What we consume has a major impact on us. Everyone knows that. Everyone acknowledges the choices they take on risk and reward when it comes to comfort food, exercise, a little treat at Target, and so on.
But social media? All bets are off. It’s built to keep us looking. The best emotions to keep you looking are negative ones, a lingering survival mechanism from our caveman days. Fear, anger, and self-righteousness are the major three. Sure, you may get a funny animal video, some absurdist surreal thing, or good ol’ brain rot, but they don’t get you for long.
What keeps your eyes lingering?
Your favorite talking head making The Other Guy look dumb in an argument? Better watch every video they ever put out to confirm my bias, no matter if they edited out well-made arguments against them.
Watching the news with your cortisol spiked while you tell yourself it’s for the noble cause of being responsible and informed? You already watched six news pieces on The Bad Thing and they all said the same thing- how informed can you get?
Oh, another person with a Facebook science degree making a Short/Reel/TikTok on how thoroughly tested science is now bad. Better stress myself out by reading the comments!
It truly doesn’t have a political affiliation, age, race, nationality, or education level. We as a species are very good at looking all around us in every direction except up. It isn’t left vs right, it’s rich vs poor with the illusion of choices, and rules we can vote for that we can pretend apply to even the most powerful.
Similarly, we have the illusion of choice with our algorithms. It starts off light with your basic data that you use to sign up with.
“Okay, this is a female in her 20’s and living in California. We will give her this gift basket and see what treats she spends more time with. Well, she ate the chocolates immediately. She put on the bracelet, took a picture with it, and quickly forgot about it. However, she kept staring at the dried fruit with disgust. She then called her friend to complain that it was even included in her basket. So, if we want her to keep spending time looking at our gift baskets, we will put some chocolate right on top, next time she visits. Once she’s happy, we will have to work in some dried mango. Enough to at least get her to call that friend back. We don’t want her to stop coming for baskets, though, so under that mango, we will put a matching necklace to go with the bracelet. Honestly, we aren’t too worried that she wont come back for more, though. We can tell that she loves having a reason to call this friend and rant.”
Paired with cookies and other web traffic trackers, every website then compiles what they were able to glean from your looking habits and sell it to each other, compiling information to a point where it could honestly know you better than yourself. Yes, even the big companies do this. Its worse now, given that natural human tendencies on all major social medias are being used to train AI to mimic human interaction more fluidly. The more closely related to an AI company the social media platform is, the worse it gets, due to your ‘permission’ being tucked away in updated Terms Of Service. Even browsers and their extensions that are constantly on will sell all of this data to whoever wants it.
So, you are what you consume. Every rage-bait political post, or confirmation bias piece. What now?
Eventually, you would need to start looking at the opposite viewpoint. Not dismissing everything unflattering about “your guy” as nonsense, but truly understanding why the other half thinks this. That’s for later, though.
You need brain rehab.
Immediately skip anything that is upsetting or gives pride. Anything that is showing a new thing to spend your hard earned money on.
Ideally, of course, you’d deactivate everything and pick up some physical pastimes, but that just isn’t the world we live in.
Second-ideally, make a new account and don’t give it time to decide what you want- immediately follow hobbies, good news channels, hope-core, informationals, recipe channels, virtual book club groups; anything to feed a different part of your soul that isn’t used to polarization. If you see a creator slip in some of that, unfollow/block. Limit how long you will spend on these sites, even with the calm content. Cultivate some real world, unscreened interest.
There’s no amount of time that magically rehabs you. You’ll probably find that this is what you wanted all along, anyway, and stick to it. If you want to get back to that kind of media, though, remember to equally watch news and information from all perspectives without bias. Question everything. Be informed, not confirmed. We have enough going on in our lives and, without even realizing it, our brains want to take the easy path, hear what we want to hear, believe it, and call it being informed. It isn’t. Its brain junk food.
Additionally, if you have friends still addicted to the fear/pride mongering content and you add them on your new account full of good vibes, their habits will still be suggested to you.
Social media responsibly, friends.
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