Social media is the new opiate for the masses

Smartphone deprivation induces anxiety among people, a phenomenon similar to drug withdrawal symptoms

With Facebook enduring a wave of public criticism for its cavalier approach to user privacy, it’s becoming more apparent how important social media has become. The era when humans interacted mainly by gathering in physical spaces, or maintained personal networks through one-to-one connections, has drawn to a close, and the next generation won’t even really understand what that era was like. Social media has changed the meaning of human life itself.

It has also made a lot of money and investors have given companies like Facebook Inc., Snap Inc., and Twitter Inc. multibilliondollar market valuations.

There’s even an argument that the true economic value created by these companies is much greater than their profits — or, in Snap’s case, their potential future profits — suggest. For the most part, the services are free to use. But given how much time people spend using them, it’s probably true that they would be willing to pay a lot to keep being able to enjoy social media. In economics, this is known as consumer surplus — the amount of value that consumers get without having to pay for it.

But many of us who lived through the shift from Internet 1.0 to the new age of social media can’t help but feel a nagging worry. In addition to concerns about privacy, electoral influence and online abuse, social media seems like it has many of the qualities of an addictive drug.

Research isn’t conclusive on whether social-media addiction is real. But it certainly has some negative side effects that loosely resemble the downsides of recreational drugs.

In 2011, psychologists Daria Kuss and Mark Griffiths wrote a paper that found: Negative correlates of [social media] usage mind. So, a significant question may arise here. After all, how to forget the past and its memories which keep haunting us like a nightmare? It is usually said, “You can’t reach for anything new if your hands are still full of yesterday’s junk.” So, we need to get rid of the past, the junk which renders life distressed.

We need to stay alert against the recurrence of memories of the days gone away. Looking forward to upcoming days must be the principle of life which we need to strictly adhere to. Another effective way to include the decrease in real life social community participation and academic achievement, as well as relationship problems, each of which may be indicative of potential addiction.

Meanwhile, a number of more recent studies find similarities between social-media use and addictive behaviour. And experiments found that smartphone deprivation induced anxiety among young people, a phenomenon that certainly has parallels to drug withdrawal. That certainly doesn’t mean that everyone who uses social media is a junkie.

Evidence shows that moderate usage is not harmful. It’s the heaviest users who may be in the most danger — a recent survey found that a quarter of Americans are online “almost constantly.” And social-media use is going up relentlessly worldwide. Whereas once the internet offered an escape from the real world, now the real world is a muchneeded escape from the internet.

Now, it’s important to emphasise that just because a product harms some people doesn’t mean it’s bad for society overall. Cars kill tens of thousands each year in the US alone and certainly pose a much bigger threat than social-media addiction. But no one thinks about banning auto travel, since the benefits for our economy and social lives are so huge.

Other economists, however, theorise that addiction can result from shortsightedness. If people are more oriented toward the short term than they realise, they may incorrectly believe that they’ll be able to exert self-control and stop using an addictive substance in the future. When the addiction becomes too strong to quit, they may find themselves trapped in a situation they never would have chosen had they known what they were getting into. This interpretation of addiction seems likely, given the fact that people who haven’t been addicted don’t know what it’s like — I can tell myself that I’d be able to quit cigarettes easily, but there’s no way to be sure until it’s too late.

Much more research is needed before we conclude that social media is like tobacco. And even if it is, the harm would need to be very substantial in order to get government policy involved in limiting social-media use. That seems unlikely. But even if social media is worth the costs, it still means that much of society’s resources have been put into creating more pleasurable drugs for the populace to become addicted to. And that’s a disquieting thought.

Whereas Karl Marx declared that religion is the opiate of the masses, our modern capitalists may have invented a better one.

IF SOCIAL MEDIA REALLY DOES ACT ON MANY USERS IN A MANNER LOOSELY ANALOGOUS TO CIGARETTES OR HEROIN, THAT MEANS THE BENEFITS ARE LESS THAN PEOPLE’S WILLINGNESS TO PAY

dodge the past is living the life of a sand glass. In the dropping of a grain of sand at a time lies the key to life free from the anxieties of the past.

Diversion of mind from the present brings about agonies which go on eating into our mental calmness. So, cease to be in the past and start living a life filled with concern only for what stands as now.