Less Face More Book
SocietyIt is early in the morning. The first thing Afonso did when he woke up was to check the notifications on his new iPhone. He wakes up happy because he has over 200 likes on his last Instagram photo and thousands of retweets in the previous post. Afonso is 18 and spent the day online, living every day in a bubble of perfection, where all the updates on his social networks shows that someone has: new clothes, a new car, is eating in expensive restaurants, is in the vacationing in heavenly destinations, among all the other things that usually “bring happiness” to ordinary mortals. He has no idea how he exposes herself and the dangers these exposures may have.
Afonso is not the only person involved in this perfect world, where only happiness and beauty are shown. A world behind the scenes, a filtered everyday situation, far from the current reality. A situation in which everyone can have access. It is in this world that most social network users, like Afonso, live. People so immersed in this reality that they do not even realize it.
“When we get to the Internet, we enter an environment that promotes shallow readings, hasty and distracted thoughts, and shallow learning.”
In the book by the American writer Nicholas Carr, “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” the author draws this small conclusion, transcribed above, about the misuse of the Internet, which will also apply to misuse of social networks.
The truth is that this is just a small tip of the iceberg for all the damage that misuse of social networks can bring to society.
Two significant problems are resulting from social networks that have numerous consequences for life in society. The first is related to the dependence on social networks and all their surroundings, such as the occurrence of depressions. The second, also directly associated with the previous one, is related to the way our data is being exposed by these same networks.
“Social media is training us to compare our lives instead of enjoying everything we are. No wonder everyone is always depressed.”
This phrase is associated with US actor and comedian Bill Muray and, unfortunately, turns out to be true.
Increasingly, due to the exposure that we have through social networks, we are more vulnerable to social approval. People want to know what others think of themselves. They care about likes, shares, comments, and get sad when they do not have feedback on the new photo.
This eagerness for acceptance often leads to the fact that the life that is shared online only represents an ultimate part of real life. We want others to see how beautiful we are, how smart we are, how strong we are, how beautiful our lives are.
We look at the life of the people we follow on Instagram and think, “Oh…I wish I had that life” because they all look happy, but most of the time, they are not. There are several cases of suicide or deep depressions where at first glance, through social networks, people seemed psychologically healthy. That is, social networks present a distorted version of everything that goes on. Here appears one of the leading causes of the misuse of social networks – depression.
Comparison is the leading cause of depression. We compare our lives with what we think the other’s life is, thinking ours is much worse. The 26th President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, concerning comparison, tells us:
“Comparison is the thief of joy.”
The truth is that, in the optics of social networks, the comparison not only occurs without foundation but ends up stealing true happiness for the sake of “false.”
It’s not just assumptions, but some studies demonstrate it. More precisely, a study prepared in 2017 that shows the correlation between the time spent on social networks and having depressions — relating a higher probability of having depression with spending more time online.
Social networks also have the problem of being utterly addictive.
Some studies in Neuroplasticity have found that our brain is more malleable than previously thought. Our circuits can be rewired and can be changed. What happens is that every time we receive a like or any notification on our mobile phone, we also get a dose of dopamine stimulating our cells. Every time we open Instagram, or Facebook, for example.
The addiction-related to the effect of released dopamine has been studied. In these studies, millions of euros are spent by social networks to find out what people find most attractive and how they can improve the application for the most abundant use of the platform.
Dopamine is the same chemical that makes people feel good when they smoke when they drink, and when they gamble.
This accessible substance leads to an escape from real life, which makes people take refuge in social networks when they are in situations of sadness and stress. Because of this, people do not have the proper mechanisms to deal with bad things as best as possible. So in a situation when a problem occurs or when stress starts to show up in their lives, they do not seek help from a person but from their mobile phones and the “fake life” they live.
Allied to this and quite worrying are the problem of invasion of privacy and the sale of data, which turns out to be linked to the use of social networks. In some cases, the data that is removed occurs with the users ‘consent’, as they end up not reading the terms and conditions associated with the use of certain social media.
The world began to wake up to everything that might be going on behind social networks when the Cambridge Analytic scandal occurred.
One of the main problems of exposing our life on social networks is when this information gets into the wrong hands.
And that has happened, in 2014, when 87 million Facebook users saw their information gathered by Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics company. The data was used to influence voter opinion in many countries to help politicians influence the election results.
This is the world we live in, and it is up to us to have the necessary tools to do the right thing, never forgetting that the security and privacy of each one is a treasure that is getting closer and closer to being looted.
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