Oh hi! Do you find yourself using your phone
more than you'd like to and you've also tried week-long social
media detox but to no avail. Don't worry I've tried
the same thing and many others have but in vain and
you're not the reason. It's because these apps are designed to
hook you in. Today I'm gonna talk about five ways
social media is changing your life right now. Welcome to 5 Mins 5
Ideas, I'm your host Samanvay. Yesterday I watched a great documentary called
The Social Dilemma. It's available on Netflix to watch and it
shines light into the dark side of AI and how
social media apps are dominating more of your life than you think
is possible. The first way social media is changing your life
is due to the addictive design of these apps.
It all began at Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab in 2007.
The founder of the lab launched a new class called
The Facebook class and the whole goal of the class was to teach
students the psychological tricks to design platforms that are increasingly
more addictive and that hook users into the platform. One
of the exercises in the class was to design
apps on facebook applying these lessons and creating ads
around those apps. Graduates of the class moved on to companies such as
LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to apply their learnings
into creating more addictive software. If you find it hard to stop
using these apps then you're not alone features such as the like button,
infinity scroll and custom recommendations are designed to give you
the necessary dopamine hit to keep you coming back for more. These features and
the apps are so addictive that even the creators have a hard time
letting go of it. The second way social media is changing your life
is through attention-seeking behavior you would think that humans are the only
attention-seeking beings out there but you'd be mistaken. Social
media apps such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram beat us to it. Attention
seeking is their main goal the more attention they can get
from you means they can show you more ads and more ads means more revenue
for those companies. They keep your attention by recommending content that
you like based on your interest and your watching
behavior. Attention is this economy's most traded currency so be
sure to guard yours carefully. Over the past few months I've
thought very seriously about which apps are using my attention the most and I've
come to realize that Instagram was pretty much a time sink
for me based on how much i was getting out of it
as opposed to how much it was taking away from me which led me to deleting
the app. I've also ended up turning off all of my notifications from all of the
apps on my phone so these apps can't unnecessarily take my attention away
from the tasks I'm working on and I definitely recommend you to do the same.
Survey the uses of your app such as Facebook, LinkedIn,
Instagram and try to figure out whether or not the time you spend there is
productive or is serving you any good. Personally I
found that my anxieties have completely plummeted
ever since reducing my usage of these services.
The third way social media is changing your life
is through your digital twin. Social media apps want to create
the most accurate model of you as possible
resulting in your digital twin and they do this by
A/B testing of ads and content on you. They can then
use this model to predict exactly which type of content you'd like
the most therefore driving up the engagement on that particular platform
and increasing revenue for these apps. These apps control
your actions on these platforms in ways that you can't even
fathom and I think that's definitely true and I find myself in the same
situation when I go on youtube and suddenly it's two o'clock in the morning
and I've gone down the rabbit hole of recommended videos
and I'm not even sure why i'm watching these videos but the platform
seems to know me better than I know myself so these apps are playing you
like puppets for the sake of revenue generation. The fourth way social media
is changing your life is through fake news. Fake news travels
6 times faster on twitter than the truth. First of all
there's no concept of the truth on these social media
websites. Their initial interest is to maximize
ad revenue therefore this means promoting
viral content. This is regardless of whether or not that content is
a conspiracy theory. It's true that companies like twitter and facebook have
taken a stronger stance in combating fake news but they still can't avoid the
growth of fake news in the initial stages when it's starting to propagate
due to the inherent design of the algorithms which
is set to promote content that has the maximum
amount of engagement until the platform modify the algorithms to stop
the spread. The fourth (fifth) way social media is changing your life
is through the rise of mental illness. Anxiety and Depression has been on a
steady rise ever since the prevalence of social
media and this is especially the case in Gen Z -- all of the people that
have been born after 96 because that's the generation
that has grown up with social media from a very young
age. So let's take a look at the stat that was mentioned in the social dilemma.
In 2015, the number of girls per 100 000 that
were admitted to the hospital due to self-harm rose to 62% amongst
girls that were 15 to 19 years old and by 139%
for 10 to 14 year olds compared to 2009. Similarly, the number of suicides per 1
million girls has risen by 70% for 15 to 19 year olds and 151%
for 10 to 14 year olds. These rise have been correlated to the availability of
social media apps on the phone in 2009. This is a direct
result of the self comparison that takes place
on these social media apps due to everyone carefully curating
their lives. It's no doubt that social media has many benefits
but it also has many many drawbacks as we've seen in this documentary The
Social Dilemma. If you enjoyed the video please
like and subscribe and I'll see you next time.