Social additions
An article by Isabella Giampà
The memory of the goldfish is so limited that every time he turns off its tank he seems to discover a new world. This animal is unable to fix attention to something for more than eight seconds. After this time its mental universe resets. Google has calculated the attention span of Millennials: 9 seconds, just one more than a goldfish. After this, they need other signals to stimulate their brain. Being on social networks it seems to us to always discover a new world and we do not notice the endless repetition with which we interface.
We have reached such low levels of concentration through continuous and long exposures to the internet while we forget its original purpose. Between 2012 and 2016 the time spent on a smartphone during a day doubled in many countries, reaching amazing numbers: 4 hours and 48 minutes in Brazil, 3 hours in China, 2 hours and 37 minutes in the USA, and 1 hour and 32 minutes in France.
But what is it that keeps us hooked on the phone? Which systems have made us lose control? One of the systems has been around for a long time and it is the same that drives slot machines and casinos. A study at Harvard’s behavioral science laboratory first demonstrated this in 1931, by experimenting on a rodent.
During the experiment, they put the animal in a glass box with a button inside. Each time he pressed it he would be provided with a regular portion of food.
Thus the rodent began to press the button regularly and only when he was hungry, taking over the machinery and controlling it.
In a second experiment on another rodent, however, the food was some times distributed, while some others it was not, and the portions were irregular; the mouse, pushed by the desire of the reward, pressed the button more and more frequently and violently, becoming in this way slave of the machinery and unable to leave it.
When we go to social media for no reason why and start scrolling and scrolling down the screen, looking for something we don’t even know what… Well, this is the Side Effect.
We wake up and look at the phone. Is there a reason to do this? No.
We spend hours on Instagram. Is this because we’re looking for something that interests us in a particular way? Probably not. Maybe it’s just a stupid reel similar to tens of others we have seen before and that we’ll forget in a couple of hours.
To all this we have given our most important resource: our time.
Digital economy intervened in the economic conquest of time. Algorithms, treating billions of data collected all over the platforms, modify our behavioral choices. Internet giants use algorithms to steal our time. This was not a Side Effect but a simple choice.
Another behavioral theory related to addictions was traced by: the “theoretical framework of completeness”. According to this theory no matter the value of the action, we feel a sense of pleasure only when we accomplish it.
An example is the Netflix mechanism. Generally the end of an episode of a whatever TV series, leaves you in a state of anticipation to induce you to follow the story.
On Netflix this is reinforced by the autoplay function, thanks to which you can scroll down through the episodes and eliminate in this way the decision-making effort.
It’s not important the quality of the show but the sense of frustration you feel if you don’t finish it.
Here is a personal example: can you even imagine how many bad Netflix series I watched until now? Quite a lot, I must admit. And now I’m finding cheaper and cheaper products on Netflix but despite this low quality I keep watching them until the last episode.
Or I like the series but I see so many episodes in a day that I start to feel frustrated and irritated. But despite all this I continue, and I’m pretty sure the same has happened to at least some of you.
But apart from addiction, which are the other effects of social media on our brain?
Among the pathologies, there are: nomophobia (no mobile phone phobia), “sentinel sleepers” people who avoid deep sleep for fear of not hearing notifications, “phubbing” which indicates the behavior of people who constantly consult the phone when they are in the company of other people, and the anxiety syndrome. Unfortunately, in this historical period technology haunts us everywhere.
Incredibly enough, since we started distance learning I turned from being a girl who looked at her phone for an hour a day to a person who can stand in front of a screen for up to eight hours, which affects both my mental health and my mood.
So what we can do in order to try to reject the negative effects of technology is to start using it in the way it was originally designed. That is using the Internet as a simple, collective medium of exchange and sharing.
One thing that I would personally like to suggest is to ask yourself: why am I using this application? I often go back to Instagram for no real reason, and maybe spend hours doing nothing. It has now become a habit and an automatic action, which I do without thinking twice, only to find myself at the end of the day without having done even half of the activities I should have done. Try making a day without any kind of social media, to re-experience what a life without technology is like. Another very important thing is to unsubscribe from all channels and pages that do not actually serve you in any way; they don’t teach you anything, they don’t make you laugh or be productive, and be ruthless. I know it sounds strange, one might say “but if I don’t care i just don’t click on it”, but the amount of time we spend on news and posts that we watch even if we are not particularly interested is truly breathtaking. I also find very useful to disable the notifications of any social media, to avoid getting distracted, because most likely we will not just look at the notification, but we will look at a thousand other things. Create free Internet moments in your day; for example when you study, eat, or you could even decide on timetables. During these periods of time I recommend putting the phone and any technological distractions away from you, for example in another room or if you have the possibility directly by turning them off. Last tip: monitor the time you spend on your phone. There are a thousand of apps that can do this for you and from my personal experience I can say that they are very useful. It may be difficult at first, but over time, they will become actions that you do naturally.
