There’s a reason social media is so popular. Of course, it keeps us connected to our friends and it’s a fun way to show the world who we are and what we’re doing. But, more than that, it’s addictive. Social media is biologically addictive. As we scroll, we hang on to the hope that the next pull will reward us in some way. When the reward does happen, something happens to our brain. That little high we feel when we find something entertaining or exciting or engaging on social media causes our dopamine levels to rise over 400%. That’s almost the amount of dopamine that you could get from a cocaine high!
Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and others affect our brains like an addictive drug. They’re specifically designed to.
It’s more than just social media – it’s a tech industry problem. But, social media platforms are the main culprits because they are literally in our pockets at all times. Being constantly attached to a device in this way is rewiring our brains. Social media apps on our phone constantly alert us via notifications to new likes, follows, friends, pictures, tags, and more. If you have an iPhone, go to your Settings and find the Screen Time section to see just how many notifications you receive on an average day. It can be alarming.
With fifty, a hundred, even hundreds of notifications incessantly interrupting us as we move through our days, it’s no wonder that we have shorter attention spans than ever. The constant distractions fragment our attention, throwing off any focus we may have been able to settle into. We even suffer now from continual partial attention, which means that we rarely, if ever, give truly one hundred percent of our focus to a given task. It means that our minds are always, in some way, somewhere else.
Our attention is being hijacked by technology, and the people behind it are starting to fear what they’ve created. Justin Rosenstein, who created the “like” button, and has an iPhone with rigid parental controls set in place to keep him from downloading any apps. Tristan Harris is a former Google employee who made it his mission to speak up about the issue that “A handful of people, working at a handful of technology companies, through their choices will steer what a billion people are thinking today.” Loren Brichter created the pull-to-refresh mechanism and feels guilty every day for how addictive it became.
Here at Go2s, however, we don’t have to worry about that. And neither do you. Our private social platform is built on a foundation of trust. Unlike most social media networks, we don’t design our features to interrupt your life by engineering your attention, but rather to help you live your life the way you want. Give it a try and start something meaningful today at: www.go2s.com