You are not friends with Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg.
Social media, designed to exploit our evolutionary weaknesses, probably do play a role.
It's not surprising that people who experienced a rush of pleasure when they received social validation - a "Dopamine hit," in today's popular language of neurochemistry - were more likely to survive, leaving a strong evolutionary bias toward people with a desire to receive social approval.
Social media companies know this, and take advantage of it.
As noted in Adam Alter's book, Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, "Technology companies and marketers have teams of engineers and researchers devoted to keeping us engaged. They know how to push our buttons, and how to coax us into using their products for hours, days, and weeks on end."
The impact seems to have been to decrease people's attention spans - as humorously noted in a Dilbert cartoon last week - and to focus people more on personalities and status than on facts and substance, something that seems to have also had a negative effect on our politics and society at large.
Add to this addictive brain-engineering the fact that social media companies are large quasi-monopolies which are themselves involved gathering huge amounts of user data, and in political manipulation, and there's room for concern.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/04/01/social-media-business-model-addicts-us-approval-not-information-column/476719002/
Social media, designed to exploit our evolutionary weaknesses, probably do play a role.
It's not surprising that people who experienced a rush of pleasure when they received social validation - a "Dopamine hit," in today's popular language of neurochemistry - were more likely to survive, leaving a strong evolutionary bias toward people with a desire to receive social approval.
Social media companies know this, and take advantage of it.
As noted in Adam Alter's book, Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, "Technology companies and marketers have teams of engineers and researchers devoted to keeping us engaged. They know how to push our buttons, and how to coax us into using their products for hours, days, and weeks on end."
The impact seems to have been to decrease people's attention spans - as humorously noted in a Dilbert cartoon last week - and to focus people more on personalities and status than on facts and substance, something that seems to have also had a negative effect on our politics and society at large.
Add to this addictive brain-engineering the fact that social media companies are large quasi-monopolies which are themselves involved gathering huge amounts of user data, and in political manipulation, and there's room for concern.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/04/01/social-media-business-model-addicts-us-approval-not-information-column/476719002/
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