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Nostalgia: Social Media Addiction pt. 2 · Why We Do What We Do

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  You're listening to why we do what we do? Welcome to why we do
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  what we do? I am your still trucking' on this nostalgia release host Abraham
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  and I am your let's say friends, sir, host Shane. Okay,
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  So we are a psychology podcast. We talk about all of the things that
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  people do, and sometimes we talk about how they network together online and we're
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  uh, well, this is a second part on a rare, rare Friday
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  release. I think of our two part release of our nostalgia episodes on social
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  media addiction. This episode is one fifty five, originally published on May ninth
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  of twenty twenty. So we were early on in the days of lockdown in
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  the pandemic. What a time. Huh Yeah, if you want to reminisce
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  about it, I mean, yeah, there was a lot of bad stuff
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  going around and going on. How cool was it that everybody had their own
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  sourdough starter? And I think that we were the idea of doom scrolling,
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  which I'm not even sure if people even say that anymore, but at the
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  time, people were doom scrolling a lot, and I think that had us
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  thinking about social media addiction as that relates to that, and so we released
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  this two part series on social media addiction. But it's been four years.
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  We've just finished publishing a run of episodes on addiction in general. If this
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  is your very first episode, like you've never listened to anything we've ever made
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  before. This is the second part of a series of two, So I
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  do think that you will benefit from going back and listening to this. Wednesday's
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  release of Social Media Addiction Part one, Nostalgia, and then today we're going
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  to re release the second part and then do a follow up. It's been
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  four years. Yeah, there's some new stuff has happened. We're going to
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  talk about that. Yes, So we typically don't do such a short span
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  of time for our nostalgias. We usually have five or more, but we
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  thought it was appropriate. Yeah, we're really excited talk about this. I
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  think, all right, well, let's quickly acknowledge that it is a day
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  that we're unlikely to normally hit that often, and it's Daniel Boone day.
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  Yeah, it's also national or not national, but it's Hugging Atheist Day just
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  in case y'all see me at a conference. I am an atheist and I
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  like hugs, So I am totally fine with being hugged. We are huggers.
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  We are huggers, some of us, maybe not all of us.
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  Yeah, it is junebug Day. It's National Chocolate ice Cream Day. Big
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  fan of that. That rules. It is National Donuts Day. I wish
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  that vegan donuts were easier to come by. I love donuts. Donuts are
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  I think peak human invention because if you really think about it, like the
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  wheel, very powerful thing. They turned the wheel into food and here we
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  are thriving, right Like, I'm just saying that's the best possible thing they
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  could have done. It's Trial Technology Day. I am a gadget lover.
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  I love gadgets, so this is great for me. I love it.
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  Wow, all right, fair enough? Yeah, early adopter, that's what
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  it is. Yeah. It's also World Food Safety Day. Since it's like
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  National Donut Day, it does make sense we'd acknowledge that. So yeah,
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  we're Food Safety Day. Don't get equali. It's also VCR Day. Speaking
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  of technology, m that's a thing that doesn't work anymore or is used anymore.
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  Really, I don't know if people are nostalgic for VCRs, and why
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  would you be, but guess that's yeah, sure, why not? The
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  tapes take up so much space. Yeah, you have to rewind them.
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  Like do people even know what that means to rewind something? If I told
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  my kids be kind rewind, they neither of them would understand what that meant.
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  Yeah, Like, who, what what does that mean? You like
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  going to the bathroom during an episode? You need me to go back?
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  Like that's what? Yeah? Yeah, what does that mean? And finally,
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  it is world carrying Day and let's just make that every day. Yeah,
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  let's just do that all the time. Anyway, as we said,
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  we are actually a psychology podcast. We do like to celebrate the holidays and
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  acknowledge when they occur because it's fun. It's the thing that we do that
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  we enjoy because, as I said, it's fun. We're finishing up the
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  second part of the Stalgia episode. We're going to go ahead and jump right
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  into this second episode, part two of Social Media Addiction. We'll let past
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  Shane and Abraham Shanebraham take it away, and at the end of this discussion,
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  we're going to come back with some updated content. Yeah see in a
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  minute. All right, welcome to Why We Do what We Do. I
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  will be your host. Abraham and I'm Shane, and so today we are
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  picking up where we left off in our discussion about social media addiction, and
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  just as a quick refresher, last time that we were here, we talked
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  about the fact that there is no actual diagnosis called social media addiction. Right,
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  Yeah, there's not an official diagnosis, and we're going to kind of
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  lean into that pretty heavily today when we talk about the different features of it.
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  But yeah, it's kind of interesting when people talk about it like it's
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  a real thing. So we did talk in staid a lot about some of
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  the features of an addiction, what that means sort of behaviorally speaking, and
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  we also talked about sort of an informal assessment to determine if you were addicted
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  to social media that really followed the model of addiction, like is this causing
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  problems in your life? And do you find yourself sneaking off to use the
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  social media sort of thing. Yeah, and from now on we're going to
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  reference it as the social media and a little bit of discussion around sort of
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  how it works potentially in the brain. We're going to talk about that again
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  here as well as some personality things. But I think if you didn't listen
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  to that one. That one does really set up a lot of the foundation.
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  So i'd recommend that you go back and listen to part one if you
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  haven't. If not, there's still lots of information to get from this discussion
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  today. So I think it'll be okay. Yeah, yeah, for sure.
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  I think this is going to cover a little bit different stuff. But
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  I think the part one to part do you Together obviously make the most sense
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  if you want to get a comprehensive idea of what we're talking about. Cool,
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  all right, so before we jump into that, how are you doing?
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  Change? I'm good man, how are you great? Did okay?
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  Did okay? Trying to set boundaries with all this stuff going on? Yeah,
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  like I've learned that I think I'm okay, but I think I'm really
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  It's really easy for me to overwork, you know, while all this is
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  going on, so I'm trying not to do that. That's actually a very
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  fair point because I felt that I was going to have all this free time
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  and ended up filling it immediately with things. And so yes, now,
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  Shane, this episode comes out in the future long after we have recorded it,
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  oh right, Yeah, and at the time that that comes out.
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  I'm just going to hope that everything with COVID nineteen has been over for some
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  time. Yeah, yeah, or at least on a better path. Yeah,
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  because at the time that we're recording this, there is no immediate end
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  insight. Yes, people really struggle with that apparently right now, just kind
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  of as a reference point. There are places that are there are active protests
• 6:57
  that people want to go back to work so that the thing. Yeah,
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  and Florida has just as of two days ago, reopened its beaches for some
• 7:04
  unknown reason, pass it around more efficiently. I guess, so Florida,
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  we should just do an episode on Florida. Wow, do a whole podcast
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  on Florida. I don't know that we would cover what we need to do
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  in that space. It would be we'll launch a side project called Florida dot
• 7:23
  dot dot Why Florida, Why Why. I used to listen to this radio
• 7:31
  station when I was younger, and they would do they would play this game.
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  They would call it Florida or Germany, Okay, And what was wacky
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  about it was that both places it was you you just couldn't tell. So
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  I guess maybe Germany. There's a German, a germany Man or German Man.
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  Oh that that had hit the same kind of strides, but it's a
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  little it's a little different. Less alligators. Yeah, more clogs, more
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  clogs more Peerstein's yes. So anyway, welcome to our episode on addiction,
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  part two. You might find that if you also have been stuck at home
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  during this that your use of social media has increased. Let's go ahead and
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  actually talk about one of our sources here. So from Forbes, there is
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  a discussion about how the addictive effect of social media actually occurs, and they
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  actually describe this need for validation and that there are these built in rewards and
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  kind of incentives in the social media platform where people can like follow or post
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  emojis and memes and hashtags to the things that you do, and all of
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  that kind of validates that behavior of interacting with social media by doing things like
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  posting your status or posting a photo, or even liking someone else's photo or
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  responding to a post, or maybe doing one of the hashtag challenges of some
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  kind that exists out there. I don't know how common that is, but
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  I'm thinking there seems to have been a lot of them. One that just
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  was kind of going around was like, can you put a shirt on while
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  you're doing a handstand? Wow? And so that's so that's and that's just
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  kind of like the quarantine thing. So like on a normal day, these
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  platforms are designed to have that validation component where it's the likes, to follows,
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  the emojis, the interactions, basically the impressions. Like there's a lot
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  of stuff that goes into the social media piece. And what's really cool about
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  that is that you know you can kind of see which aspects of which platform
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  are designed to be those reinforcing things. Even on LinkedIn, which is designed
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  to be a platform for professionals that are supposed to share resources and whatnot,
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  one of the things that I noticed while I was using it the other day
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  was when you interact with a post, like if you like a post or
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  or anything like that, my phone does this. I don't know if everybody's
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  phone does this, but my phone vibrates like it's like at this cool little
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  sensation where it's like the minute you hit it goes like real quick. Yeah.
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  So like even that is like designed to be have some kind of reinforcing
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  property built into that. Yeah. Smart and probably that little vibrating sensation would
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  not have meant anything if it wasn't linked to that outcome of that validation or
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  that reward, and so that becomes part of the experience and can become missed
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  if it is removed or changed in some way, And so we all sort
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  of get used to these little things that happen and those become these sort of
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  learned rewards if you will, that then can really cement in that pattern of
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  behavior with that type of interaction. According to the source, they also talk
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  about Fomo, of course, and that they reported in twenty thirteen that sixty
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  seven percent of users feared that they would miss something that was going on if
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  they weren't using the social media platform. And so that would be another one
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  of those not only do you get those rewards when you use that platform,
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  but you're explicitly aware of the fact that when you're not using the platform,
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  you're missing out on the potential rewards that you may have gotten had you been
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  using that platform. And you can see how that builds into a cycle really
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  quickly. Yeah, and just as like again just to kind of note,
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  this is on a normal day, like this isn't like right now, more
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  people are using social media more people are posting articles, more people are doing
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  this because we're kind of at home, but on a normal days, they're
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  kind of making the argument that about sixty seven percent of people are like having
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  this fomo piece. So that kind of drives the use of social media up
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  a little bit. Yeah, great point. So on this point of this
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  whole thing, where you get this validation, you get these rewards, and
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  you are satisfied, I guess with the fact that you're not missing out on
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  things that are going on. Every time that you get to interact with this
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  platform where you sort of get to push yourself out there, it sort of
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  gets to build up your ego, if you will, And so you get
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  some amount of recognition or you get some sort of acknowledgment for what you are
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  contributing to those platforms, and that just continues to build the momentum of that
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  behavior in that space. If that makes sense. Well, right, and
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  think about it like this too. So like your platform, whatever you are
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  posting, you are in total control of too. So like you get to
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  respond to what you want to, you get to reinforce what you want to,
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  You get to post things that are going to contact more reinforcement than others.
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  This episode is not on thirst traps, but that is something that we
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  could talk about at some point in time where it's like partial nudity and stuff
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  on ha, you know, but that's something to look at. It's like,
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  you know, there are certain posts that you get to control as part
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  of your platform, as part of your social media presence that contacts certain reinforcers
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  and you follow certain people that have certain it's a whole cycle. But yeah,
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  it's like a monument to you as a person in the digital age,
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  which is really interesting. So let's do one more time. Let's talk about
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  this whole brain chemistry part of this, and then I think we can be
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  probably done with it for this topic for now. Yeah, And so I
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  think I thought of a way to say this that I think will maybe make
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  the most amount of sense, and that is they always talk about what happens
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  in your brain when you, like, you do this pleasing, and dopamine
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  happens and the pleasure centers of your brain light up, YadA, YadA,
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  YadA. I think the way to really think about this is that we are
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  set up biologically to feel a need for something in some way, and so
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  we call that motivation. And let's think of it that way, right,
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  we're deprived of something, or we are alerted to the fact that there is
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  some reward available out there, or where some reward is made valuable by something
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  that we're told. So like, for example, if I were to say,
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  there's this new social media thing that is really cool, and it's really
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  fast, and it's really easy to use, and it allows you to do
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  all those new things that other social media platforms can't do. Well before,
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  that platform may have meant nothing to you, even if you had heard of
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  it, and now I just sort of built it up and made it sound
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  valuable, okay, And so now when you go and use that platform or
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  you do whatever that thing is, because there was that sense of motivation,
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  then you also get the reward of having interactive to that platform in line with
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  the motivation that you had. And so you sort of satisfy that motivation or
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  that urge if you will to use it. And so that's the whole brain
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  chemistry thing what it is is. And I'm not talking about like the neurotransmitters
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  or the structure of the brain, because I honestly don't think that that's terribly
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  important to understand. Beyond. We have the capacity to feel motivated for something
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  and then rewarded for completing on that motivation. And that has to do with
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  how our brains are set up and how our biology is set up. That's
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  allowed us to evolve effectively. And it's getting sort of hot, well,
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  not hijacked, but it's the process of social media and other addiction or addictive
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  platforms really lean heavily into that process. And so without talking about oh,
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  it gives us a rush of dopamine, that doesn't mean anything because the dopamine
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  doesn't just happen because we did X, Y or z. It happens because
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  there's a motivation in place, right, And that's just the process of what
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  occurs when we engage with those rewarding activities is like the fact that they're rewarding
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  is tied to the sensation that we get, which is related to our biology,
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  and it's all mixed together. It's not a cause effect. There you
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  go. I'll take that. So basically, listen to what Abraham just said.
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  Great, yeah, that's my point. Let's pause, change directions and
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  run some ads. Let's get back and let's kind of switch gears a little
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  bit and talk about some of the other things that kind of go around this
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  idea of addiction in some of those processes. This is going to be from
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  a resource that we have called Addictioncenter dot org, and they provide some resources
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  on addictions and whatnot. But in kind of going back to the idea of
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  what Abraham just said, when one of the many rewarding quote features quote of
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  the platforms occurs, it becomes paired with that jolt of dopamine whatever that is
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  associated with the activity positive reinforcement. We've kind of talked about and touched on
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  all those things, but basically there is some reward for engaging in that,
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  right, right, yeah, exactly. So those features are kind of like
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  candy or cocaine. I'm going to go out on a limit saying neither of
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  us have been on cocaine. Correct, Correct, We can strongly say that,
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  and behavior conforms those patterns that acquire more of it. So essentially,
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  kind of like the concept of reinforcement, which we've talked about, this idea
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  that when I contact something I like, I'm going to continue to engage in
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  that thing, that behavior to contact the thing that I like. So the
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  reason we like candy is because it tastes good. Right, we all have
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  a preferred candy, so we continue to engage with that because there's some reinforcing
• 16:30
  properties related to that licorice. Yeah, licorice depends on the licorice. Now
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  do you like black licorice? I have started experimenting with black licorice. Nobody
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  has ever said that sentence in the world sweet. I'm an original. I
• 16:47
  historically hated it, and I decided as I was getting older, and old
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  people seem to like licorice, black licorice, so maybe I would start to
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  like black licorice. And so I started trying it more. And it still
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  has the sort of oily soa beef flavor that is mostly gross. But I
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  could start to see, with enough exposure and enough desperation, how it could
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  be seen as pleasurable, which is probably true of a lot of things.
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  Black licorice the candy of desperation. I mean, I prefer butterscotch. I've
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  learned that butterscotch is a thing that's in my palette now. But if my
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  opinion, butter scotch has always been good. But I do like that the
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  tagline for black licorice. I really think they should consider using that the candy
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  of desperation. Are you starving to death? Black licorice is the answer?
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  Yeah, you're so bored that you're willing to try something awful. Have you
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  ever liked the taste of sweet soap? So essentially, what happens here kind
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  of in this idea of there's some reinforcing property with that platform, there's some
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  kind of reinforcing property with interaction. The problem starts to come when one starts
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  to disregard those other things like interpersonal relationships. They mistake something like social media
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  relationships for real contact and real relationships. Maybe they start neglecting work, school
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  responsibilities, physical health, Their mood begins to fluctuate. And we've kind of
• 18:03
  touched on those a little bit before, But that's when it starts to become
• 18:07
  a problem. Is it's not that social media is a problem in itself,
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  it's that when those behavioral patterns start to shift and change away from healthy relationships,
• 18:17
  healthy work, habits, those other things that kind of maintain our homeostasis.
• 18:22
  You're exactly right, And I think that that leads to a really good
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  segue to describe when you see those unhealthy habits develop, you might understand implicitly,
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  but let's state explicitly that what can happen then is you see a decrease
• 18:37
  in your overall mental health because you have these other unhealthy habits, and they're
• 18:41
  unhealthy because they affect you both in a physically negative way but also in a
• 18:45
  sort of mentally negative way. And so there are reports that the excessive use
• 18:49
  of social media, whatever excessive might mean, can lead to those lower self
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  esteem, feelings of isolation, feelings of sadness, and essentially just increase unhappiness,
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  which almost sounds like a double negative. It's not technically, but let's
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  let's say increasing sadness or less happiness. Yeah. The thing is is that
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  when you talk about these social media platforms, because it is so digital,
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  and we've probably all had this experience on a very small scale where it's like,
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  I'm somebody who likes to read books and have a book in my hand.
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  I have a really hard time with digital versions of books. They don't
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  make me happy, they don't bring me joy. I like having that tangible
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  thing. Now, start thinking about that in the frame of like a relationship,
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  right, like social relationships, physical contact, like seeing people in person,
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  like all those are very salient things that happen in your environment, and
• 19:37
  they have rewarding properties within itself. Now, when you start moving into this
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  social media platform, you start losing that physical contact, you lose that real
• 19:45
  time interaction, and so that's a lot of what happens. The content itself
• 19:48
  on social media isn't paired with any sort of physical contact or those more intimate
• 19:52
  connections that are pretty critical to a human experience. Yeah, I mean,
• 19:57
  if you think about the fact that in the age of everyone having gone to
• 20:02
  virtual ways of hanging out, people are meeting online via video. They could
• 20:07
  just have a phone call, they could just be texting one another, but
• 20:11
  there's something important about being able to see the person that you're talking with,
• 20:15
  be able to hear the inflection in their voice and see the expressions on their
• 20:18
  face, and be able to interact with them in that meaningful way that has
• 20:22
  people use video instead of just like sending each other text or posting online,
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  and all of those things are so important to how we interact with one another.
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  There's just there's so much that's lost in the nuance of expression, and
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  even ideally, I think one thing that we've learned is we'd still rather be
• 20:38
  in person if possible. We've been using zoom to record for a very long
• 20:45
  time, since way before it was cool. And that's why, yes,
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  hipster accomplished. Were the hipsters of zoom? The hipsters of Zoom? Oh
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  man, what that'd be an interesting band name, Hipsters of Zoom? What
• 21:00
  kind of bands that? Are? They? Just fast hipsters? Yeah,
• 21:03
  exactly, it'd be like a rapid pace funk band. I guess into it,
• 21:08
  Yeah, I'm there for it. So but anyway, we could have
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  always just recorded where we only heard each other but didn't see each other,
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  but we felt it was important to be able to see one another's faces as
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  we record, and I think that a lot of people have discovered that.
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  So there is something that is lost on social media platforms where you don't get
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  that direct interaction. And of course, how many times has it been said
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  of you said something and someone took it out of context and they read a
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  tone into your message that was not there, and that sparked a whole or
• 21:37
  that you didn't intend to be there, I guess, and that sparked a
• 21:41
  whole confrontation between people who that would have never happened if they'd had that face
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  to face interaction, right absolutely. I mean, and another side effect of
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  this too that we have to look at is just whenever content is being produced
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  on social media, for the most part, it's manufactured. Like while somebody
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  it's controlled content, right, it's not. Nothing that you're going to see
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  is gonna be as authentic as having a real conversation with somebody in real time.
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  And you know, while sometimes this is good. You can update people
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  and people become proud of a loved one, they're inspired, maybe they see
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  something, the other part is people can become jealous or depressed because they're seeing
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  something that is I mean, I use this example when I talk about self
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  care all the time, is that when you go look at like the hashtag
• 22:21
  for self care on any sort of platform, it looks like people are on
• 22:23
  these luxurious vacations and they're doing all these things. But it's like, this
• 22:26
  is a moment in time. This is like a glimpse into the amber of
• 22:30
  human experience, and it is controlled, it is shaped, it is a
• 22:34
  small snippet of what's really happening, and so we lose some of that perspective.
• 22:40
  I guess when we start seeing those posts like oh, this is what
• 22:42
  self care looks like and people are influenced by that, and there's reinforcing properties
• 22:47
  that I mean, there's just so much stuff that goes into the idea of
• 22:51
  the influence of social media, but understanding that the content itself is manufactured is
• 22:55
  really critical. Yeah, and that is a good point. And there is
• 23:00
  also this element of being sort of, I guess, guarded against that interaction
• 23:06
  with somebody where you don't have them in front of you, and so people
• 23:08
  react in very different ways than they would if they were actually talking to that
• 23:12
  person. So the kind of hateful messages that people would send one another,
• 23:18
  you wouldn't. You'd rarely say that to someone's face a lot of the time,
• 23:22
  right, and a lot of the time they don't. You put that
• 23:23
  out there. You don't even think the person's going to end up seeing the
• 23:26
  message that you even sent. And so there's another podcast that I listened to
• 23:32
  called Conversations with People Who Hate Me, and on that he specifically takes those
• 23:37
  people who have said hateful things to one another online and had them meet virtually
• 23:42
  and most of the time or at least on a phone call, and actually
• 23:45
  talk to one another. And almost every time the person who sent the message
• 23:51
  said, I didn't actually think that you would see that, and so it's
• 23:53
  sort of their way of just I want my voice to be out here too,
• 23:57
  because that's what this platform is intended. And you don't think about the
• 24:03
  fact that there's another human being that you're interacting with because all you have is
• 24:07
  the screen, right, and you don't get to see what interaction looks like.
• 24:10
  So there's something that changes the way that we behave toward one another that
• 24:15
  can lead to those really unhealthy relationships. Yeah, for sure. So you
• 24:19
  know, as we start looking at all this, I think one of the
• 24:22
  things that we do need to kind of touch on is this idea we've talked
• 24:26
  about personality before, but we want to really talk about like who's at risk,
• 24:30
  you know, when we start talking about this, who's more susceptible to
• 24:33
  contacting these problematic contingencies related to social media and all that. And we're going
• 24:37
  to use the term personality traits quite a bit because that is kind of talked
• 24:41
  about within some of the discussions, but we're going to try to tie it
• 24:44
  back to some of the more grounded stuff that we want to cover. Yeah,
• 24:47
  and honestly, I really think the way to think about this. When
• 24:49
  we talk about the type of personality of someone who's likely to really fall into
• 24:55
  the social media trap of addiction, level engagement is which talking about people who
• 25:00
  are already demonstrating those patterns of behavior. For the most part, that like,
• 25:04
  that's what personality is essentially is you are already have a pattern of behavior
• 25:08
  that lends itself to a particular outcome, at least with how we're talking about
• 25:14
  what personalities are likely to I guess get stuck in this addiction cycle if you
• 25:19
  will, right, So, you know, we start talking about personality traits,
• 25:23
  they can contribute to a problematic use, right, Like they can contribute
• 25:26
  to accessing these social media platforms. They can contribute to that kind of like
• 25:30
  I guess, maybe slippery slope of problem that comes up. But usually the
• 25:34
  people that are more susceptible to this are people who are already engaging in these
• 25:38
  kinds of patterns of behavior. They just become more amplified the more they use
• 25:42
  this. So the first example is anybody who's got like traits that are related
• 25:45
  to neuroticism, or the degree to which one's experience with the world elicits anxiety
• 25:51
  and stress. So as somebody who is generally pretty neurotic. I could see
• 25:55
  how that would escalate for somebody, especially the FOMO piece, like I got
• 26:00
  to see what's going on. I can't get rid of my social media because
• 26:02
  I'm worried that I'm going to miss something, or I'm not going to get
• 26:03
  an update, or I'm going to miss some news about something. And so
• 26:07
  I could see somebody who is generally considered neurotic or engaging in those types of
• 26:11
  patterns would get sucked into this really quickly. Yeah, And that was both
• 26:15
  according to The Chronicle and Medical News Today, referencing a study from Being Hampton
• 26:21
  essentially saying that the people who are already demonstrating the tendency I guess to demonstrate
• 26:27
  like anxiety, stress, that sort of thing, and have that experience that
• 26:33
  they're at an increased chance of sort of getting hooked to platforms like that sort
• 26:37
  of as you said. And then another one they pointed out was this idea
• 26:40
  of conscientiousness or the quality of being sort of diligent or level headed. Also
• 26:45
  sort of the idea of self control and impulse control, that sort of thing
• 26:49
  that actually has the reverse effect of being able to self regulate your tendency to
• 26:56
  want to use that. So essentially, it's saying here that those people who
• 26:59
  are already do a lot of sort of self regulating and have a good skill
• 27:03
  around how they control their impulses are less likely to find themselves quote unquote addicted
• 27:08
  to social media, right And within that you'll hear kind of the discussion around
• 27:12
  like susceptibility too, righte. Susceptibility to peer pressure, susceptibility to social pressures,
• 27:18
  and usually somebody who is maybe more susceptible is going to experience more problems
• 27:22
  using those platforms. Speaking pretty freely, my daughter, when she first got
• 27:26
  some kind of social media, she really struggled with it because she would see
• 27:30
  friends engaging in certain behaviors on there, she would get pulled into that,
• 27:33
  and she was fairly susceptible to some of those peer pressures that were related to
• 27:37
  like thirteen, fourteen, fifteen year old kids on the internet. And so
• 27:41
  after kind of having contact with some problematic contingencies related to that, she kind
• 27:45
  of stepped back and has become less susceptible to peer pressure. And that's been
• 27:48
  more helpful and actually really great for her mental health. And that's I mean,
• 27:51
  that's an anecdote, but that is something that I've seen directly as a
• 27:53
  result of all this. No, that's great, and I think that's sort
• 27:56
  of a place of optimism of even though we are not prepared for something like
• 28:02
  this as a species, because we've never had something quite like this, we
• 28:06
  adapt to things so quickly that I think what we're just going to see is
• 28:08
  a new way of learning and developing socially, where this is a platform that's
• 28:14
  available for the youth and it's not necessarily something to be terribly afraid of for
• 28:18
  them. And like, I also think I am so glad that this was
• 28:22
  not available when I was a teenager, no joke. I can just see
• 28:26
  myself having gone down the absolute wrong paths having that as an outlet when I
• 28:33
  was really really susceptible to what my friends were doing and what I wanted to
• 28:38
  fit in. I wanted to be part of the conversation. I wanted to
• 28:42
  have my voice be heard by everybody because I thought I had something to say,
• 28:47
  and like that just would have been, I think, not good for
• 28:51
  me, and maybe, you know, maybe instead I would have actually developed
• 28:55
  good skills around dealing with that. But yeah, it's I think it's just
• 28:56
  a good point to raise that the new next ouration is facing something that we
• 29:00
  don't know what it would have been like to have been raised with that,
• 29:03
  and it's hard to provide a lot of guidance because we're not coming at it
• 29:06
  from that perspective. And I think that goes back to, you know,
• 29:08
  so many of these other other topics that we've talked about, where you've got
• 29:12
  so many, you know, possibilities in place for how to interact with these
• 29:18
  platforms on different levels, with different forms of communication. Like you're talking about
• 29:22
  the difference between like public posting versus private posting. You're talking about like just
• 29:26
  all this stuff, And I think that's very difficult to navigate because you've got
• 29:30
  this issue of like there are so many choices to run with and kind of
• 29:34
  going back to we talked about option paralysis and kind of those terms too,
• 29:37
  but anything around that, I mean, you're talking about a wild West where
• 29:41
  there are very little limitations that somebody might come across. Yeah, it's it's
• 29:48
  territory that's only beginning to be explored in terms of sort of the parameters of
• 29:52
  what to expect and how best to use it. That's a yeah, you
• 29:56
  said it, well, I think going into the Wild West is as a
• 29:59
  metaphor that probably res it's pretty well with a lot of people. So I
• 30:02
  have a quick follow up to that, ADS, that wasn't helpful. We're
• 30:12
  back real quick. There was this this review on social media addiction by Cus
• 30:18
  and Griffiths, and essentially they pointed out that it is really difficult to talk
• 30:23
  about this personality thing because there is a tendency to use self report for personality
• 30:29
  descriptions, and how reliable is that going to be, you know, right,
• 30:33
  and so you know, they do argue that a more structured clinical interview
• 30:37
  by a professional would probably be better at really accurately detecting specific links between those
• 30:45
  behavior patterns also known as personality traits, and the tendency to be addicted.
• 30:52
  And then there's been more. If we want to do just a quick summary,
• 30:55
  there was another study by Marengo, Paletti and Setani in twenty nineteen.
• 30:59
  If you just want to describe what they found with personality and social media addiction,
• 31:03
  Yeah, basically kind of to touch on the idea of personality, they
• 31:06
  found that neuroticism was tied and linked pretty closely to social media addiction. Where
• 31:11
  extraversion was inversely related, But essentially what they found was both are tied to
• 31:17
  making more status updates perhaps do do the need for self preservation self expression fulfilled
• 31:22
  by social media. So you'll kind of see that those links that we talked
• 31:26
  about before are correlated with this social media addiction that we're talking about. I
• 31:30
  mean, I think there's this common theme throughout a lot of the things that
• 31:33
  we've discussed that what happens in this space is this positive feedback loop where more
• 31:41
  use begets more use, and that the intrinsic reward system built into these platforms
• 31:48
  fosters a high level of engagement on that platform, which results in a high
• 31:52
  level of reward, which results in a higher level of engagement, and you
• 31:56
  just get this snowball effect of using. And again this isn't for everyone,
• 32:01
  but for those people who already have a tendency to allow themselves to be snowballed
• 32:07
  by effects like this, or they've never had to practice regulating themselves in spaces
• 32:12
  like this, you can see it's easy to get in that cycle. And
• 32:14
  I think that's just that'll end up probably being one of the take homes here
• 32:17
  is that cycle thing that that feedback loop is one of the critical elements of
• 32:23
  what you might describe or think of as social media addiction. Yeah, I
• 32:28
  mean specifically, this article talks about how extraversion had a positive correlation with positive
• 32:32
  feedback. So basically, the more you're out there, the more likes come
• 32:36
  in, and it just does that snowball thing. But when they do talk
• 32:37
  about this, the neuroticism and extraversion components found that there was a higher frequency
• 32:43
  of status updates its specifically when there was positive feedback related. So you know,
• 32:47
  as we start talking about this and you start looking at that, you've
• 32:51
  got somebody who I'm extroverted. I'm going to say something, I'm going to
• 32:54
  get some interactions with it. I'm going to continue to post stuff. I'm
• 32:58
  going to continue to get interactions with it. All all I can think of
• 33:00
  right now is the singer of that band Trapped right Now has gone on this
• 33:04
  like this ridiculous rabbit hole of like fighting with people on Twitter, and he's
• 33:09
  fighting with like people like Iced Tea and like these metal bands and stuff and
• 33:13
  just calling people. It's just really bizarre to watch. But there is a
• 33:16
  lot of interaction with those posts because the guy is saying some pretty incendiary things.
• 33:22
  Yeah, weird, it's very strange. I didn't realize that that band
• 33:27
  was still around. Oh they're still around. It's a whole thing. I
• 33:31
  might change my recommendation to just go read the drama related to it. But
• 33:36
  you know, the thing is is like as you start talking about this vicious
• 33:37
  cycle of likes and interactions and kind of the back and forth, you develop
• 33:42
  a heightened tolerance. So whereas ten likes might have been sufficient before, it's
• 33:45
  no longer working, right. It's like chasing the dragon. One hundred likes
• 33:50
  is the next one two hundred, I mean, and like really, if
• 33:52
  you want to use it compared to like real drug terms, that's exactly what
• 33:55
  it is. You know, ten likes doesn't work anymore, so I need
• 33:58
  a higher dose of likes. And that's where it becomes more of a problem,
• 34:02
  and you start seeing people do more outlandish things or saying more outlandish things.
• 34:06
  Or Kanye West is a perfect example of this, Like he goes away
• 34:08
  for a little bit, then then he shows up and he says something really
• 34:12
  incendiary, like hey, things are better now than they were, and you're
• 34:15
  kind of like whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa whoa, whoa, whoa,
• 34:16
  And he gets all this interaction with this one post that he makes,
• 34:20
  and it just continues. It gets bad for some people. I could see
• 34:23
  that with myself when I was all excited when we were about to reach one
• 34:29
  hundred followers on Spotify, and I was so excited about that, and then
• 34:32
  I was like, now I need one hundred and ten. Just kidding,
• 34:37
  yeah, right, we're way beyond that. But I actually legitimately was like
• 34:43
  watching those numbers, be like, you want to break a hundred soon,
• 34:45
  want to break a hundred suit and now I just need more. So one
• 34:49
  of the things, let's go and wrap up the study real quick. They
• 34:52
  did point out in this study that there are specific signs to look for for
• 34:54
  social media addiction, and that was a sense of loss or anxiety when you
• 35:00
  are without access to that platform. So when you don't have your phone or
• 35:04
  a computer, or maybe for whatever reason you just don't have access to the
• 35:07
  Internet, that you a reliance on the feedback that you get from those online
• 35:12
  platforms in order to have a high level of self esteem. You engage in
• 35:15
  that vitriolic, angry trapped singer behavior online and therefore plays too much importance on
• 35:24
  social media, and you'll see too people lose sleep, they are emotionally distraught,
• 35:29
  they obsessively check, I mean, they're you. And we've kind of
• 35:31
  already covered this, but it's basically confirming what we've talked about in the first
• 35:35
  episode, which is all these things that are these obsessive, repetitive behaviors are
• 35:38
  occurring and becoming more and more intense as you go. So basically, this
• 35:45
  study came out last year that really kind of confirms what we're talking about.
• 35:49
  Even with the bias there, it still talks about those same indicators of addiction.
• 35:52
  We also found this this interesting fellow who seems to be an expert and
• 35:57
  addiction Shane. You found a lot about him. His name is doctor Mark
• 36:00
  D. Griffith. And so what's his deal. He's got like eighteen awards,
• 36:04
  like national awards for his research. He's published like seven hundred articles that
• 36:07
  are that are peer reviewed, five books, one hundred and fifty chapters.
• 36:12
  I mean, the guy's done. I can't speak to the maybe integrity of
• 36:16
  his work because I didn't get to go into all that, or like maybe
• 36:20
  the rigor of his work, but he has done a lot of work in
• 36:22
  this, and he seems to be kind of like that, the facto expert
• 36:24
  when it comes to gaming addictions, working addictions, and he also kind of
• 36:29
  works with like sex addiction two. So he could be like a doctor Oz
• 36:32
  where he's just you know, famous for being famous, but he could be
• 36:36
  a legitimate guy. I'm leaning more towards legitimate guye than doctor Oz, Like
• 36:39
  it seems like kind of the profiles that I have read seem like that.
• 36:43
  But I'm not gonna die on the hill just yet. All right, fair
• 36:45
  enough, So if he has a reality TV show, then I think all
• 36:49
  credibility goes out the window. But other otherwise, what we'll assume for now
• 36:51
  that he's a legit guy. Yeah here is doctor Phil also, I think,
• 36:55
  as he pointed out, he does actually have quite a few credentials that
• 36:58
  seem to suggest that he's legit. So he pointed out that for a small
• 37:00
  minority of individuals, social media use is correlated with some other psychological mental health
• 37:06
  problems we as we have mentioned, such as anxiety, depression, loneliness interestingly
• 37:10
  ADHD, and then he also said that social media use specifically can be correlated
• 37:16
  with addiction, and I'm thinking he meant addiction of various kinds. What he
• 37:21
  kind of talks about too, is specifically this idea of like ongoing usage or
• 37:24
  constant usage is really closely intertwined with this rise in the use of mobile culture,
• 37:30
  or kind of like this idea of mobile culture where we are basically all
• 37:35
  walking around with supercomputers in our pockets. I mean, think about this for
• 37:37
  a second. When we were younger, a podcast was simply a radio show.
• 37:45
  It was a talk show, yeah all right, that came on at
• 37:46
  a specific time, and you could only listen to it when it was on
• 37:50
  right and you had to turn on the radio. Now you can listen to
• 37:53
  hundreds of thousands of podcasts from your pocket whenever you want. And so you
• 37:59
  know, you're starting to see this kind of culture in this mobile culture where
• 38:01
  things are more accessible more quickly, people are fearing missing out. We're just
• 38:05
  flooded with information. So the usage of social media is kind of like he
• 38:08
  does talk about, increasing with this rise in this mobile culture that we're living
• 38:12
  in. He raised the question, and also this was described by Forbes of
• 38:16
  who's sort of responsible here and doctor Griffiths here suggests that governments and organizations should
• 38:22
  actually take action and try and limit or even ban the use of social media
• 38:28
  in certain contexts. Of course, driving low hanging fruit here. This is
• 38:32
  pretty universversally accepted in terms of where to ban the use of engagement with a
• 38:37
  social media platform. And of course many schools, employers, and colleges have
• 38:43
  placed some amount of restriction or bands on the use of social media. Some
• 38:45
  of them have tried to create their own versions of social media that are relevant
• 38:50
  to only what they're doing. Apparently, some restaurants offer discounts for diners who
• 38:54
  refrain from using their phones throughout their meal, which I think is actually very
• 38:59
  clever. I always thought that one of the smartest things that companies did was
• 39:04
  when some of the insurance carriers started offering incentives for doing like having your phone
• 39:10
  off while you drive or have it in like drive mode, and that was
• 39:14
  paired to some thing in your car where they could actually verify that. I
• 39:17
  don't know how well that actually worked, because I think that one the outcome
• 39:22
  was pretty small the output from that, and two I think it was very
• 39:25
  difficult to regulate, so people maybe found too many loopholes in that system.
• 39:30
  Yeah, but I really like the idea of if we're going to try and
• 39:32
  regulate this punishment is just not going to be that effective because people are You're
• 39:39
  not getting at the motivation to use the thing, and so the only way
• 39:44
  to really combat it is to either address the motivation, which good luck,
• 39:50
  right, or to try and incentivize some kind of alternative. And so I
• 39:54
  do like the idea of offering like a discount or something. Yeah. I
• 39:58
  mean one of the best meals I've had recently was It's in Miami, right
• 40:00
  when APBS got canceled. Went out with some colleagues and we went through with
• 40:05
  restaurant and they had in the middle of the table like just put your phone
• 40:07
  here, don't touch it. First person that touches it has to pay for
• 40:08
  their dinner. Hah, pay for everybody's dinner. Like kind of one of
• 40:10
  these things. But it was really cool. We got to sit and talk
• 40:14
  and chat and I wasn't even stressed about it. I was like, cool,
• 40:15
  I canna put my phone up, and we did. It was great.
• 40:17
  I do feel like we've gotten as a culture too used to talking to
• 40:23
  people who are sort of half listening while they use their phone. And I
• 40:28
  know I'm guilty of this, absolutely where someone talks to me and I'm like,
• 40:30
  oh cool, this is an opportunity for me to use my phone.
• 40:32
  And I'm not really on social media, has been raised many times on this
• 40:37
  podcast, But I do use my phone for a lot of things, and
• 40:40
  I do use my phone for a lot of things that involve other communication,
• 40:43
  like emails, texts. We use Slack for a lot of communication. So
• 40:47
  I'll be looking on that. I'm on a discord server, which is kind
• 40:51
  of social media, Like that's for you know, other podcasts that I support
• 40:55
  and listen to and so and including ours. So hey, if you want
• 40:59
  to join in our discord server, pretty easy, pretty see what to do?
• 41:01
  It just roped it all in anyway, I think that we have gotten
• 41:06
  very used to this as a culture where we just sort of accept that people
• 41:09
  will sort of have pay attention to us and we're going to have to repeat
• 41:12
  ourselves or just know that we go unheard. And I think that you're right
• 41:15
  that it we would benefit from. When we're going to be face to face,
• 41:20
  we put our phones down and we talk. Yeah. So, in
• 41:23
  reference to Abraham talking about the government being responsible and all that fun stuff,
• 41:29
  Forbes kind of digs into this idea of responsibility for addiction a little bit.
• 41:32
  Salesforce CEO Mark Bennioff says the social media company should be regulated the same way
• 41:37
  cigarette companies are to put quote the safety of consumers before the financial gains,
• 41:43
  which I like end quote, which I like that sentiment. I like that
• 41:45
  idea of safety is more important than money. Yeah. I mean sometimes people
• 41:51
  just say things like that, but you know, if that's actually the value
• 41:54
  that is being pursued, then that's great. They definitely are in support of
• 41:57
  that. Another thing to consider is that, as pointed out by Forbes,
• 42:00
  the people who develop and run and moderate Facebook, these are not psychological professionals.
• 42:07
  They are essentially pr people and marketers, and yet they are in charge
• 42:12
  of and responsible for a lot of the American and global cultural and psyche that
• 42:21
  have developed around this. And they don't necessarily bring a level of intentionality or
• 42:27
  scientific rigor to the process. What they have done is figured out what works,
• 42:32
  not why or how, but just what does work and how to exploit
• 42:36
  it as much as possible. And I don't think that means they're evil,
• 42:38
  and I'm not suggesting that they are evil. What I'm suggesting is they have
• 42:43
  found an effective way of doing their job that maybe has had some adverse outcomes,
• 42:49
  and we are putting a lot in the hands of people who are not
• 42:52
  professionals. Right, It's like a few people that kind of learned a little
• 42:54
  bit about how behavior shaped up, and now here we are where all of
• 42:58
  us are buying triple might gun. I was going to use a much darker
• 43:07
  reference, which was back in I think it was around maybe the sixties or
• 43:10
  seventies. I'm forgetting the decade now where, yes, exactly it happened is
• 43:15
  following some of the revolution around behaviorism, we found some ways to help change
• 43:20
  people's behavior, and before there was a lot of ethics and regulation around use
• 43:24
  of those technologies. There were workshops where you could go and spend a day
• 43:30
  learn a couple of tricks, and then people would go out and start entire
• 43:34
  hospitals with vulnerable populations that ended up being exploited and horribly mistreated because they understood
• 43:40
  a way to get an effective outcome that was not a responsible or ethical way
• 43:45
  to do it. I mean, that's a whole thing. We could probably
• 43:47
  do a whole podcast around that too. So anyway people know a little bit,
• 43:52
  they do a lot of damage intentionally and unintentionally. Yeah, that's saying
• 43:55
  that's like, I know, just enough to be dangerous sort of thing.
• 43:58
  Yeah, that's kind of what happens. And so to kind of give a
• 44:00
  little bit of scale as far as like social media goes and like how many
• 44:05
  people are directly impacted by let's say this marketing and like this like kind of
• 44:10
  all this stuff that gets put out Right, currently, there are over two
• 44:14
  billion Facebook users worldwide. About five hundred million tweets are sent out daily.
• 44:19
  On Twitter, ninety five million images roughly are uploaded to Instagram daily, and
• 44:23
  on YouTube, over four hundred hours of video are uploaded per minute. That's
• 44:28
  a lot. I mean, we don't really have a lot to compare to,
• 44:32
  like compare that to, but that's just in itself, are just gargantuan
• 44:37
  numbers that describe the scale of what we're talking about and how many people are
• 44:42
  potentially impacted by these platforms and the amount of content and are maybe possibly susceptible
• 44:47
  to social media addiction. Yeah, that's oh man, I mean I was
• 44:54
  just thinking, Sorry, this is a little bit off topic, but I
• 44:57
  was just thinking about it, as I said, like, no, and
• 44:59
  just enough to dangerous. I think they would describe almost everybody who drives a
• 45:01
  car. They yeah, just enough to be dangerous. Right, Oh yeah,
• 45:08
  I think about like when I started driving, they should not have given
• 45:10
  me a license. I ran over my best friend the first day I had
• 45:15
  my license. Wow, he's alive. He's okay, Okay, there's a
• 45:17
  joke. I think on Parks and Records said like they had to take out
• 45:21
  third of his body, the middle third. I interrupt your regularly scheduled program
• 45:29
  to bring you the sounds of swamp gas, I mean advertisements. Wait,
• 45:40
  returning to our show. Going back to those numbers you mentioned, it's difficult
• 45:45
  to compare those to anything. Those numbers could be relatively large or small without
• 45:49
  some kind of comparison. So let's think of it this way. If you
• 45:52
  take the two hundred and sixty two million users and you divide that by the
• 45:57
  five hundred million tweets, essentially that is five tweets per day, and that
• 46:01
  does not account for the people who use it a lot or don't use it
• 46:06
  at all. Right, Essentially, you have the people who on average are
• 46:10
  posting one basically every other day, and then there are people who are on
• 46:15
  the extreme ends of that posting rarely and the people who are posting hundreds of
• 46:19
  times per day, yes, like elected officials, Yeah, like elected officials
• 46:22
  who are attempting to liberate states apparently, Oh no, crouss the territory into
• 46:27
  politics. All right, how do we treat this problem? So the question
• 46:30
  comes, you know, as you start kind of like maybe conceptualizing this is
• 46:35
  whether or not this is a disease or not, or maybe just an evolution
• 46:37
  in social behavior or you know, something along those lines. So we don't
• 46:40
  really have an answer to that question because it's still a fairly new technology.
• 46:45
  It's still fairly new in the scope of human evolution, so we don't really
• 46:50
  have a lot. What we have to kind of start looking at right now
• 46:52
  is this idea of what is the individual impact on the person using it?
• 46:59
  Now. The Guardian and talks about attempting to deal with social media and how
• 47:01
  it should be built around living with it rather than abanding, restricting or censoring
• 47:07
  it. So when we start talking about this as a conceptual piece, the
• 47:10
  idea of social media being present in our lives maybe something that's just it's there,
• 47:16
  but it's managed or we manage it on some level and that's a lot
• 47:21
  of kind of the discussion that we'll see here. I do want to say
• 47:22
  I realized when I said how do we treat this problem? This problem could
• 47:25
  have referred to a lot of things, because I just talked about politics and
• 47:30
  politicians using social media and us talking about politics and what I was talking about,
• 47:36
  of course with social media addiction. Now, I do want to just
• 47:38
  jump right on what you were saying about how whether or not we abandon it
• 47:43
  or we try and live with it. And I think a good metaphor or
• 47:45
  maybe an analogy is a more appropriate word to use here is looking back at
• 47:51
  this type of approach was very much in what was being discussed when the Internet
• 47:55
  first came about, people saying like this is going to lead to all these
• 47:59
  problems, we should just get rid of it. I mean, no,
• 48:02
  that's just not going to happen, right, So it makes a lot more
• 48:06
  sense to figure out how do we navigate these waters rather than how do we
• 48:10
  get out of this ocean that we're in because the ocean is too fast.
• 48:14
  This same argument was made by Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla when they were fighting
• 48:19
  over the type of electricity use. People were like don't use electricity, you'll
• 48:22
  die nice. Yes, exactly. Also, if you want a really fun
• 48:28
  lert, like a fun little romp into history, look at the beef between
• 48:31
  Edison and Tesla. It is so good. And history is fraught with these
• 48:36
  examples of when really large societal changes occur, there are people who are fighting
• 48:43
  against it, saying we need to go back, and unfortunately these are these
• 48:46
  are sort of Pandora's box type problems, which is to say, once it's
• 48:52
  opened, you don't get to put it back in the box. Sometimes things
• 48:54
  will just fizzle out and go away. Like that happens too, But you
• 48:59
  are not going to start a revolution to like end something like social media,
• 49:05
  and not with the kind of momentum it has. Instead, what will happen
• 49:08
  is it's going to morph into something else, or it'll continue on the way
• 49:12
  it's going on and it'll just kind of will evolve with it or something else.
• 49:15
  But really it makes the most sense to take a level headed, data
• 49:20
  driven, science based approach to what is the best way to move forward with
• 49:24
  these tools as we exist with them. And that is why the sham wow
• 49:29
  is not a big deal anymore. Sham Wow so NBC News talks about this
• 49:35
  a little bit. So many jobs now require like some kind of social media
• 49:37
  presence. So you'll see that where maybe there's an online profile, maybe there's
• 49:40
  some kind of interaction, whether you're talking about marketing or your celebrity, and
• 49:45
  this can result in some kind of depression from just ongoing, repeated exposure,
• 49:51
  constant interaction with these platforms. And some people do suffer from this. I
• 49:54
  mean you'll talk, I watch interviews sometimes with celebrities and they won't have social
• 49:58
  media because of the amount of criticism the comes to their pages. So you'll
• 50:01
  see this as like maybe this is something that is ever present, but some
• 50:05
  people are opting not to have it right, And so that gets to this
• 50:08
  idea of what what do we do about this? And for those people who
• 50:12
  are experiencing this as sort of an addiction, and the point is we're not
• 50:17
  going to be able to just reverse it, so it makes more sense to
• 50:22
  teach a just better way of approaching these things. And honestly, like this,
• 50:25
  there's some parallels here with something like diet exercise, Like you don't need
• 50:30
  to go from being a slovenly lump on a log to running a marathon in
• 50:36
  a month. But if you do better at managing your caloric intake and the
• 50:42
  type of nutrition that you get, as well as doing some amount of regular
• 50:45
  exercise like that goes a really long way. And so I think that's maybe
• 50:52
  a better way to approach this. And I don't particularly like the term everything
• 50:54
  in moderation. I think that's very misleading. But this is something that is
• 50:59
  so common that it makes sense to moderate it. That being said, there
• 51:01
  are people that I know that are celebrities, that are people that I know
• 51:05
  personally who decided social media was not serving their life in a positive way and
• 51:09
  they did abandon it completely, and they seem to be doing okay. I
• 51:13
  never really adopted it myself, like I was on MySpace for a minute when
• 51:17
  that was a thing, But I can't really speak to the experience of trying
• 51:22
  to get rid of a system that I was used to using in that way.
• 51:27
  But there are people who go on living perfectly productive lives without it.
• 51:31
  It's just it is a supplement, not a staple. Yeah. And so
• 51:37
  as you start kind of identifying those maybe those aspects of what to change or
• 51:42
  how to treat it or whatever you want to look at, you have to
• 51:44
  start asking questions along the lines of how much time is spent on social media?
• 51:47
  Is the time that's spent on social media reflecting your values? Is it
• 51:51
  improving yourself anyway? Can you commit to any changes? And this is I
• 51:54
  think a great quote is if you think of every megabyte as a bite of
• 51:59
  food, what person of what I consumed online today was empty calories? And
• 52:02
  I like that idea of thinking of it as like consumption because essentially you're consuming
• 52:07
  content, you're consuming information, you're consumers of that platform, and so how
• 52:12
  much of it is this kind of mindless or not really useful for you?
• 52:15
  That also, I think immediately prescribes where you can start cutting away the dead
• 52:21
  weight of things that are completely unnecessary. Thinking back to that skit on the
• 52:27
  Office where Michael is trying to regulate his finances and the financial guy on there
• 52:34
  his name is Oscar. He said, this bar is how much you spend
• 52:37
  on essential items. This bar is how much you spend on in essential items.
• 52:42
  And this scary, giant bar is how much you spend on things that
• 52:45
  nobody ever needs. And so if you can identify those pieces of social media
• 52:52
  that are like this is something that nobody ever needs type thing that's low hanging
• 52:58
  fruit to say, let's cut down on that first, because probably that's also
• 53:02
  where the fewest amount of the rewards are. You know, they come at
• 53:05
  the most interest perse intervals, and it's the least useful. So that's the
• 53:08
  kind of stuff that you find yourself doing when you literally have nothing else to
• 53:12
  do. Like, I've done my posts, I liked my friend's photos,
• 53:15
  I'm up to date on the news. Now I guess I'm going to scroll
• 53:17
  through my feed and look for pictures of cats and bulls, and as entertaining
• 53:21
  as that might be, that might be a place where it's like, maybe
• 53:23
  you just do that less often, or just read a book instead. Yes,
• 53:28
  I'm a big proponent for reading books apparently. Oh yeah, books are
• 53:30
  the best. Yeah, books are the best. So you know, kind
• 53:32
  of what Abraham was saying, it's fine a moderation, like drinking alcohol,
• 53:37
  eating sweets. It's all that part is fine, a moderation. We can
• 53:39
  kind of navigate that. But computer world dot com talks about the idea of
• 53:43
  how to kick the habit, and one suggestion they make is this idea of
• 53:46
  visiting once per day or maybe using some kind of app to track your usage
• 53:51
  Apple systems. If you have an Apple phone or anything like that, like
• 53:53
  an iPhone, it will give you the amount of screen time that you use
• 53:57
  per day. And it's pretty interesting. Like when you look at the Why
• 54:00
  we do what we do crew and we compare our data, it's really interesting
• 54:02
  to see how different our data would look. Especially Ryan's on here, so
• 54:06
  I'll let him defend himself later. But he talks about his screen time sometimes
• 54:09
  and you're kind of like, like when do you do you eat? Yeah,
• 54:14
  or do you sleep or you know, it's kind of it's interesting,
• 54:15
  but that's part of what his role is. Yeah, he's on a paradoxical
• 54:19
  twenty seven hours per day on his screen. I don't know. I don't
• 54:22
  know how he does it. It's it seems like it's impossible, but it's
• 54:27
  bizarre. If he's not here to defend himself, then I can say whatever
• 54:30
  I want. Just kidding, oh man, anyway, take that Ryan.
• 54:37
  The Addictioncenter dot org website, they actually make some very sound recommendations that are
• 54:42
  relevant to any time that you are trying to reduce or change a habit like
• 54:45
  this. And if you think about a lot of these habits we have a
• 54:49
  routine of cues, and we've talked about things like that on this podcast before,
• 54:52
  those sort of reminders and those habits that we have. If you try
• 54:57
  and eliminate some of those hues, things like whether or not you get specific
• 55:00
  notifications, whether that notification is accompanied by a sound, and like noticing times
• 55:06
  when you're likely to go on social media. So, for example, people
• 55:08
  probably take five times more bathroom breaks now than they used to, which is
• 55:13
  contributing to our toilet paper shortage. People and they don't necessarily need to,
• 55:16
  but it's like that's a sort of an escape to get on your phone.
• 55:20
  Maybe deliberately make the effort to just not bring the phone into the bathroom with
• 55:23
  you, you know, and then you're just less likely to engage with that
• 55:25
  that much. Or maybe set certain parameters for yourself in terms of you will
• 55:30
  only check it once per hour, or you will have certain times of the
• 55:32
  day that are designated no screen time, or like put your device, phone,
• 55:37
  laptop, tablet, whatever somewhere away from you when you're doing specific things
• 55:43
  like hanging out with your family or making dinner or something like that. On
• 55:45
  a more systemic level, or just kind of like a conceptual level too.
• 55:49
  Psychology today talks about this idea of maybe social media companies that are producing these
• 55:53
  platforms and kind of managing it. They could use all the data day collect
• 55:58
  because when you sign that agreement, they collect all kinds of data about you.
• 56:00
  They could talk about and determine who operates successively and and offer strategies to
• 56:05
  limit use. They could talk about that a little bit. They have the
• 56:07
  data there as far as usage. It's just a matter of applying some of
• 56:10
  those controls a little bit, and if all else fails, of course you
• 56:14
  have marijuana or CBT. Ah, CBT, I got my CBT card.
• 56:22
  Just kidding. That was a joke on CBD. But anyway, the cognitive
• 56:25
  behavior at therapy was what that was supposed to be. I think things like
• 56:30
  that are funny. I don't know, but that is often the go to
• 56:34
  treatment for things like this, and honestly, a lot of mental health issues
• 56:38
  important to point out there really aren't. However, a lot of published studies
• 56:43
  that have examined effective treatment packages inside of this with respect to internet and social
• 56:49
  media addictions specifically. So, although I think that that is a relatively general
• 56:53
  approach to mental health that has some evidence to support it. How well it
• 56:59
  relates to this particular problem just hasn't been investigated very thoroughly, and so one
• 57:01
  thing they do recommended, and this is kind of a final point within that,
• 57:06
  is this idea of maybe considering some similarities that you might see with social
• 57:09
  media addiction to porn addiction, because the format's kind of same, the process
• 57:14
  is kind of same, the outcomes are a little bit different, but at
• 57:16
  least there are closer parallels to that than maybe say gambling or maybe some kind
• 57:22
  of like drug addiction. Yeah, it's a good point, and I was
• 57:23
  thinking gambling, but you are right that there are closer parallels to this where
• 57:27
  there's not that really clear financial external reward. I mean, I guess there's
• 57:34
  kind of external reward, yeah, or potentially, but not. I think
• 57:37
  the financial one is just it's such a powerful motivator and it's so generalized and
• 57:42
  generalizable that it does sort of set itself aside from things that are like most
• 57:46
  people don't get direct payment for their engagement with the social media. But right,
• 57:52
  all right, I think we have beaten this topic to death. Do
• 57:54
  you have anything else on that? Nope? I think we can do takeo
• 57:58
  points now Okay. One of the ones I think, as I mentioned earlier,
• 58:01
  is a really good take on point here is that a lot of what
• 58:05
  happens inside of this social media addiction. I want to remind everyone this is
• 58:08
  not a formal disorder or diagnosis. This is relatively new thing because it hasn't
• 58:14
  been around for very long, and it has become just wildly available because there
• 58:20
  is essentially unrestricted access to it as long as you have a device that can
• 58:23
  connect to the Internet, and it has been very thoroughly studied. And what
• 58:27
  we really see and what my main point here is a big take home is
• 58:30
  this feedback loop thing, this positive feedback loop of what we're seeing what looks
• 58:35
  like social media addiction, and whether or not that's problematic for you has to
• 58:39
  do with this cycle of getting involved in these habits that become extremely pervasive,
• 58:47
  I guess, and then to the detriment of other valuable and important things in
• 58:52
  life. Yeah, And so to kind of piggyback on that, the idea
• 58:55
  of social media addiction or even becoming addicted to social media is it's still fairly
• 59:00
  subjective, but it does follow those patterns or like a similar paradigm that you
• 59:05
  might see to conventional addiction criteria, so you can see that it's likened.
• 59:08
  You see behavioral changes, you see new patterns of behavior emerge, and the
• 59:13
  main criteria I think that they really kind of lean heavily on is this idea
• 59:16
  of is it affecting your work, is it affecting your relationships? Are you
• 59:20
  having withdrawal symptoms? And those things do occur in relation to social media withdraw
• 59:25
  but again it's still not that classified specific disorder like you'll see with some of
• 59:30
  these other ones. Now, Fortunately, as we described in some of the
• 59:34
  treatments, for some people, there are some relatively simple changes that can make
• 59:37
  a huge impact for them, and that might be systematically decreasing the amount of
• 59:42
  time spent using social media or even just arranging your immediate surroundings such that you
• 59:47
  have less access to it at least during certain times, or have parimeters around
• 59:52
  when you have it be available to yourself. So there are ways of dealing
• 59:57
  with this that might be really easy things for pe to take on, and
• 1:00:00
  for those people for whom that doesn't work, then you might want to seek
• 1:00:04
  professional help. Agreed. I think that's a good place to wrap it up,
• 1:00:12
  all right, So that is the thrilling conclusion of our discussion on social
• 1:00:16
  media addiction. And you know, it occurs to me that during the two
• 1:00:21
  part run, I don't think we ever actually define social media or social media
• 1:00:25
  addiction, and those episodes, I think we took for granted that we all
• 1:00:30
  simply agree on what that is, or what maybe we'd interpret it to be.
• 1:00:35
  But I think it is important for setting parameters of what counts and what
• 1:00:37
  doesn't when we're talking about things like social media addiction or any kind of addiction.
• 1:00:43
  Yeah, and therefore situate this inside of the conversation we've been having about
• 1:00:47
  what it means to even call something addiction, because, as we've talked about
• 1:00:52
  in some of our episodes on things like sex addiction and food addiction, is
• 1:00:54
  like, what does that mean in this case? Like these are biologically necessary
• 1:00:59
  things, things that we're going to do anyway, So at what point do
• 1:01:02
  we call it excess over use dependency? Like it becomes harder to find those
• 1:01:08
  lines. And so that's why I think it's important to bring that into something
• 1:01:13
  like social media use, which again is not a physical dependency, but it's
• 1:01:16
  a behavioral sort of pattern of excess, right, and so so to kind
• 1:01:22
  of get on track with that. Social media is what we could describe as
• 1:01:27
  a kind of nebulous term. It's really hard to kind of pin down what
• 1:01:29
  it is. So all or nearly all Internet content is designed to connect people
• 1:01:34
  together in one way or another. Social media just has that as a kind
• 1:01:37
  of a stated goal. But we can broadly recognize social media websites and platforms
• 1:01:42
  have the unique feature of being a place where people get to add their own
• 1:01:45
  content and react to other people's content. And there are a lot of different
• 1:01:49
  ways and formats and kind of places where this happens, like Reddit, Facebook,
• 1:01:53
  LinkedIn, Tumblr, YouTube, TikTok, zigazoo, Instagram, we chat,
• 1:01:58
  WhatsApp, threads, and telegram, just to name a few. And
• 1:02:01
  yeah, we did skip some. There are just a lots to name.
• 1:02:05
  And also we're just not going to give any acknowledgment to the sites that are
• 1:02:08
  explicitly oriented toward promoting hate speech, disinformation, and bigotry. There are so
• 1:02:15
  many more than the ones that we listed. Have you heard of all of
• 1:02:19
  those? I have heard of all of them except for and I might even
• 1:02:22
  be on all of them except for Ziggazoo, Like that's the only one that
• 1:02:25
  would in we chat like Zigazoo and we Chat I'm not on at all.
• 1:02:30
  Okay, Zigazoo is apparently just for kids, but it's good. I'm not
• 1:02:34
  on there. Yeah, I think some people will hear and rightfully cringe that,
• 1:02:37
  like we've designed social media specifically for children, right, It's supposed to
• 1:02:42
  be this like very it's like highly regulated, supposed to be a very safe
• 1:02:46
  sort of space that does not allow for a lot of like hate speech type
• 1:02:53
  things. So anyway, that seems to be the idea. I've never used
• 1:02:59
  it. I don't really know anything about it. I just know that it
• 1:03:00
  exists. Yeah, and then we Chat I had never heard of, and
• 1:03:04
  Telegram I had never heard of. Yeah, I mean Telegram is fine,
• 1:03:08
  Okay, it operates like slack a little bit. Okay, Oh I forgot
• 1:03:13
  discord that should probably be a discord. Yeah, I mean that's what I'm
• 1:03:15
  saying. There's too many. There's also like I think Mammoth is out there,
• 1:03:20
  there's vo There's all kinds of stuff, like it's kind of like,
• 1:03:23
  oh, okay, like if you kind of get to a point where you
• 1:03:25
  go, like where where do I even want to be at at this point
• 1:03:29
  in time? And it's kind of exhausting. At some point you have to
• 1:03:31
  choose, like, there's only so many hours in a day, right,
• 1:03:35
  where are you spending your time? Right? So? All right, Well,
• 1:03:37
  so that was that was defining social media and giving lots of examples.
• 1:03:42
  I guess then we'll talk about addiction. And we you know, we're our
• 1:03:44
  very first episode in this series. We sort of unpacked it and so,
• 1:03:47
  you know, I think you can go back and check out that one for
• 1:03:50
  more. But as we've discussed, this has become a very loaded term.
• 1:03:53
  We say, some of our favorite foods have an addictive quality. This,
• 1:03:58
  you know, addictive chocolate. Well, just describe consuming content or food as
• 1:04:01
  binging sometimes, like you might binge TV shows or movies or whatever. It
• 1:04:06
  might be more useful in some cases to specifically look at more of a dependency
• 1:04:12
  over use or use disorder as descriptors for the sort of pathological use of something,
• 1:04:18
  particularly in this case social media. Yeah, and when it comes to
• 1:04:23
  social media addiction, it then becomes very difficult to define because internet behavior is
• 1:04:28
  not easily distinguished from social media use specifically, So in fact, it's kind
• 1:04:31
  of a challenge to actually define this and the use of social media and the
• 1:04:35
  use of Internet behavior has given rise in the last few years to some caution
• 1:04:39
  among professionals and cavalier diagnoses of addiction as it relates to Internet use. We
• 1:04:43
  can't just say somebody is addicted because they're using the Internet, because so much
• 1:04:47
  of our work right now, especially if you're doing work from home, requires
• 1:04:51
  internet use. It requires engagement on social media, it requires interactions with people,
• 1:04:58
  and so there is like part of it where it's like just our job
• 1:05:00
  requires us to be involved in that. So it's hard to kind of spell
• 1:05:04
  out what constitutes an addiction in this space. And I think it's very tempting
• 1:05:08
  to just want to say, to use addiction as a pejorative. We're just
• 1:05:13
  going to say, you know, all these kids today are so addicted to
• 1:05:15
  their phones, and it's basically something that the people are doing that other people
• 1:05:19
  don't like that they're doing it, at least they don't like it that they're
• 1:05:24
  doing it to the degree that they're doing it. But it's not actually pathological,
• 1:05:29
  right. I mean, for some people it is, but for a
• 1:05:31
  lot of times people will call things addiction just to try and disparage it,
• 1:05:36
  saying this is bad. I see people use this a lot with things where
• 1:05:41
  they are sort of throwing that term around just to throw it around. Right,
• 1:05:45
  So, for one thing, time spent is not very useful metric for
• 1:05:47
  assessing addiction, right, So, like being on the internet, being on
• 1:05:50
  social media not a use useful metric here. Many people use social media as
• 1:05:54
  part or entirely part of their jobs, like I mentioned before, and we'll
• 1:05:57
  spend much more time than the average user just simply by the fact that that's
• 1:06:00
  the context in which they have to use it, to context of their work.
• 1:06:03
  And so content creators will use social media extremely high volumes. But again
• 1:06:08
  it's part of their work or hobby and not really a pathological issue. It
• 1:06:13
  just so happens. They're putting a lot of content out as part of what
• 1:06:15
  is funding them, like giving them money, like actually like as part of
• 1:06:19
  their job and their careers is doing that. So at what level do you
• 1:06:23
  call that an addiction? I don't think that you could. Yeah, And
• 1:06:26
  the place at which they find that it's the most useful for them to pursue
• 1:06:30
  their hobby, which might be making videos and might be teaching people how to
• 1:06:35
  I don't know whatever, Like you're teaching people how to do magic tricks or
• 1:06:39
  card tricks, or how to build something like These people are on social media
• 1:06:44
  a lot because they're sort of hobby. Is that thing in the best way
• 1:06:46
  for them to sort of, I guess, both capitalize on and sustain that
• 1:06:50
  is to use those social media platforms. So for them it's just a tool,
• 1:06:54
  right, and they use it at high volumes, but not to the
• 1:06:57
  point at which it would be called something pathological, just as you said.
• 1:07:00
  And so another thing here is that like social media, this is again thinking
• 1:07:04
  about the time spent here, This could be a lifeline for people in some
• 1:07:10
  sort of unfortunate circumstances. You have people who live in governments where censorship really
• 1:07:15
  heavily monitors their behavior in a lot of ways, and oftentimes including their activity
• 1:07:20
  online. And so it can be helpful if there are various social media platforms
• 1:07:26
  that are more difficult for the government to censor, where people can actually use
• 1:07:30
  that to connect with the world where they otherwise wouldn't be able to because the
• 1:07:33
  government prevents them from doing so. In places where wars are going on,
• 1:07:38
  people use social media to get news out about what's actually happening in these war
• 1:07:42
  zones, and they can do so faster and more effectively than journalists and news
• 1:07:45
  organizations, which can be really helpful at dispelling misinformation campaigns which so often try
• 1:07:50
  and derail humanitarian aid. And so like those people might spend a lot of
• 1:07:56
  time on it because they're desperately seeking help, you know. And then finally,
• 1:08:00
  there are people who are marginalized and they just really don't have a lot
• 1:08:03
  of people that are closer relationships that are immediately around them. They can't go
• 1:08:09
  to, like their friend or their neighbor down the street. And as an
• 1:08:12
  example of this, LGBTQ plus people have consistently for decades been the target of
• 1:08:18
  fear and hate based campaigns around the world, and they've been able to find
• 1:08:24
  some solace in their communities online where they might have otherwise not had anyone that
• 1:08:29
  they could turn to for support, but now they do. They do have
• 1:08:31
  this group of people who are there who are either in the same community or
• 1:08:35
  are allies who are there to support them, and that can be really meaningful
• 1:08:40
  and impactful when they otherwise wouldn't have that sort of thing available to them.
• 1:08:44
  So they might spend a lot of time there and it's actually very healthy for
• 1:08:47
  them to do that because that's where their social environment is available, right.
• 1:08:51
  You hear that a lot with video game spaces too, where people make more
• 1:08:55
  like they have meaningful friendships and relationships in like online video game platforms and so
• 1:09:00
  like. There is that piece where it's like, this might be the healthiest
• 1:09:03
  way for somebody to have a relationship given their circumstances and given their like,
• 1:09:08
  given their locations and whatnot. Such a good point. Absolutely, it's so
• 1:09:12
  important. Well, here's something really quick and easy. It's an ad,
• 1:09:23
  and we're back. Hopefully those ads were not for a social media platform.
• 1:09:28
  I don't hear a lot of ads for social media platforms, but they are.
• 1:09:30
  They do. Like I've seen an ad for Snapchat recently and I went,
• 1:09:33
  what so, Actually, that's how I heard about Ziggazoo was ads on
• 1:09:36
  podcasts. Oh there you go see interesting stuff. Yeah, what a weird
• 1:09:41
  time. Yeah. Now finally you kind of getting back into like the you
• 1:09:44
  know, the topic. And in some of these updates, it's important to
• 1:09:46
  kind of point out all those is not directly related. Some have pointed out
• 1:09:49
  that the increase in the seeming chaos in the world is correlated with the rise
• 1:09:55
  of the internet use and they're likely influenced or are being influenced by other factors.
• 1:10:00
  But social media being one of them. Said another way, just because
• 1:10:02
  the complexity and chaos in the world increases while Internet use increases, doesn't mean
• 1:10:08
  that one has caused the other. So twenty twenty three, all those years
• 1:10:12
  ago meta analysis to this effect summarized data from other studies that effectively captured the
• 1:10:17
  data of over two million people. That's a huge end. That's a big
• 1:10:21
  end. That's a big end, and they saw that no matter how you
• 1:10:25
  slice it, there is no change in positive or negative experiences. So internet
• 1:10:30
  use does not mean the world as in more chaos. They're not directly causal,
• 1:10:34
  and I want to be careful, like we're not trying to make a
• 1:10:36
  straw man argument here. And it's important to note that this was not looking
• 1:10:41
  at social media specifically by Internet use as a whole. And further, what
• 1:10:45
  they did find is that the range of satisfaction and dissatisfaction increased, meaning that
• 1:10:49
  you had to higher satisfaction and hire dissatisfaction over time with those but the average
• 1:10:56
  stayed the same, so you didn't really have like there was no net trend
• 1:10:59
  in one to direction or another you just had more variability with honestly, with
• 1:11:03
  two million people, if you didn't have more variability, I would be very
• 1:11:06
  confused. That just seems like that's going to happen, right exactly. Another
• 1:11:12
  thing that they point out is, like some factors that are also correlated with
• 1:11:16
  and probably more causally related to use of internet is like increased economic access and
• 1:11:21
  stability, And so when that tends to be high, it tends to also
• 1:11:26
  increase people's quality of life. And that also tends to come with greater access
• 1:11:30
  to the Internet. So like, again, it's just all over the board.
• 1:11:33
  I think the problem is it's just a tool that some for some people
• 1:11:38
  has been really helpful and for others has been harmful. It seems like we
• 1:11:42
  can't say whether one direction or another is really clear, but just that that
• 1:11:46
  is a way of considering that. Like and again, this is just Internet
• 1:11:50
  generally speaking. We can't just say like it's a net bad because the data
• 1:11:57
  just don't show that right right right now. Mines of dependency or overuse include
• 1:12:00
  things like scrolling excessively in a narrow range of topics where people are maybe or
• 1:12:05
  like kind of down the rabbit hole, and like subreddits or like cash tags
• 1:12:09
  and whatnot, or people spending excessive time on specific topics like weight loss videos
• 1:12:13
  or conspiracy theory rabbit holes. Ooh, that's a whole thing. Yeah.
• 1:12:15
  I had somebody tell me recently, like actually describe how into flatter theory they
• 1:12:20
  were, and I was like, I can't deal with that right now.
• 1:12:25
  This is so bad. So scrolling without any specific purpose, or having multiple
• 1:12:28
  accounts that are anonymous, or if they use a pseudonym, all of these
• 1:12:31
  scenarios or situations could signal that there's maybe a dependency or an overuse, But
• 1:12:36
  it still is loose because there's lots of reasons why people might use a suitonym
• 1:12:42
  online or why they might choose to be anonymous online because maybe what they're searching
• 1:12:45
  for could cost them their job or could maybe get them in trouble or like
• 1:12:50
  cause problems with their families and stuff. So there's different reasons that are not
• 1:12:54
  just directly related to overuse. There might be contextual reasons why somebody might be
• 1:12:58
  doing those things too. Yes, So all of that is to say so,
• 1:13:02
  I mean we've been talking for a long time. For a follow up,
• 1:13:05
  Usually it's like ten or fifteen minutes. So all that is to say,
• 1:13:09
  I think in some is that like right now, scientists kind of can't
• 1:13:13
  determine what social media addiction is or even if it's like a thing. We
• 1:13:17
  know that many people do struggle with excessive disruptive use of social media. If
• 1:13:23
  we think of social media, as we talked about in these episodes, it
• 1:13:27
  is specifically engineered to encourage, incentivize, and select the highest possible rates of
• 1:13:31
  engagement. It's kind of surprising to me that that's the case, given how
• 1:13:36
  not user friendly and unintuitive some of these platforms are. But I think when
• 1:13:41
  we're talking about social media addiction, it's really best to just figure like this
• 1:13:45
  is going to be a nuanced conversation. We have to take this on skeptically,
• 1:13:48
  critically, compassionately toward people, and largely I think in many instances on
• 1:13:54
  a case by case basis for really looking at all, right, is someone
• 1:13:58
  who needs support because right now, like we just don't have anything to say
• 1:14:01
  like we need to take unilateral or universal mega decisions on a lot of this
• 1:14:09
  because it's so nuanced and in everybody's situation, why they're using it in the
• 1:14:14
  extent to which they're using it. And there are lots of things that show
• 1:14:16
  that, Like there are adverse outcomes for people who spend too much time on
• 1:14:20
  there, but there are also a lot of benefits for people who spend a
• 1:14:24
  lot of time on there sometimes, Right, And we just can't say,
• 1:14:27
  like we have to do one thing or another, and like we do need
• 1:14:30
  to figure this out, but it's just it's going to have to be nuanced
• 1:14:32
  because it's way too complex to make a ruling about we need to do one
• 1:14:36
  thing or another. Right, I think that's the most important thing, is,
• 1:14:41
  Like I don't think that we have any sort of agreement on it to
• 1:14:44
  even call it anything else. Like, do I think that it should be
• 1:14:45
  studied, Sure, Like I think that we probably need to look at it
• 1:14:48
  more and evaluate it more and look at impacts all stuff. I think that
• 1:14:51
  that stuff is important. But I think it's important to note that, like,
• 1:14:55
  we don't really have enough information on this because social media is a rather
• 1:14:58
  new phenomenon, right, Well, it's something that's kind of come up in
• 1:15:01
  the last you know, couple decades, like twenty years. Yeah, you
• 1:15:04
  know best honestly, at best, you know, like and when you kind
• 1:15:09
  of unpack it like that you go, okay, it's a rather new phenomenon,
• 1:15:12
  so like the impact of this is still rather new, so we just
• 1:15:15
  don't know enough about it to call it anything definitive, like an addiction or
• 1:15:20
  anything like that. And I think people will look at how this has evolved
• 1:15:24
  where you've had vines, reels, shorts and tiktoks and these are like really
• 1:15:29
  short pieces of content, and people say, you know, this is an
• 1:15:32
  example of how we're all losing our attention span. And I do think that
• 1:15:35
  like truncated formats of that nature do foster a certain type of content creation that
• 1:15:42
  lacks the ability to carry a lot of nuance. And I kind of think
• 1:15:47
  it was inevitable because we live in a world where content has now been democratized
• 1:15:53
  to the point where any amateur can create really high grade things so fast,
• 1:15:59
  right that if we want, if we're going to participate in and engage in
• 1:16:04
  what's available to us on these platforms, we're going to do it in these
• 1:16:09
  small, bite sized chunks because there's just too much. There's just too much
• 1:16:13
  for us to try and keep up with it all. So the more efficient
• 1:16:16
  way we can get through it is people who create things that are like thirty
• 1:16:19
  seconds to a minute long, like that's where our tension is. And so
• 1:16:23
  I don't think this is endemic as a demonstration of people losing their attention spans.
• 1:16:27
  I think this is an outcome of having enough content being created that every
• 1:16:32
  year, the amount of content that's created is more than a lifetime's worth of
• 1:16:38
  engagement. We just don't have that kind of time, you know, to
• 1:16:41
  engage with it. So I think we just have to pick and choose,
• 1:16:44
  and one outcome of that is that we get these really short, bite sized
• 1:16:47
  pieces of delivery, and those come with pros and cons too. But again,
• 1:16:50
  I don't think that that was a demonstration of people's like deterioration. I
• 1:16:56
  think that is a symptom of having way too much and maybe not too much
• 1:17:00
  as maybe the word, but there's just a ton, there's a lot a
• 1:17:02
  lot out there well, and behavior goes where reinforcement flows, right, So
• 1:17:08
  you know you're going to get more interaction with shorter content than you will for
• 1:17:11
  a two hour video, So like it's not necessarily a shorter attention that is
• 1:17:15
  the problem. We did a whole episode on attention spans, we did right,
• 1:17:18
  and we found that like that hasn't really changed that much over the last
• 1:17:21
  several decades. But the point was is more so that like, yeah,
• 1:17:26
  shorter content will get that faster reaction and more like a more like more volume
• 1:17:31
  of reaction because more people are going to access it quickly and move forward.
• 1:17:34
  Like more people read newspapers than books because or they used to at least because
• 1:17:39
  that was an easier reader, you know, so or at least a quicker
• 1:17:42
  read. So just thinking about that too, you know, yeah, think
• 1:17:45
  about like Gone with the I think it was Gone with the Wind is a
• 1:17:48
  four hour movie? Four hours, right, and I don't give it?
• 1:17:55
  Is this frankly shame, I don't give it in four hours? That's a
• 1:18:03
  like that's long. That's so long. It's a lot of like movie.
• 1:18:10
  And I mean, I granted most I think movies have sort of been trending
• 1:18:12
  up lately. And I get you have a lot of three hour movies or
• 1:18:15
  two and a half two and a half hour movies or two hour movies,
• 1:18:16
  and that's pretty common anymore. But like, you know, movies mostly got
• 1:18:19
  shorter. And it was because like with the amount of movies being made,
• 1:18:24
  like people like if they're gonna go to the theater. Like back when Gone
• 1:18:28
  with the Wind was out, that was like your choice. There's a screen
• 1:18:30
  you go watch Gone with the Wind. Now you've got twenty screens. You
• 1:18:34
  go and you have to pick from twenty different movies that are going on,
• 1:18:39
  and it's like there's only so much time in a day, there are so
• 1:18:41
  many options, Like it's gonna make sense that people's and just imagine, like
• 1:18:45
  you who think you do not have a problem with a shortened attention span.
• 1:18:48
  If you go on YouTube to look up a video on anything, and there's
• 1:18:51
  a version of that video that's twenty five minutes long and a version that's five
• 1:18:55
  minutes long. Which one are you clicking on first? Right? You're gonna
• 1:18:58
  select the fun? Yeah, Like do I want to spend twenty five minutes
• 1:19:01
  on this? No? I don't. I want to spend five minutes at
• 1:19:04
  most, So like, yeah, I think that that just gets selected.
• 1:19:08
  We're kind of way off topic here. I think we should probably pull the
• 1:19:10
  plug on this guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think we're good
• 1:19:13
  now. So social media addiction, there we go, nostalgia Bam, done.
• 1:19:16
  That's right. We are going to recommend some things. So let's do
• 1:19:19
  a quick ad break and then do that yay recommendations. All right, we're
• 1:19:40
  back, and I am recommending a movie that is just so so old at
• 1:19:45
  this point. I never saw this and it was highly recommended. A lot
• 1:19:50
  of people love it, and I fully understand why now. But this was
• 1:19:55
  called Gatka. This came out in nineteen ninety seven. This movie is well
• 1:19:59
  over two decades old, and I just never got around to it, and
• 1:20:01
  it kind of just time went on and time went on, and finally it
• 1:20:05
  came available on a streaming platform and I decided I was making time for it.
• 1:20:10
  So I watched Gataka. This is Ethan Hawk, Jude Law and a
• 1:20:14
  lot of people. It was really really good movie. It's always fun to
• 1:20:17
  watch like sci fi concepts that try and imagine the future before they had the
• 1:20:20
  kind of technology that we now have. Yeah, they're like sort of trying
• 1:20:25
  to picture that regardless of that, Like what an incredibly thoughtful commentary on the
• 1:20:30
  idea of like a new form of bigotry, right, Like it's kind of
• 1:20:34
  it's kind of how you think about it. Yeah, Starbilly Sneetches like sci
• 1:20:40
  fi version. Yeah, oh man, it's so good and and acting and
• 1:20:44
  it's so great Ethan Hawk is so good in it. He's fantastic. So
• 1:20:46
  anyway, this right now is streaming on Amazon Prime. It's been available for
• 1:20:51
  a long time. Probably most people have seen it who were going to see
• 1:20:55
  it at this point, But if you haven't, I recommend Gatka And even
• 1:20:58
  if you have and it's been a while, maybe worth a rewatch, so
• 1:21:00
  go check it out. Yeah. I love that. I love that.
• 1:21:02
  My recommendation is not really a recommendation, but just a comment on like how
• 1:21:06
  great things go sometimes, and I just, yeah, I think that this
• 1:21:12
  was a really wonderful thing for me that happened, and my daughter graduated high
• 1:21:15
  school, so I just recommend yeah, applause and congratulations and all the things.
• 1:21:23
  You know, it was a journey, I'll say that. Yeah,
• 1:21:26
  and maybe those of you who are listening to this show didn't know that I
• 1:21:29
  had a daughter that was old enough to go to high school, let alone
• 1:21:31
  graduate high school. So yeah, that's all we're at world, Yes,
• 1:21:36
  my daughter graduated high school. I recommend celebrating people's accomplishments. I guess it's
• 1:21:42
  part of that recommendation. So that's maybe the biggest thing, is like do
• 1:21:45
  you celebrate with the people you love celebrate the things they do because there are
• 1:21:49
  only so many milestones that we get as part of our world, and I
• 1:21:54
  think it's worth celebrating all of them. Congrats Class of twenty twenty four.
• 1:21:58
  Yeah. If you'd like to tell us something about congratulating the class of twenty
• 1:22:01
  twenty four or Gantica or anything that has to do with addiction or social media
• 1:22:05
  addiction, you should email us at info at wwdwwdpodcast dot com or reach out
• 1:22:11
  to us on the other social media platforms. We release our normal episodes on
• 1:22:15
  Wednesdays only, and then we will also release minis on Mondays, so look
• 1:22:19
  out for those episodes to get more of us. Also, if you would
• 1:22:24
  like to support the show, you can join us on Patreon. You can
• 1:22:27
  leave us a rating and review, I can subscribe, tell a friend,
• 1:22:29
  all those kind of things. And if you do join us on Patreon,
• 1:22:31
  You're going to get early episodes, add free episodes, behind the scenes content,
• 1:22:35
  and all kinds of stuff. And I'm also going to read your name.
• 1:22:39
  Here are some names of people who I'm going to read because they support
• 1:22:42
  us on Patreon. Mike m Megan, Mike T, Justin, Kim,
• 1:22:45
  Joshua Brat, Stephanie Olivia, Brian Ashley, Kiara Christy, and Michelle Man.
• 1:22:51
  What a group, What a group of wonderful people. Yay, love
• 1:22:56
  those folks. Also, my team of people that help make this happen includes
• 1:23:00
  writing in fact checking from Shane and myself, with special things to Alan Kinsella,
• 1:23:03
  who helped put together the notes for the original social media addiction episodes that
• 1:23:08
  we released. Also audio engineering and sound magic Maker Happening thing is Justin and
• 1:23:14
  our social media coordinator is Emma Wilson. And then thank you all for listening.
• 1:23:18
  Of course, is there anything that I'm forgetting or anything that you would
• 1:23:20
  like to add? Shane, No, I think that covers it. Thank
• 1:23:24
  you so much for joining us. We will see you next Wednesday for a
• 1:23:27
  normal release of an episode. This is Abraham, this is Shane. We're
• 1:23:30
  out. So yeah, you've been listening to Why We Do what We Do.
• 1:23:33
  You can learn more about this and other episodes by going to wwdwwdpodcast dot
• 1:23:40
  com. Thanks for listening, and we hope you have an awesome day.
• 1:24:00
  I'm going going