eli5: Why is social media so addicting?
In: 5
They are carefully designed to be that way. In the age of free content, you no longer pay for access to services, instead corporations pay for access to your time, attention and personal information with the intention of making a sort of delayed profit from you eventually via advertisements, sponsored content etc.
Since corporations are the ones investing money into these companies, pleasing them and ensuring they benefit takes priority over the user when the social media platforms are updated. Over time they have been carefully tweaked in order to maximise attention and time even as it was shown to be detrimental to some users. Things like endless scrolling, like buttons and algorithms favouring divisive content were introduced in order to keep your attention for as long as possible so you can be shown advertisements, have your email address harvested, and your user habits collected so you can be funnelled into seeing adverts for things you are most likely to buy.
In terms of the actual effect on your brain, the little PING that you get seeing something amusing or divisive or a bit of social validation from a like or comment is a rush of endorphins. Your brain is hardwired very very strongly to seek these chemical hits as they indicate ‘good thing is happening we should repeat this’, and so you start out with a healthy relationship to social media, checking in on friends and communicating – using the platform for its original purpose – and gradually, without realising it, you begin to use the platforms more and more, becoming more exposed to these feel-good feedback loops until you’ve developed a habit that you can’t break. Phones are in our pockets every minute of our lives, we have a simple easy way to escape any unpleasant thought, any microsecond of boredom, just jump on and get a few little hits of interesting things and before you know it you’ve wasted your evening looking at garbage you weren’t interested in.
The same way a rat will wear out its little pink claws pushing a button for a drop of addictive substance over and over again until it has two bloody stumps, so we wear out our brains by giving them these little hits over and over again, completely dulling their sensitivity to real sensual pleasure and smoothing over our abilities to be mentally flexible and focused and resiliant.
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