What means to be online? And how this can affect people’s minds?
And then another question came to my mind when I was checking some of them: “And what about actual convos?”
Well, as you can see from my previous blog that I shared about Chronic illnesses and more, I was in a strange situation for some time. But now I have the mental capacity to be outside, to be with friends and enjoy the sun (when it is there!), and even be able to forget checking my phone for hours. Things that after the introduction of social media, many people stopped doing…
What happened?
Recently, I had a very deep discussion about being online and I am going to share how I interpreter things around it. First of all, a lot of research has been done around mental health, psychology and more, especially after COVID19 showed. We had to survive only from our phone applications by ordering stuff, by checking information, by contacting people. But this too much usage had its consequences.
And some of the results were that people inside their houses could potentially have mental health issues, or even pathological issues as many of them didn’t have even the chance to walk a lot. Some other researches showed that people not being in nature, or in general outside could have issues with sleeping as the brain was not working properly.
Other researches were focused on the social media platforms, and how these affect the people’s minds, especially when we all were dependent on them. But either after Quarantines, nowadays many people still prefer to be at home, or to skip socializing IRL, and instead to use their social media accounts.
In some countries, they even banned some social media platforms to teenagers and kids as they found that brain cells were not reproduced as it should. I will not start referencing all the researches here, I’m not doing research right now(doing a lot about my master XD), but you can google them or use Google Scholar (not chatGPT or any AI, please!)
Ok Maria and what is the actual problem here?
I will stick most to some parts of the problem, and especially being online always on social media platforms. The “problem” that I see is that people mostly rely on media platforms and how they represent themselves there. They prefer to chat with people they might know IRL, instead of going outside. They prefer to keep themselves to the safe place (behind a screen) rather than connect with people physically and even understand each other from body language for example.
Don’t get me wrong, social media has also brought potential help to people that they couldn’t communicate in another way, like people with movement issues etc. But is this the case for the most people worldwide? I can say from my perspective that is a no!
Sticking too much to the media platforms created the opportunity to the social media companies to gain more from us. And by this I mean, more screen time, more audience, more likes, more chatting, more…. profits.
Social media is now part of e-commerce.
It was made to happen. Maybe not something that everybody would see coming a couple of years ago, but if something is free, is it ACTUALLY free? Would the companies go and invest so much money on Cloud systems, and pay energy, just so you have an x,z,y App? Of course not.
You, most of you, know that you “pay” by giving your data. By giving your preferences to every website that uses cookies, to every “like” that you make, either to a click you might accidentally make, you will get ads, and relevant content around it. It is ok, but I feel that every marketing strategy should have some limitations. But marketing and ads is not part of this post!
More profits for the companies means more online time for you, and the other way around. As algorithms are created in a way to engage people, to promote you all the relevant things you are interested in, this results to more actual time of you being there, browsing…
But is it something that people realise? How much time actually you spent on your phone, how much time you just browse on things around? And is this healthy?
A recent research also showed that people can increase their dopamine levels by just looking at some funny reels. As internet says, Dopamine is known as the “feel-good” hormone. It gives you a sense of pleasure. It also gives you the motivation to do something when you’re feeling pleasure. But it’s not only this. Dopamine is also triggered by every notification, like and comment, making it harder to stop. Scientists call this “delay discounting”, which is when you choose the immediate reward (scrolling) over something important, like studying, sleeping or even hanging out with friends in real life.
Could this make things worse?
And now is the actual discussion of this talk. How being always online could mean “be always alone” or to even impact your mental health.
There is a reason why scientists say not to give tablets and phones to kids. There is a reason why teenagers’ mental health is directly impacted by these platforms.
Right now, there are a lot of cases with people having psychology issues, communication issues, anger issues, even need of audience to their content. I heard teenagers could harm theirselves just so they will get more views and likes to TikTok. This is not just a warning. This is P1 Incident. We need to fix this situation yesterday!
Don’t get me wrong, but people of my age (80s, 90s) had a better balance between “being online” and “being outside”. We might not had the best iPhone that came, or to be able to capture a 4K video. But at least we were healthy (and health is not only physical!).
Back in the days, there was a whole process of being online through MSN in our PCs. I even remember my routine back then, where I was still in high school, having my daily routine with studying and outside activities, and I specifically remember the times I had to turn on my PC (even turn on the router), and waiting for my PC to load everything and be able to play backgammon with a friend on MSN when we couldn’t arrange something outside, as it was not weekend and our families didn’t agree with that. Being online was like a ritual, you want it to turn your PC on to talk with a friend and play together. You wanted to have actual chat, so you were using MSN to arrange a physical activity with your friend.
I now NEED this Synchronous way of communicating. I started hating the “async” way of communication between people. This way too much usage of social media created more confusion, mental issues, even people thinking about death. I feel that this “always online” way of things in our lives is not easy, and I believe a good way to change it, is to bring this case to IT people (including me 😀 )
Stop doing apps like this. Find ways to make things better!
Ok Maria, everything you said seems so easy to you to do..
Well, no, of course it’s not easy! I realised all of these after long discussions of why I feel tired, confused, overwhelmed, or even having messy thoughts always. What really helped me are the steps below:
– understand what kind of social media usage am I doing? Is it for business? Is it personal? And what are the actual people I’m talking to? Am I talking to people? Or just checking all the reels?
– Are those people distributed all around social media platforms? Could I maybe find an alternative way to communicate with them? (So that I can stop using too much social media)
– Are there actual messages? Or just funny memes and videos? If this is the case, could I mute the chats, and decide when I want to look at them? This way I will not have any notifications to my phone to distract me.
– Could I find other interesting things to do with my digital friends? I know not all the people are close by, but maybe could I play with them an online game? Or maybe set up a connection with them to a different platform?
– Do I have boundaries? And by this, I mean prioritization on life. It’s better to stay out of social media and play puzzle, rather than looking at all the “perfect lives” of the influencers.
– …and anything else that could get into your mind after this reading…
It’s a very long discussion with many aspects of it, but I hope that I gave my small thought on this and how we could achieve better.
PS. Another interesting post will come regarding this, but for the impact in the environment (stay tuned)
I hope that you liked this article! If you have any question or anything you might want to mention, feel free to contact me!
Talk to you soon! Till then bye!! 🙂