Social Media Addiction: How do you get addicted? How does Social Media Platforms attract users?

 

 

Social Media are interactive computer-mediated technologies that facilitate the creation or sharing of information, ideas, career interests, and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks. The variety of stand-alone and built-in social media services currently available introduces challenges of definition. There are many Social Media Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Whatsapp, Linkedin, Youtube, etc. 

How do you get addicted to these several social media platforms:

 

Addiction: Addiction is a psychological and physical inability to stop consuming a chemical, drug, activity, or substance, even though it is causing psychological and physical harm.

 

Neurotransmitter - Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that helps send signals in the brain. Dopamine plays important role in executive function, motor control, motivation, arousal, reinforcement, and reward through signaling cascades that are exerted via binding to dopaminergic receptors at the projections found in the substantia nigra, ventral tegmental area, and arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus of the human brain. In Simple words, a neurotransmitter (Dopamine) engages the pleasure sensation in our Human Body. 

For Example, Cigrarretts are harmful to human lungs that can even lead to lung cancer, but why do people smoke, the dopamine releases the pleasure sensation in the brain already knowing about the impacts of smoking. But still, the person smokes. Similarly, People are getting Addicted to Social Media because of the content that is giving pleasure sensation to our Human Brain.

Craving, Loss of control, and desire to repeat. After watching the content, The neurotransmitter releases sensations to repeat those actions. The content on Social Media does not end. It is limitless, approximately there are 3.80 billion social media users in January 2020. Billions of people post content on social media every minute. The countless posts or contents brings up desires to repeat. You lose control of your brain that was meant to work on other projects.

Social Media - Business Model

If the product is free, you are the product. Facebook is free to use, you can post on Facebook, you can chat with your friends, you can even look for jobs on Facebook. Everything is free on Facebook. But do you know how Facebook runs, the amount of data Facebook has about you. The meaning of these social media platforms is they are free but they are selling your data to an organization or organizations that cannot be claimed. 

Competing for attention. These Social Media platforms basically focus on the usage of a user. They increase the usage by your actions and by your reactions to the content you have interacted with. Most users spend their time watching or reacting to the content on these social media platforms. 

Targeted Advertisements. Did anything look weird when you were looking for a new Laptop or something, the next moment when you land on youtube and there is an advertisement for a Laptop? This happens because the things or the content you have interacted with are being recorded and then it is shown to you. Your actions are being recorded.

Surveillance Capitalism - Sell certainty, Lots of data (Camera, GPS, Speaker, etc). Social Media platforms know the places where you have been visiting and been staying. This kind of data may be sold to unwanted parties or organizations or even the government. Devices like mobile phones or computers could get compromised by certain or popular apps like social media platforms that have much popularity and much users. Each and every move on the Internet is harvested. Every moment of every day, mobile phone apps collect detailed location data.

Build models that predict our actions. Organizations are making models that are predicting our next move. The massive use of artificial intelligence is used in these models. These models now know your daily routine. You keep an alarm on your phone and also use fitness bands that are connected to your phone and the internet. These devices may know your heart rate and also know your health status. These devices monitor your routine and with the help of AI, they can now predict your next move.