep a person up, too. All this brain excitement and depression throws off the body’s circadian rhythm, leading to poor sleep and mental fatigue during the daytime.
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