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28 - Social media: the real privacy

As we've seen on the previous post, with social media our phones turned into an addictive tool for alleviating boredom, frustration and stress: their beep activates the reward center in our brains, triggering a pleasure response. Not only that, we're also using our phones as babysitters rather than interacting with our children. In 2015, a study by Dr. Hilda Kabali, a pediatric resident at Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia, revealed that 2-year old infants knew how to use mobile devices before even developing proper motor skills and learning to talk. So those kids will be educated by the internet, which is generally geared at simplification in order to reach the wider audience possible.

I, as a writer and lover of language, am appalled at how rapidly grammar and the richness of speech are in decline—that is, when language is not squarely bypassed by emojicons. Dr. Jody Azzouni, professor of philosophy at Tufts University, declared literature dead in his engrossing TED Talk "The Death of Literature." Basically, reading literature is challenging to the brain as each kind of writing requires a learning curve (poems, short stories, novels, different genres), whereas seeing is a natural, effortless skill. When you trade challenges for the easy stuff, though, you lose an important mean for stimulating your creativity and intelligence. The brain needs meaningful stimulation. If you keep feeding it easiness and sameness, it stagnates and is dumbed down.

There's also this overwhelming bombardment of information everywhere we look. Being exposed to that alone is sort of stressing, right? And so much junk crowds the cyberspace, little shiny pieces that grab you and make you lose your precious time with irrelevancies such as those lists about celebrities (who dressed what, who gained weight, got fat or old) and useless tests ("What Barbie thinks of you?" Me: who cares, how useful could that possibly be? "Who really likes you on Facebook? Me: you don't need a silly test, your heart already knows it. "Who would you kill, marry and hook-up with?" Me: note the use of the word kill in an innocent test and the incongruent word choice of and instead of the correct or—should you kill, marry and hook-up with the person in that order?). Brazilian philosopher Márcia Tíburi said in one of her lecturers that on social media there is a lack of filtering the value of information, as well as lack of interest for the truth.

Lab rats

Since my experience with Twitter, I started imagining everybody like lab rats, always seeking the next digital reward. So it turns out I wasn't off the mark. The problem is, if we're always alert expecting the next reward, we're constantly producing extra cortisol and adrenaline—the stress hormones—and that can lead to chronic stress. Do you know what reduces the level of cortisol and adrenaline? Human contact. The same contact from which we're depriving ourselves while hooked on social media. In 2001 Gallup Institute took a pool and every average American said they had 10 close friends. In 2014, the same pool showed that number had declined to 2 close friends.

Take internet celebrity Essena O'Neill, who quit social media and her one million followers in 2015. She posted a farewell video on Youtube explaining the reason for her decision: he hadn't been living a real life and felt extremely sad and empty in spite of her glamorous, cheerful, phony façade. She lived to post stuff online and her self-esteem was based on the amount of likes she received every day. In the end, O'Neill didn't even know what her true identity was anymore. Some accuse her of pulling a publicity stunt. What I found quite interesting was the comments left by viewers. Stunt or not, her video resonated with many people, who shared feeling fake, inadequate, depressed, isolated. When you see the glossy posts of other users, you can't tell what's behind them, the dozens of attempts to achieve the perfect, "spontaneous" selfie, the true state of mind of people and all the hard work, frustrations and failures that lead to a posted success, and so on.