Why Are You Addicted to Social Media?
According to a BBC article written in 2018, three billion people, which is approximately 40% of the world, use social media. Even crazier, people spread an average of 2 hours a day on social media. Take into account that this article was written in 2018, so the number of people using social media and the amount of time spent on these sites has likely only increased since then.
One might think that if people are spending so much time on these sites that they would provide some sort of benefit to us or at least spending time on these sites would make people feel better. However, that is actually not in the case for many people. According to a study published in the journal of Computers and Human Behavior, the number of social media platforms you have can actually be tied to how anxious you are. In fact, they found that people who use seven or more social media platforms were more than three times as likely to have high levels of anxiety compared to people who only use two or fewer social media platforms. Even more bonkers is that according to a survey of 1500 people by a charity called Scope, social media sites make more than half of its users feel inadequate. And for 18 to 34 year olds, social media sites make more than half of them feel unattractive. (BBC)
So, why do people actually use social media if it tends to make them feel anxious, inadequate and unattractive? Well, according to the BBC article some researchers say that tweeting may be more addictive than cigarettes and alcohol. Now consider how big of an issue alcoholism and nicotine addiction is? Bonkers, right. It is honestly no surprise. Their user interfaces are psychologically designed to keep you on the site as long as possible. Their algorithms are designed to feed you as much personalized content as possible. You could honestly scroll forever and never get bored because all of the content is tailored to what you like.
However, how do people even discover and find out about the social media sites they are addicted to? This can be explained by the diffusion model. The diffusion model is an explanation of how a piece of technology or a new idea is spread through a network. The idea is that if you have a popular enough person who uses a social media platform, then a bunch of their friends will also use the social media platform. Then, the friends of those new friends will be also using that social media platform and soon, you’ll have tons of people using the platform. (class notes)
So, let’s look at the network in the picture below. Let’s say that all these people in their heads are thinking, well, I will start using this social media platform if more than half of my friends use this social media site. Well, let’s pretend that for some reason A and G decide to start using this social media site which are represented by the circled nodes. Then, because 2 out of 4 of E’s friends are using the site, E decides to start using the site. For the same reason, H also decides to start using the site. Then, because half of F’s friends are also using the site, F decides to also use the site. Then, B realizes that 3/5 of their friends are using the site so they decide to use it. Now, you have that entire friend group using the site just from 2 people at the beginning and it looks like the second image. (class notes)
Now, this is just on a simple, small-scale network. Imagine what happens on a much larger scale with millions of people. More than that, there are so many different social media sites out there: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, TikTok and so much more. So, this type of spread happens for many of these sites. So, like the diffusion model explains, maybe you just download an app because a bunch of your friends are using it, not planning to spend much time on it. But social media apps are designed to be addicting and well, the research proves it. So, you might just end up on a few social media binges and feel bad about yourself afterwards because of all the time you wasted. It’s all a big yikes, but it is at least one that can be explained using networks and some psychology.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180104-is-social-media-bad-for-you-the-evidence-and-the-unknowns