The downsides of social media

For a very long time I’ve been hesitant to take a definitive stance on social media. I would say something along the lines of “Social media are tools, and it depends on how you use them.”

What I meant is that for the majority of people, they could decide to use social media in w way that does not harm them, or makes them addictive. However, as I’ll demonstrate in this article, I no longer think it’s true. I think that social media bring no value to humans. Let me outline the problems I found with social media.

They dehumanize humans

I was thinking the other day about the amount of people who read my tweets. On average, I get anywhere between 100 and 300 views. You could read this and be like “meh, what a looser.” Sure thing, in terms of social media outreach, I’m no one. But consider this.

An average classroom, at least in my youth, was about 30 children. A cohort could consist of 3 to 4 classes. This makes between 90 and 120 students in a single year group. Now imagine yourself standing in front of a cohort in your school and delivering a message to all those students. This would terrify most of the people.

But in terms of social media, it’s nothing. Most people dream to be on a stage with thousands of listeners in order to deliver their speech, yet on social media 2000 views is considered lame. I don’t know of a single person who was able to deliver his message, in person, to more than tens of thousands of people at the same time without the use of social media.

Social media dehumanize others. As posters, we view people as “views” and “likes”. Just a number. We don’t think that behind every number there is a living being, similar, yet completely different to us. They have their own story, and experience emotions while reading/viewing your content online. Yet, for us, they are just a number.

And we are to them just text. Cyberbullying is a known phenomenon in social media. Sure, it happens in real life too. But at least in real life you get to see the consequences of your actions. You learn that you hurt another human being. In social media, we see no face or emotions. It’s just a text.

And so, everything that makes you human in real life, is taken away when you participate in social media.

They condition us

The phrase “social media is addictive” is thrown a lot. But I believe that social media is not only addictive, but it’s a conditioning tool. It shapes the way we think and act. Phenomena such as “phantom notifications” are a good example. A phantom notification is an imaginary feeling that you’ve heard a notification pop up on your phone. Some people experience it with vibrations while having their phone in their pockets.

Prolonged exposure to social media also changes the way we think. Since most social media algorithms try to expose your to information that they think you like — through metrics such as viewing time of content, or interactions with the content — they create a feedback loop where you will see more and more information about the same topic, thus changing the way you think. News have similar effect. Since news tend to portray negative events only, studies have shown that people who consume news on a regular basis, are more paranoid in life.

And this is the danger with social media. If you accidentally made the algorithm think that you like a conspiracy theory about how oxygen is bad for you, you will continue to be fed such content. This will, eventually, condition your belief about the world and your relationship with oxygen. And trust me, there is a dark corner on social media for every conspiracy theory.

They build destroy communities

But the worst part of social media is that they managed to deceive as all.

According to a statistic from Our world in data loneliness is on the rise. I’ve read somewhere that we are the loneliest generation that ever lived. People struggle to build connections, find partners, and create communities. Despite the fact that we have access to people all around the world.

Why? Because social media lied to us all. The lie is in their name: social media. They portray themselves as tools to build connections and create communities. A replacement to real life social interactions. But there is no correlation between social connections in real life and social media.

Social media is all about you. I saw a report that selfies get more likes than posts about nature or whatever. Thus conditioning you further into focusing everything around yourself. You become a narcissist. But that’s not how you build social interactions in real world.

In real life you have friends, but in social media you have digital numbers. You do not associate humans to these numbers, because it’s impossible. How can you imagine hundreds of people? Nobody has that many friends. Yet, on social media it’s possible.

And the FOMO, fear of missing out, is understood in reverse. Before social media, I would meet with my friends in real life, and we would discuss past week events. Everyone would share a story from their lives. Somebody had an interesting situation at work, someone else just came back from a trip. We could sit all evening and talk about our lives.

Social media convinced us that we need to get information in real time. But the effect is the opposite. Now, when you meet people who you follow on Instagram, and whose posts you’ve seen while they were on vacation, there is nothing to talk about. You saw all the pictures, read all their thoughts and emotions. Maybe even had a “conversation” in comments.

So no, they don’t build connections, they actually destroy them, and there is nothing social in social networks.