I’m Perfect to Imperfect: The Lasting Effects of Social Media on Teens and What We Can Do About It
Your phone starts to vibrate uncontrollably. You look to see 135 missed notifications from Instagram. You immediately reach over to check what your friends have been saying about your latest post. You need to make sure that they like your new dress you bought at the mall this past weekend. After all, we live in an age where most people need other people’s opinions to reassure themselves about whether they look good or not. We live in an age where around 75% of the world’s population owns a cellphone and half of the world’s teenage population has at least one active social media account (AACAP). In an era where the main cause of depression in teens is social media, we cannot avoid the hustle and bustle of the internet, let alone social media. But we can sculpt it into being a more positive and cultivating environment.
Social media emerged as a global platform in the early 2000’s. Myspace was one of the first social media outlets to reach a million active users per month. Since then, social media has increased exponentially (The History Cooperative). After Myspace, social media platforms expanded to include others like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. With the release of every new platform came the advancement in technology and attention-grabbing tools (via marketing and techniques used to keep a user’s attention).
Why is social media so addictive?
Have you ever wondered why you continue to watch YouTube three hours after the time limit you set for yourself? “Sounds relatable, right?” Do not worry, it happens to all of us. The major corporations behind social media hire attention engineers. Their sole job is to make people use and stay on certain social media platforms for the longest amount of time possible. To fulfill their jobs, they apply some of the tricks from Las Vegas casinos to try and make these products as addictive as they can be. These attention engineers are also in charge of the timing at which people receive your post and who will be able to see it. For example, if you change your profile picture, Facebook can control the time between when you post and when others will be able to view your post. They can also tweak it so that only people you know, or care about, will be notified about your new profile pic, as they are more likely to react. This makes it so that you must keep on checking the platform throughout the day to see what others thought about your profile pic. (Summarized from an interview by Tristan Harris, Big THINK).