Detoxification from Social Media

Dear readers, if you are reading this, you are not going to spend next your time in vain. Right now at the peak of Social Media and technologies, most people started to worry about the usage of Social Media, and this topic becoming discussable and more arguable. Let's start with the question:

"What kind of benefits am I getting in my personal and social life by using Social Media or what changes are bringing me social media"?

You can divide answers into two columns: in one you list positive impacts and in the second negative impacts. Based on your answers you might already start to worry.

Now, it is time to share with you what I gathered and learned, and what was useful for me that caused me in shifting my mind, behavior, and my attitude toward social media.

I am going to reveal to you the "Side effects" of beloved Social Media.

As I keep repeating, be aware, that all the information and knowledge that I am sharing with you are verified and reliable. I summed up all the data which I gathered to make it easier for you to understand. I will keep repeating there are no such things as applying my assumptions or guess-works which are not proven or have just speculation. I gathered here opinions of influential people who can accurately describe mostly the disadvantages of Social Media.

I think it is time for everybody to understand the importance of Media Literacy in our daily life when we are living during the Boom of Social Media and the excess of information. I am not even talking about GPT chat, etc. Being Media literate you will be aware of what is going on in a real-life and you won't incur yourself to the hands of a fake and unrealistic world. And I will share the information sources to track the real information and share tips on avoiding control from the side of Social Media. We tend to see only beautiful and embellished sides of life that distort our reality. Or likewise, we see or hear only negative sides that terrify us and we become more fearful. Let's take a situation with the Coronavirus. For almost a year and a half, all the news portals talked about COVID-19 and how people are dying which terrifies people more. Imposing fear is a good method to manage and control people, I believe. This is my subjective belief. We do not know all those big social media influencers, marketers, and advertisers, cause behind all of them there are intelligent psychologists who very well know how to influence and manipulate people. All big social Media companies hire individual attention engineers to try to make products maximum addictive.

You have been programmed. A large portion of your day to spend in a state of fragmented attention. It reduces your capacity for concentration. Social media consumes you and make you consume more of them and their products.

What do you feel when you always see the beautiful side of people's lives? When do you see only luxury and good things going on in that person's personal life? You start to feel measurable that your life is not as beautiful as theirs which creates comparison, low self-esteem, and dissatisfaction with your own life and reality. It creates also a feeling of envy which brings only harm to you. Go into your reality instead of admiring of life of others. Build an admirable life for yourself. You do not know what is behind those beautiful pictures and videos. We do not know what is their reality. We should understand that instead of tracking other's life and wasting our time, why we don't use that time to build up our own life?

In Social media, we only see the bright side of people's lives, how they are enjoying and happy. Sad to say-If these things were true. People who see only the beautiful side of people and their life are prone to depression, as they begin to compare themselves to others and feel unhappy.

We care what other people think about us. Our mind is very vulnerable to what other people think about our new photo. Why do we need it? Why do we need other people to know where we are and what we are doing?

In the US congression when they organized a discussion about the negative influence of SM, they asked Mark Zuckerberg a question: " Would you share in which hotel you stayed last night"? His reply was: "No, never".

Dopamine spark

Technology and social media release the chemicals dopamine which is when you get 1 text message you will feel good. Dopamine is the same chemical that makes us feel good when we smoke when we drink and we gamble or watch pornos. In other words, it is highly addictive. That is an addictive behavior that sparks dopamine. The same amount of dopamine when you get from cocaine.

We have an age restriction on alcohol or cigarettes for kids, but we don't do it for social media. Why we don't give restrictions for kids? Instead, we should teach them media literacy and let them know the dangerous parts of our beloved social media.

Learn more about dopamine in an article about sleep by clicking here.

Social Media Platforms

Social Media is good for work and business if used as a professional and if you are getting a benefit.

Facebook

The scientists of the Danish Happiness Research Institute experimented with participants of 1095 people. They asked half of them to refrain from using Facebook for a week and half were asked to continue using as usual. Experimenters asked them to assess their life satisfaction on a ten-point scale before the beginning of an experiment and after. They had a scale from 1 to 10. The participators of the experiment start to notice positive changes in their life. The research identified that a lack of social media usage increased life satisfaction. After a week without Facebook participant's indicator of life satisfaction has grown from 7.56 to 8.12. Participants admitted not only the life satisfaction but highlighted the increased volume of real communication with real people. Also admitted that they became less annoyed and felt less lonely. Research Director Make Wiking's studies show that 61 % of social media users prefer to demonstrate only the good sides of themselves, and 69% of others upload photos of the "cool events" that happened to them. Seeing only the bright and cool sides of other people we start to compare ourselves with them and it leads us to a depressive and anxious state. More and more people even end up losing themselves and often don't know what they want and who they are. Social Media became a fake world where we spent half our time there and then we can not accept our real life, we are struggling with acceptance of our real world.

Most of the suicides of teenagers happen just because of Social Media.

"People voluntarily engaged in what makes them unhappy" - Make Wiking

As we started to talk about Facebook. Let's start from that Facebook came out around 2004. Here we can say that not the phone changed everything, but social media did. Let's take Steve Jobs, who invented iPhones and made them very compact by following minimalism. He loved minimalism. After when social media came out everything starts to change. We start to get more new and new applications, programs, and of course types of social media. Now if you look, most of the applications that you want to use require another application to support first. In short, you need an app to use an app. In the beginning, Facebook had only functions like liking photos, sharing stories, and sharing your favorite movie, book, and whatever. But now it is changed. It includes entertainment, business development, and advertisement. Even social activities run their movement. Let's take political campaigns, people voting starts not in special procedural places, but in social media. How about the war? First appears digital war before the actual war.

We think, that we are controlling all this Social Media stuff, but unfortunately, they are the ones who are making decisions for us. Yes, there are so many advantages of Social media. We can connect with Whole Word, with friends abroad, and we can send messages in 1 sec. We are improving our businesses, entrepreneurship, and blogging skills. We can easily get the knowledge online from where we are. But at the same time, there is a lot to know about social media as well. We might know how to use them, but in reality, we don't know. We do not know how social media uses us if we do not know Media Literacy. We are not aware of how we are getting far from real connection, real face-to-face communication. We became so depressed, stressed, and not confident in real life, but we are confident in Social media which is fake. We became customers of Social Media allowing them to earn from us. We are not filtering the information we are receiving, seeing, hearing, or reading. We do not have access to real core truth, because everything above is blurry of what we often tend to brainwash. We must learn how to analyze, observe, filter, check, compare, and then give the right opinion or in other words have our own opinion regarding anything, our conclusion, and decision, and our point of view. We have to know how to find, check, or get the real true information. We have to always ask ourselves questions such as:

How do they know or how can I believe it? How Can I know that is true? Where I can get pure information? Who can help me to find honest and pure information? Where I can get access to that information? What is the truth of what I am seeing? What is the truth of what I am hearing?

Are they subject to reality or real fact? Does that describe the current situation and actual position country's, public people, companies, organizations, celebrities, political situations, and economy?

"Be realistic! Be smart! Have widely open eyes! Seek truth! Do not believe what you see and what you hear first! Be suspicious! - Ayrie

How Social Media affects your actions, decisions, opinion, behavior, mental and physical life, and how you see the World. Let's see together how we were manipulated from different perspectives. -Agitation; -Appealing;

-Propaganda; -Selling the products and consumption; -Manipulation to achieve the specific goal;

The Social Media disadvantages

Every single action starting in your social media is being watched, tracked, measured, monitored, scanned, and recorded, even for how long you look at it. They know everything: you are an introvert or an extrovert. They making better predictions.

“There are only 2 industries that call their customers “users”, “illegal drugs”, and “software”. (Edward Tutte)

Social media is a drug. All social media are profits from us. Social media increases depression and anxiety. After 2011 up 62% of teen girls suicide: 15-19 years old-make suicide around 70%;

0-14 years old- 151%. These services killing people and these people are killing themselves.

We can do genetic engineering and develop new kinds of human beings, but realistically speaking, you are living inside of hardware, a brain that was millions of years old and there is this screen and the opposite side of the screen, there are these 1000 of engineers, and supercomputers, that have goals that are different than your goals, and so, who is gonna win in that game? Who is going to win?

The Internet rules the World. Social media controls us more than we thought we are controlling them.

Make a plan about your life, don't plan your social media posts. We get rewarded with short-term feelings like social media gives us. Instead, live in the present moment and try to learn to notice what is around us.

From the research on social media: The longer you are in social media the longer you are alone and isolated.

It increases the rate of depression. Scientists behind the science know how your brain functions and your behavior and they keep researching you by having data just from your phone and from the way how you use your device.

From the interview with Elon Mask and his opinion about

Instagram:

"People use to look like they have a much better life than they do. They modify pictures and post their best pictures than they look. People show their happiest life -they are not happy. They are depressed and saddest people in reality.

Of course, Elon Musk as an engineer knows what he is talking about with his engineering mindset.

It is not about regulation or shutting down social media-it is more about minimizing them and having balance. The danger of AI is much greater than the danger of nuclear war. AI is far more dangerous. I do not worry about short-term staffs".

As an experiment try for yourself to learn a technique for managing social media and you will understand that there are many tools and techniques they use to get your attention, make you interested in something or even change your opinion which works. You will have data that you collected and depending on their user engagement with you, you will start to do better predictions to influence those people. And you start to use other different methods and experiments. The same thing does social media companies but in a much-enhanced way.

Especially Instagram gives you a negative impact in terms of your perception of the World and yourself. Another effect is FOMO-Fear of missing out. This fear creates you feeling that you missing someone's fun moments or achievements that you don't have while you are busy with your responsibilities.

Unrealistic expectations. On the surface, everything looks great, but that person you are comparing yourself with might be desperate and they post good photos just for Instagram likes as a form of validation. Take yourself as an example, how many times do you post stories just to get the attention of your followers, despite you are having bad moments in your life? How dare you are to do it?

Center for Human Technology 1. Technologic world overwhelms human strength and intelligence. 2. Technology exceeds and overwhelms human weaknesses. It creates inhuman: Addiction Polarization- division into two sharply contrasting groups or sets of opinions or beliefs Radicalization Outrage-edification Vanity-edification

Conspiracy theory is a belief that some covert but influential organization is responsible for a circumstance or event. We are a nation of people that no longer speak to each other. We are a nation of people who have stopped being friends with people, because of who they voted for in the last election. We are a nation of people, who have isolated ourselves to only watch channels that tell us that we are right.

Cal Newport is a Computer science Professor at Georgetown University. He wrote about the intersection of technology and society. He is interested in how technologies impact our abilities, productive work, and fulfilling lives.

We want and try to be more connected and excepted, but conversely, we becoming less connected and less excepted.

Focus is a new IQ in the modern world when we are distracted by social media.

Let's see what Yuval Noah Harari-an Israeli author of popular science bestseller "Sapiens" says about social media, boredom, and relationships.

Social Media

We need to see and notice how technologies downgrade humans and human skills. It is downgrading social and personal skills. Many of the top skills we need are social skills which we are losing now. It got replaced with artificial intelligence. We are losing the ability to engage. A century ago you encountered different people, and you have to corporate with them. But now our social interactions became social media. As a human, we grow by interacting with people and socializing.

Boredom

"The most difficult thing for people is dealing with boredom".

80% of people pull out their phones just to not feel lonely. You feel unpleasant feelings in your body- which is boredom. You feel like wasting time. Then you pick up your phone, and your body reacts and you get excited.

He also says:

" It is really dangerous to get to know yourself".

You don't have time to get to know yourself, you are too busy ( with work, family, and social media). But some people have time to get to know you. And it is their business. The entire business model or political model is based on that. If they get to know about you a little bit then you game over. The media works against our minds and well-being.

Relationships

It is becoming hard to build a relationship with people. Why?

Simple example: It is so much easier to connect with your cousin in Switzerland than your husband next to you who is always looking at a screen.

When you connect with somebody through a phone or screen it is easier to deal with, than a real person. Real relationships force you to deal with difficult people. You can unfriend your friends more than your neighbor.

We need to develop social skills. But we are looking at screens, says Christian Haris-philosopher. We are by nature dependent on social cooperation, it is our growth, but we are degraded now.

From Simon Sinek

This is a highly anxious and stressful period of life. Many people nowadays can not cope with the stress. When significant stresses start to show up they are not turning to a person, they are turning to their devices, and here social media comes as a temporary relief. Trauma for young kids is to be unfriended on social media. We need the approval of peers. There is nothing wrong with phones and social media - it is imbalanced. If you are sitting with your friend in the restaurant and you are speaking with someone else on your phone-it is a problem. Before you will tell your boyfriend or girlfriend good morning you are checking your phone-it is an addiction.

"Using Social Media is Ok, but using it too much is dangerous and addictive, Everything has to be in balance" - Simon Sinek

"They are good at showing confidence which they don't have"-Simon Sinek.

Tribalism It is not about technology. Technology's ability to bring out the worst in society and the worst in society is an existential threat.

If technologies create mass chaos, outrage, incivility, lack of trust in each other, loneliness, alienation, more polarization, more election hacking, more populism, more destruction, and inability to focus on the real issues… that is just society. And now society is incapable of healing itself.

“Whether it is to be utopia or oblivion, will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment…” (Buckminster Fuller) How do you wake up from the matrix, when you do not know you are in the matrix?

Utopia and dystopia

Artificial intelligence. It became a cool tool instead of the right tool for humanity.

These products are an outcome of our products.

“If you are not paying for the product, then you are the product.”

It is the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your behavior and perception that is the product. They will change, who you are, what you think, and what you will do.

Our subconscious mind works like a computer. As you know a computer thinks literally. So that is why entering any request you have to carefully select the words. In the same way, works our Subconscious and Conscious mind. As a computer, they are receiving all the information literally. The result will depend on the exact formulation of the command. If our inside computer won't understand that, it simply won't know what to do. Our subconscious mind does not aware of the information received, it will receive all the information no matter if it is fake or true. So it is your conscious mind's job to filter the information and feed the subconscious mind with pure, true, and honest information based on facts.

Appeals

There are 2 types of advertisement appeals: Emotional and rational. And there are more than 20 types of these influential advertisements. If you go to any websites and they will ask you to accept cookies which means depending on your usage they will customize the website or any portal, or social media specifically to you. In this way, they have more opportunities to influence you.

Emotional advertisement appeals:

1. Personal appeal;

2. Social appeal (people are motivated by what others are doing);

3. Humor appeal (humor can bring relief);

4. Fear appeal (fear of losing something)

5. Sexual appeal (make viewers emotionally excited);

6. Romantic appeal (can take people to a nostalgic moment that evokes emotion);

7. Endorsement appeal (celebrities, athletes, and influencers to endorse products);

8. Musical appeal (music can set a tone and mood just as quickly as images);

9. Adventure appeal (experience something new and exciting);

10. Empathy appeal (evoke the emotion of empathy and understanding);

11. Potential appeal (a sense of empowerment to turn dreams into reality);

12. Brand appeal (people will pay money to be a part of a brand that they think will give them a certain kind of status, value, or quality).

Rational advertisement appeals are mostly based on objective facts, logic, and reasoning.

1. Pain solution (most people are motivated when they have a problem that needs to be solved, that causes them regular pain);

2. Scarcity appeal (it puts on impulse);

3. Contrasting appeal (a comparison between your product and the competition, to prove that you are better than the alternative );

4. Transparent appeal.

The list can go on. Through these examples, I wanted to show how the advertisements use well-tested methods to trigger your emotions. Now you can look at yourself to how you have been triggered by those ads. You might not have your own opinion even or your willingness to choose, because you have been triggered and imposed to act in that or that way. You might don’t have your feeling that your body is stimulating, but it is an artificially stimulated feeling.

YouTube

UGM -user-generated media like YouTube, Space, and Wikipedia.

1. They consume content for fulfilling their information, entertainment, and mood management needs;

2. They participate by interacting with the content as well as with other users for enhancing social media and virtual connection. Note, it is not about real social connection, but virtual connection;

3. They produce their content for self-expression or self-actualization. Do you think it is good or bad?

These 3 examples were taken from the Harward education portal.

My advice

My advice is often to take track of your SM usage behavior and be aware of your thoughts and feelings. There are tools in mobile phones that can help you to track your usage of social media and you can customize it based on your needs. Good if you are having only benefits from social media like supporting your business or any activity you do. Start detoxifying yourself from social media for a month and more until you will feel you are okay without SM. Then start to attend to communities based on your interests. Develop your hobbies and skills.

It is just simple, eliminate the usage of social media, keep balance, and create a limit line towards Social Media. Be more mindful and interact more with real people, with your family and friends. Create balance and harmony in your life and around you!

I hope it was useful!

I am starting a challenge to change my life by skipping social media. If you are ready to join the challenge, leave your e-mail and mention that you are into the challenge. We will track our moods and see how our life will change.

If you are curious about AI disadvantages and want to have a more perspective look + if you want to Watch a Documentary movie " The Social Dilemma", click this link here and you will be referred.