Since I have been a long-time proponent (and participant) in longer form content and have for far longer warned anyone who would listen and many who would not about the dangers of high consumption of social media and short-form content, I also take note of stories and studies that discuss these things. This week I have come across, with one from a doctoral dissertation performed in Finland, the other a study from China finding a strong correlation between short-form content consumption and increased loss aversion and addiction, is particularly interesting.
Problematic use of social media is linked to depressive symptoms, loneliness and low self-esteem, according to a doctoral dissertation published by the University of Oulu on Monday.
Excessive use of short-video platforms not only impairs decision-making processes but also predisposes individuals to addictive behaviours.
Called it.
Sure, I didn't have an fMRI machine to prove the negative effects on the brain, but it is pretty obvious it would, isn't it? We aren't made to learn in the way that we are consuming content today, but our brains are still learning even if not learning any useful information, or useful habits. Just like our environment shapes how we look, think and behave; the content we consume is making physical changes to our brains and none of it seems to be for the better.
Yet, the majority of people, including parents raising young children, somehow seem to think that that they are not affected by it and it is not a problem. They seem to believe that they are somehow different, unique, and can beat the average. Perhaps it is the reduction in loss aversion speaking.
Or the impaired decision-making mechanisms.
It is interesting to consider I think, because we hold this simple rule that we "learn from our mistakes", but the thing with addiction is, even when we know we are making a mistake, we will keep behaving to fill the desire. Not only this, based on the information in the study, we are also going to be worse at making decisions in the future, and more willing to lose. Essentially, the checks and balances we should be developing through experience are actually weakening, and the wisdom we should be gathering through that experience, is not developing either.
There are those "aging simulators" that will show a person's face at a young age and then what they will look like if they are smokers or heavy drinkers, or out in the sun a lot. I wonder if there will be a simulator that will show what life could have been like give a fully functioning brain. But, for those who are consuming a lot of short-form content and social media, they should expect that their brain is going to function increasingly worse, even though they aren't getting to an age that it would normally start degrading at.
Doctoral researcher Krista Hylkilä also found that people with ADHD symptoms are predisposed to problematic use of social media.
That was a line from the Finnish article, and one that I found a little bit problematic. Are people with ADHD symptoms predisposed to problematic use of social media, or does problematic use of social media manifest ADHD symptoms. It is likely, both. Because while there are some people with ADHD (and we are all on the spectrum remember), someone doesn't have to have ADHD to behave in accordance with the symptoms. Their learned behaviours can mimic the symptoms, without having a predisposed position. I suspect that the massive increase in ADHD diagnosis and medication prescription does not indicate a large increase in ADHD, but an increase in the behaviours used as indicators of the disorder. The treatment might affect the behaviours, but it doesn't remove the external cause.
Technology and the culture driven by it has fundamentally changed the way we live our daily lives and goes against hundreds of thousands of years of relatively slow evolution. Perhaps in a few more hundred thousand years from now we would have evolved into beings that could handle the technology of today, but none of us are at that point yet. We all are impacted negatively when we overconsume social media, short-form content, and the continual chase for a micro dopamine hit from some random event.
Intention matters, and when people are scrolling endlessly, they are not consuming with intention. Instead, they are consuming with hope that something interesting will come into the awareness and provide another hit of dopamine, which is fading faster and faster, increasing the desire and the reducing timeframe required to get the next hit.
As I see it, all of this is obvious and requires no special study or the title of professor to predict. We all should be able to see this happening, and all be able to make changes in our lives in order to limit the damage. But, the majority of us don't because we are addicted to a range of feelings, and look to fill our needs with substitutes that do the opposite of what we actually want. When we are hungry, we are eating junk. When we are thirsty we are drinking junk. When we are lonely we are chasing junk relationships. When we are bored, we are filling our mind with junk.
And we want more.
Making us hungrier, thirstier, lonelier and stupider.
Get off the wheel.
Taraz
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