Social Dilemma- How to Social Detox.
I think you will all agree with how addictive YouTube and Facebook (other platforms too) has become due to feature of Infinite scrolling and their algorithm finding us things we enjoy. Now, TV has limited content still it is so addictive, taking 4 hours daily of an average American. Now, if you guessed that in Mobile device it is much higher, due to infinite contents, then you are right! A teenager on average spend 7 hours 22 min on screen media (source: The Washington Post), which is like half the waking hours of most people. This is only going to increase as the Company will pour their billions of dollars to make it more addictive.
Big companies are manipulating us to increase the screen time to their platform for their benefits. They are putting billions of dollars in research to develop systems which will hook us, and make us addicted. They are using our basic instinct such as need to belong, to be accepted, to be validate, etc. to hook us to their product.
I agree that the benefits some of these platform bring are may be far greater than the drawbacks. So I won’t ask you to stop using this platform, rather I want to make everyone aware and take back the control of our time and not unknowingly consume product when it doesn’t serve any purpose.
How this platform affect us
Do you know it is affecting you brain? Imagine getting dopamine again and again as you see notification in social media, watch a video in YouTube. Your brain is getting stimulated so much that now simple task which doesn’t give you kick (dopamine), will become extremely boring to perform, getting distracted easily and unable to focus; which can effect us from doing meaningful work in our day-to-day lives. Also, from personal experience the best ideas and clarity comes when we are doing nothing but alone with our thoughts; Due to this technologies we are seldom alone with our thoughts.
How can we gain back our control
So, what can be done about it. Now that you know how we are being manipulated. Firstly, those who are working for these companies should understand it’s harmful effect and make changes to system such that users has control over what content they want to consume and not give that to the algorithm (using algorithm to find content should be optional, not the only thing available). From our side, we can use plug in to chrome extension such as this YouTube Recommendation Blocker https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/remove-youtube-recommende/khncfooichmfjbepaaaebmommgaepoid?hl=en , to gain that control.
Furthermore, we have to be mindful of social media use. For which, we can turn-off all the notification from all the platform (In my phone, only my email and important people and families WhatsApp notification are turned on)- with this we can be more mindful towards using this platforms. I know, it is easier said than done; even I find it quite difficult to overcome the temptation.
Thank you so much for reading till the end. If you have ideas on how to gain control over the use of this platforms please leave a comment down below, I would love to know :D
P.S.: Have a productive day :)
P.S.S: This is the third article of my daily writing challenge \o/
