Welcome wonderful steemians to my blog once more, I hope you will have a great time here,
Again the session will be on some issues with social media
Social Media (SM) has changed the way we communicate and socialize – forever! There will never be a reverse to the pre-social-media interaction. One can hardly even remember what that was like, even when it is still less than 2 decades ago. Due to recent events like social media addiction; the privacy crisis; mind manipulation; ‘fake news’; false information spreading and many more concerns, the need to educate ourselves on the use of social media is highly needed – now, more than ever.
Taking addiction, a very good number of millennials are addicted to social media, but we do not admit it. This is sometimes due to ignorance and some other time, self-conceit. Let us do a quick diagnosis.
How many minutes can we stay after receiving a notification from our phone before we run to the phone to check? How do we feel when our phone/gadget goes off? And are we feeling that way because people won’t be able to reach us or because we won’t be having access to our social media accounts for some time? How do we feel when we get ‘likes’ and ‘comments’? When you experience a ‘flash of genius’ or you just read this great quote, is SM the first thing that comes to your mind? ‘Share it’, ‘it’s nice for my status’, ‘this will get many retweets’? I am not a psychologist and won’t give a final diagnosis on whether or not we are addicted, but sincere answers to these questions should give an idea of how much one is attached to SM.
But why are we so attached? Guys, SM is much more than some codes running on the internet. According to a recent study by RadiumOne, we get a high rush of dopamine - a neurotransmitter that helps control the brain's reward and pleasure centres – each time we get a notification. To put this into a better perspective, the release of dopamine is a central factor to popular addictions such as cocaine, nicotine and gambling. By causing the release of dopamine, SM is said described as” imitating natural pleasurable experiences like eating or having sex, which makes it very addictive, setting up a reinforce behaviour in our brain”. You simply want to “recreate the experience”, hence, more posts; more time. The Silicon Valley giants are much smarter than we think, aren’t they? They invest so much in research into human behaviour to get more and more of our time. Also, Social media is known for having complex algorithms to capture and manipulate our consumption, to take as much of our time as they can. To avoid SM addiction or break free from it, one must be VERY intentional about it.
SM addiction can be dangerous, as succinctly put by Yancey Strickler – Kickstarter’s CEO “It’s not hard for me to imagine that in 20 years from now we find that what social media does to our brains is equivalent to what smoking does to our lungs” he said. I do not know how to completely break free or completely avoid getting addicted on the long run. But I do know a few tricks that can help reduce the attachment and prevent addiction; at least for a long time.
- No-Phone time: marking out some time of the day (say in the morning till 9am; office hours; or in the evening from 8pm; or even if it is just some 1hr to start with) that one won’t be accessing and of one’s SM accounts; or better still, not using any gadget at all. This weakens the “spontaneity” of notifications and the eagerness to share everything interesting about one online. And with time, one would notice improvements in how much one can control oneself.
- Limit oneself to a few posts a day: One should make a firm decision that no matter how many interesting things happen today, I am not posting more than say 3 posts a day across all SM accounts. This gives one two things: improve your self-restraint and weakens the spontaneity; and more importantly, one would make sure that only posts that are necessary would make it out there since one has just 3 to ‘spend’.
- The Mute function: The mute function on the smart devices is a great tool to help break SM addiction. One can do this in 2 ways: One either completely mutes less important notifications permanently or ALL notifications in specific periods.
Moving to privacy, this is a huge problem. But most people don’t realise it yet. We have no idea how much of our data is out there. Why should you care? Well, 20 years from now, we do not know on which side policy makers would be. But one can prepare for the worse and assume they won’t be protecting our privacy enough (even if they want to, they technically can’t protect us completely). The internet never forgets, they say. Imagine applying to a job and one doesn’t need to take the interview because the employer has access to all of one’s online activities for 25 years; from how one was making needless comments on crush’s posts to how much one hates his president or how badly he wants a ‘revolution’. Some people’s whole life activities can literally be followed on their SM accounts; their location can be predicted to a large degree of accuracy. They update ALL events, movements, feelings and anything one can think of. It makes one so vulnerable in many ways and once one posts anything out there, it is out already. Deleting a post hides it from other users, but not from the platform owner. They still have it, but marked as ‘deleted’.
So, asides the fact that the internet never forgets, another issue on privacy is just how much platform owners can say about us with our SM activities. Like I mentioned, they spend a lot on research into human behaviour. And our activities are NOT as random as we think (they are); they follow a pattern and these guys have the resources to investigate this pattern and manipulate us as appropriate. Just a study about what one’s likes on Facebook says about him/her shook the world’s democracies so strongly that it caused an international scandal. That was just an instance in which they got caught. There may be more. It is important that we do not give out much information about ourselves as we are vulnerable to our screens and the more information we give, the more they can control what we see and mould our minds into whatever they want, too. We will discuss this in more detail later.
The privacy crisis is even worse with friends coming into the picture. There are now algorithms (step-by-step computations) to predict one’s behaviours based on observed patterns from his/her friends’ activities. We’re screwed, right? Sadly. When someone joins a social network, the next thing to find friends, isn’t it? To aid the process, many apps offer to import contact lists from someone’s phone or e-mail or Facebook, to find matches with people already in the network. With this, one’s friendship connection web can be constructed, and some things can be said about one’s behaviours too with a considerable level of accuracy – thanks to Artifical Intelligence (AI) algorithms.
So, how do we solve the privacy problem? I’d be lying if I say I have all the answers. But, again, I have no doubt that giving out less and less information would be a positive move. Why should your SM account include places you have visited? Your interests and world view? Movies you see? Places you’ve lived? Of what use is engaging in arguments on social media about controversial issues? The following are some privacy tips for SM:
® One should only accept requests from people he/she knows, henceforth: Nobody collects award for highest number of friends. And one should not be driven by ‘quantity’ but ‘quality’. Someone recently was to confirm login on one of his SM account and was to identify some of his friends by their pictures, he has a long list of over a thousand friends and the platform would just pick 5 at random; he couldn’t complete the process. One’s contacts on SM also have access to our personal info, so one needs to be very careful as to who gets access to his personal info
® Review privacy settings: How many people have every visited their SM accounts privacy settings about who can see what? This is very important and anyone that has never done that should do so. Here, one would see a whole lot of things that can be controlled.
® Share only what is necessary: Home address, travel itinerary, health conditions, phone number, email, financial details, and pictures that reveal locations should not be shared on SM. It is advisable that one should be very discreet on SM. It is not as ‘harmless and safe’ as we would think. Public figures don’t even discuss sensitive matters over a phone call or private chats. This a practice I would recommend.
Log out/log off when you’re done: It is cool to just be logged in, right? Well, it’s a huge risk. One should try to logout each time he/she is done on SM platforms.
® Do NOT follow a suspicious link: this sounds more like an online security issue, but it also has to do with privacy. A lot of one’s data can be spoofed from malicious websites and one’s gadget can be infected with worms too to collect one’s private data. Cyber-Security would be another session on its own, hopefully.
Do random stuffs: One should be a little unpredictable. One should ‘deliberately add some outlier data’ into his online activity log (well, I hope AI algorithms won’t be smart enough to detect them)
I will have to stop here now because my PEN BLEEDS.
I will continue tomorrow same time, so don't miss it. Thanks for visiting my blog, you can RESTEEM upvote and comment if you appreciate this content, am 