Ali Almazedi & Naman Patel

• Junior Project Essay

  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?

Caspar McDermott

Dinithi Ramanayake

• This is the artwork I produced, which was inspired by 2020. Look at the powerpoint for information about each of the figures and events. 
  

  

Dominic Thunhurst

Finn Pudsey

Floella Thompson

Francesca Seedat

Isabelle Hyams

Issy Ashforth

Joe Mottram

• Introduction 

  You may be thinking that artificial intelligence will rise to power and control our lives  sometime in the distant future, but you’re wrong! That’s pretty much what social  media does today. 

  In this presentation, I will share my research on how robotics impact everyday life,  how it’s helped during the pandemic and what might happen some time in the future.  

  *Unfortunately, this is all I could do due to lockdown and most of my research was  actually about building a robot which is what would have been my final project*

  How do robots effect modern life? 

  Normally someone’s perception of a ‘robot’ is something like C-3PO from star wars  and although there are technologies like that being created at the moment, a robot  is any machine that completes a task traditionally done by humans, normally using  some form of low level artificial intelligence to operate. Robots are more commonly  used than you might think. Large industries use automated robots in factories to  make things more precisely and efficiently than a human can, hospitals use them to  complete intricate surgical operations and the police and military use them to  complete dangerous tasks like bomb defusal. 

  Source - https://engineering.eckovation.com/10-impacts-robots-everyday-life/

  Robots impact on modern life 2 

  Japan is the leading country in robotics development and uses robots in restaurants  to make sushi and chop vegetables. There are lots of crime fighting robots that  disarm traps and collect data on hostage situations. Roombas are robots that learn  the exact dimensions of wherever they are hoovering so they can cover everywhere  and avoid obstacles like furniture. 

  Source -https://sciencing.com/robots-used-in-everyday-life-12084150.html

  How robots have helped during the  pandemic 

  Robots have helped with everything to do with the pandemic from sanitising hospitals to  making deliveries. In Kigali, Rwanda there is a team of robots at the medical centre,  checking temperatures of people entering to prevent person to person contact. There is  also a fully automated swab robot in development, germ zappers that use ultraviolet-c  waves to compromise the molecular structure of germs. In Italy there are robots used to  check up on patients without using protective equipment. A company called zipline  created winged flying machines to drop protective equipment to hospitals. 

  Source - ttps://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/medical-robots/how-robots-became-essential-workers-in the-covid19-response

  What will happen with robots in the  Future? 

  This is a difficult question as we can only speculate as to what will happen in the  future but still, I found a blog with 10 things that technology might improve in the  fairly near future. The first is public security allowing for suspicious activity to be  

  reported faster. There may be robots helping teach students at school, working along  side us and eventually replacing some jobs but in turn will also create the job of  repairing the robots. Self driving cars may be a possibility but as many would argue,  a bad idea. There would be improved healthcare robots who would act as a gp and  there’s virtual reality which will be a part of the entertainment system. 

  Source - https://blog.robotiq.com/10-ways-robotics-could-transform-our-future
  

  Thanks for watching!!!

  
  
  

Lilia Dean

Lizzie Hughes

Lucas Hu

Olivia Whitby

Romilly Tuckley

Summer Harvey

Theo Lindridge

Tilly Potten

William Gale

Yasmin Seedat