The Social Dilemma

Written by Ido Tanne

A majority of our social media has been present in our lives since we first started interacting with technology. We check our phones constantly and our first instinct ia to open Snapchat, Instagram or Tik Tok. But only recently have we stopped to ask, “why.” "Why is it that I feel this urge to open my phone and see what my cousin in Wisconsin did? Why do I want to look up my ex and see how she's doing with her new boyfriend?" Well, with research it's been shown that these feelings aren't natural. They're actually feelings designed by the developers of these social media apps to keep us engaged, keep the apps growing, and make money off of us. A majority of social media platforms are designed to stimulate our minds. It's that feeling of going to Vegas and pulling down on the slot machine and hoping that you're going to get something good out of it, because usually when you do it's something very good.

The thing is, social media hasn't just been affecting its users, but also its developers. They had fallen into the own trap that they made for us the first thing that they would do is when they wake up either open their phone check social media, open their email, just something to stimulate their mind and make them feel “human”. As humans, we naturally have a need to connect with people and what better way to do it than social media. However, social media acts like a drug and with people who don't know how to fight this addiction this can get brutal. Some parents have tried to MacGyver away into preventing their kids from using social media and helping them open their eyes to the real world in front of them. Sadly, children nowadays are not accepting the idea and a majority develop aggressive behaviors in order to get their phones back; actively choosing to fight reality

Social media gives us a sense of constant approval and to help us gain approval. We obtain this "approval" from our followers, posts, likes obtained, etc. The thing is, humans weren't built for constant approval. You can receive 1000 likes a day on a social media post but if one person says something negative about you it'll affect you even though 999 other people say “You look awesome", "You look amazing", "You look gorgeous.” This social media pandemic, has also been causing people to also harm themselves. In the United States, a survey had been taken by a large number of high school students and in that survey, 18% of them reported having self-harmed themselves once due to cyberbullying. Social media alone has ruined the GenZ Generation, it's proven to make us more anxious, fragile, and depressed and it's just we get much less comfort from physically speaking with people than speaking with them online. And as a result, it's reduced the number of romantic relationships and friendships drastically. How often do you find guys at a bar anymore who are just looking for an honest relationship? It's all converted even before the pandemic turn dating apps like tinder, bumble, OkCupid. We speak now with emojis and no longer with actual English, and there may even be a possibility that our society may just convert to speaking with emojis when we want to convey emotions. Our mobile devices have even become a sort of pacifier that when we feel anxious we can just pick up our phones and mask that anxiety although it is a mask and we don't learn how to deal with their imperfections.

Also when we think of AIs we try and remember Terminator and how AI is going to kill the human race and take over the world. But the thing is, AI is already running our world. when it comes to ads and displaying what we “may like“ if there's someone's profile that we've been going to constantly and they posted on their story it will most probably be the first one you see on your feed on Instagram, even for news that you receive on social media it will present you with what it thinks you'll appreciate the most. it's been shown that fake news spread six times faster than normal news on Twitter, so no wonder why we're so divided as a nation into what we want to believe. Everyone is getting different information and nothing seems true from the other one. It's fair to say that social media is not primarily a good thing for our generation, it has divided us, it's made us weaker, it's made us addicts, and the only thing that we can do to stop it is take action. No one person can stop this social media war, it's up to us as the users to stop ourselves from going on these apps for 10 hours a day. When it comes to people, you can't force them to learn something, they need to want the desire to learn it. The same goes with social media; we can't force people to stop using it. They need to understand that it's not a healthy aspect of our lives. While it's made it easier for people to connect, it also harmed many others.