Social media, something that’s used by billions around the world. It almost feels like magic how you can communicate and see the life of anyone, anywhere. Platforms like TikTok and YouTube fueling your creativity, allowing you to perform live, or prerecorded to anyone in the world. We are in a digital age, an age in which we are the first to be brought up with this technology. But are we sure we know how to handle this technology? Or are we merely puppets of tech-giants, allowing them to make trillions every year? Whats app is a completely free service, there’s no way to pay for it, and no in-app payments, yet it reaps in $5 billion a year. How? In the latest whats app privacy policy update, they’ve said that messaging data will be sent to businesses to send you targeted adverts on Facebook and across the web, and there’s no way to opt out of this. You have to agree to this, or else delete the app. That was a turning point in the messaging app’s history, as over 20% of Whatsapp’s userbase moved to more privacy-focused messengers like Telegram and Signal. The question is, why is advertising and data-collection so important? It all comes down to keeping the user on the page for as long as possible. Facebook use data collected from Whatsapp to tweak/improve your Facebook and Instagram feed so that you can stay on the app for longer, and look at their ads for longer. In 2019, data, your data, surpassed oil in its value to become the most valuable item in the world. It was only now that we had realiased that this was only the tip of the iceberg, and there was so much more. So me and my friend Ali wanted to do more research into this. 

We first looked at some statistics, and found out that the average person spends over 2 hours on social media platforms a day, with that figure going up to 9 hours for teenagers. The average person will spend 40 minutes on YouTube, 45 on Facebook and 30 on Snapchat, every single day. But we were intrigued to know why did people spend so much time.

It all comes down to what’s known as a Dopamine Reward cycle. Dopamine is a chemical produced by our brains that plays a role in motivating behavior. It gets released when we take a bite of delicious food, when we have sex, after we exercise, and, importantly, when we have successful social interactions. neuroscientists have shown that rewarding social stimuli laughing faces, positive recognition by our peers, messages from loved ones—activate the same dopamine reward pathways. Social networks know about this, and therefore leverage off this, Instagram’s notification algorithms will sometimes withhold “likes” on your photos to deliver them in larger bursts. So when you make your post, you may be disappointed to find less responses than you expected, only to receive them in a larger bunch later on. One of the original developers of the Facebook news-feed even said that the thing which made it successful wasn’t the software at all. But it was actually the scroll wheel on a mouse.

There’s a drinking age, a gambling age. But there are no age restrictions on technology devices. We’re essentially allowing kids to use highly addictive drugs in the form of technology before their brains have developed and before they have any natural defenses against them. 

But this Dopamine Reward Cycle isn’t only what’s going on, there’s also a Variable reward schedule in play. Variable reward schedules were introduced by psychologist B.F. Skinner in the 1930’s. In his experiments, he found that mice respond most frequently to reward-associated stimuli when the reward was administered after a varying number of responses, precluding the animal’s ability to predict when they would be rewarded. Humans are no different; if we perceive a reward to be delivered at random, and if checking for the reward comes at little cost, we end up checking habitually. It’s called “variable” because you don’t reward the behavior every time. You vary how often the person gets a reward when they do the target behavior. Slot machines are a very effective example of a variable ratio schedule. The casinos have studied the science of rewards and they use them to get people to play and keep playing. Social media works very similarly to slots machines, you would refresh your feed because you are expecting something new. What’s happening in Vegas is happening everyone. But why do people prioritize this short-term happiness over long-term happiness?

This is known as instant gratification. Instant gratification’ is the immediate attainability of satisfaction and happiness. It is a way of experiencing pleasure and fulfillment without delay or patience because it provides a spike in dopamine without effort or discipline. Having our desires quickly met isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But as it pertains to the spread of quick-fix solutions in the digital age. The constant checking of our social accounts or our exposure to auto-play features on streaming TV makes it difficult to maintain focus on actions that create long-term success and happiness. This is the first time in history we’ve had instant access to dopamine delivery systems as potent as our smartphones. In the past, you had to put in a lot more work before you got your reward.

According to research from Princeton University, there are two areas of the brain: one that is associated with our emotions and the other with abstract reasoning. The emotional part of our brain responds positively to instant gratification. Our emotional brain wants to max out the credit card, order dessert and smoke a cigarette. Our logical brain knows we should save for retirement, go for a jog and quit smoking. The key is to get a balance, but it is becoming more harder to do so as we are becoming overwhelmed by access to instant gratification wherever and whenever we want. We then wanted to look at what impact social media has on children and teenagers.

Children would have less attention-span affecting their childhood and adulthood. The Internet ecosystem as a whole tends to reward in the short term at the expense of the long term. For the most part, it revolves around more clicks, more likes, and more views — and this is as true for learning material as anything else. Children and teenagers will want to learn something quick and easy, rather than taking the long route. For example, if you decide to learn French, and google ‘how to learn French?’, people are now more likely to visit a site that says something like ‘learn French 20 minutes a day, in 2 weeks’ rather than ‘learn French 1 hour a day in 24 weeks’. We then looked at where children and teenagers spend most of their time, school. We wanted to know what schools were doing to help tackle this pandemic of social-media addiction among young adults. 

Over the past decade or so, teachers have reported that the growing number of children bringing personal devices into class is hindering teaching and leading to disruption. The London School of Economics found that banning mobile phones from classrooms could benefit students’ learning. GCSE results at the Ebbsfleet Academy in Kent have almost doubled since the school banned smartphones in 2013. It is expected to say children should be taught to limit the amount of time they spend online."- the government said that it’s a not a good idea to add this to the curriculum  and therefore made it optional to teach with less than 1% of schools in the UK teaching this. So then if young adults continue to use social media at this alarming rate, how would adulthood look for them?

We would end up with a generation of adults that would always want to take shortcuts in learning and life in general leading to low grades and inadequate performance in tests and assessments. And they won’t be very resilient, i.e. give up on tasks frequently

So social media isn’t necessarily bad, but excessive use, over a long period of time (like we’re currently seeing among young adults) can be harmful. What can you do to reduce the time that you spend on social media? You could measure screen-time across apps, using built in software (digital-wellbeing for Android and screen-time for IOS). Maybe you could set screen-time limits for yourself. Or, after checking your social media, sign out of your account every time, meaning that if you want to check it again, you will have to sign in again, eventually reducing your temptations. One of the most simplest yet most effective things you can do is to allocate a specific time in the day where you can check your social media accounts. This works if the window is between 15-20minutes. Be sure to keep track of time when doing this. So there you have it, there’s more than enough evidence that social media is having a negative impact on not only young adults but everyone. Social media companies are literally hacking your minds using psychology just to earn more money. So make the right choice, will you remain a slave of social media or will you break free?