Like

By Mamduh Halawa

How does social media affect us? What happens in our brains and how does it affect our wellbeing? In LIKE, research on social media is reviewed in an easily accessible and objective way, in order to give you knowledge about exactly how these platforms work, and why they do. Topics such as biological processes used by social media, psychological tricks built into the applications that manipulate our attention, and the impact of social media on wellbeing and memory, are discussed in detail. Should we have phones in school? And can social media even change our brains?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mamduh Halawa
• Release date: Mar 31, 2021
• ISBN: 9789163987779

Book preview

PREFACE

THIS BOOK WAS ORIGINALLY published in swedish, in 2018. Therefore, some of the references might be slightly misadjusted to your situation. In general however, this book generally covers universal and global issues and conclusions about the subject.

My goal with this book is to present, in as objective and clarifying a way as I can, how social media affects our well-being. Primarily, this should be seen as an investigative book where I try to sort out what actually happens with us under the influence of social media. I will put it in the context of psychological knowledge about how we function, and then hopefully put together a clarifying and summarizing picture at the end of the book. I will not try to solve any problems I find when it comes to the use of social media, but only present the psychological research, as I interpret it to the best of my ability. It is then the task of each individual to judge this book on the basis of the facts presented. The studies referenced are all peer-reviewed and published in real scientific journals and I will refer to studies directly in the text, so you can quickly double-check them yourself. The book is exploratory and thus not a conclusion about how things are, but instead my own attempt to figure out what the research suggests about the phenomenon of social media, and its impact on our, but then mainly adolescents' and children's mental health. My hope is that this book will be of value to anyone who feels confused about discussions on social media related to our mental health, by showing a more coherent picture of what happens to us when we use this new technology .

The first chapter concerns incentives for social media platforms to function as they do. And how that forms a basis for influencing us in different ways that are beneficial to their business model. Chapter 2 reviews the situation regarding mental illness in Sweden today. I also address different factors that could be the possible culprits for the development of mental illness. Chapter 3 is an in-depth review of biological processes that are relevant to the use of social media. In Chapter 4, I develop how these processes can be affected by various psychological tricks, to keep users attention on the applications. Chapter 5 is a review of how our brains, on a biological level, can be affected by social media. Chapter 6 is a purely psychological examination of what social media can do with our wellbeing. And Chapter 7 is a similar review, but this time focused on how human cognition, primarily memory and learning, can be affected. In Chapter 8, I then try to present a unified picture of the conclusions I came to. And a discussion about how that knowledge could be used. Together, I hope I can give you, the reader, a comprehensive picture of this area. My hope is that one can walk away from this book with a sense of satiety and contentment, while at the same time arousing at least a small spark of further curiosity in the subject. Or maybe you can at least take with you, if not everything in the book, then at least something that you thought was interesting. If so, this book was worth the effort.

Chapter 1

TIME IS MONEY

A DIFFICULT FACT FOR every inventor to contend with, is that we only have 24 hours per day. 24 hours in someone's daily schedule, where 8 hours disappear with sleep, another 8 with work and several other hours for socialization, food and only god knows what else. Somewhere in between, your amazing new invention should take up a little bit of someone's time. It would also be nice to get paid for the effort, so that you dont starve to death. High-tech material resources are abundant today, and the cost of manufacturing virtually anything has never been lower. We have become so good at inventing ingenious technological solutions, that what cost millions of dollars to manufacture in the 50's for some completely legal and semi-moral american military lab, can now be put together by some ingenious 14-year-old in her father's garage without the weekly allowance being significantly affected. Moore's Law is a now famous exponential curve showing how the capacity to store and process electronic data has doubled every year since the first computer, and seems to continue to do so, at least approximately¹.

This enormous technological development makes our cars, computers and machines faster, better and smarter in a way that pushes down production costs and allows manufacturers across the globe to build on each other's advances. The Internet has opened up the world's knowledge base that further fuels developments day by day. If someone has come up with something amazing somewhere on earth, you can look it up and build on it yourself². There is thus a fantastic abundance of high-tech products that every average citizen can enjoy, in a way that has never been possible before.

Making money on Social Media

Counted in people over 12 years of age, virtually all humans living in an industrialized society have a mobile phone today. Nearly 100% of that population also has a mobile phone that can be used to surf the internet. Having an iPhone or Android in today's modern society is closer to a human right, than a privilege for those who earn well. Looking at the younger generation, they completely bathe in technology. Almost all industrialized citizens between the ages of 12 and 25 have a smartphone. 79% of Sweden's two-year-olds use the internet - just an absurd figure. 74% of all 10–11-year-olds are estimated to use the internet via phone on a daily basis. 90% of all 14–16-year-olds state that they have daily access to a wireless network at school. Around 45% of these state that they use mobile phones in lessons to do schoolwork³. If we assume that young people at this age have access to the mobile phone during school hours and use it to study, it is probably not unreasonable to assume that other apps are also used during school hours. In every smartphone, there are thousands of apps competing for space in your everyday life, completely free to download. The mastodon apps, the real dominants, especially for children and young people, are unexpectedly social media apps. Facebook is the uncrowned lord of the field in the app world. But Snapchat, Instagram, Linkedin and Reddit are also permanent elements in people's everyday life. Absolutely free for everyone. Go into any school or high school and try to find someone with no relationship with social media, and statistically it should be completely impossible for you to succeed in finding a single person. So there is a huge market for app makers, but also a terrible competition from other apps. The majority of the apps are  also free. This presents two key dilemmas for each app developer.

• How do I make sure that my app is used?

And

• How do I make money?

The solution to the first question is to capture the user's attention for that particular app in the most powerful way possible, and to get the person to return again and again. Those hours we have to spare each day are extremely valuable to these companies. The market for things that can steal people's attention today is completely saturated, and each person only has a few hours a day to give these companies. The solution for companies like Facebook and Snapchat is to use psychological techniques to make people long for their particular app. With enormous resources, they use the most proven psychological research that plays on exactly the right strings to make you think about the app, use it and long to use it again. It's not a work of evil people, and the majority of the arguments behind the creation of these apps I think are good-natured. Social media also brings with it a number of benefits that we will examine in more detail later in the book. But the social media market is driven by a constant incentive to grab your attention. Consciously or unconsciously, these giant companies must adhere to the rules of the game and adapt accordingly, so as not to be overtaken by their competitors. Salaries must be paid, the business must be financed and all this must be done without going bankrupt because some other company has outcompeted your place in people's everyday lives. People's livelihoods are at stake, just like in all other markets. This form of economic thinking is quite uncreatively called Attention Economy. A person's attention is a resource like any other, and a lucrative and scarce one⁴. And just like with any other scarce and lucrative resource, acquiring the resource brings with it a hell of a race to the bottom. As for the solution to the second question, how the social media companies finance their activities, they sell their platform to marketers. Game makers can sometimes incorporate paid services into an otherwise free app, but the book's focus is on social media, which has a different strategy. What a social media app sells is a gigantic platform where many people are gathered. These people also have a huge amount of information that they have voluntarily posted online. It is thus an excellent way for companies to reach out with their own advertising and is thus also the general strategy that Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram use to get money. They offer a platform where other companies can pay

to reach out to potential customers. This is their main source of income, although such huge companies of course find other ways to get an extra penny as well, such as external financiers and so on. Facebook made just over $ 34 billion in advertising revenue in 2018, the highest figure in the company's history and over 90% of their total revenue⁴. In comparison, the entire Estonian GDP amounted to 23 billion dollars in 2016 5. In other words, Facebook 2018 made more money in one year than the total turnover of a smaller European country, and that only based on advertising revenue. This is the reason why the platform is free for ordinary men and women, and why the business idea works at all. To make the platform attractive to different companies that want to market their products, these companies also have functions for tailoring advertising. Because Facebook has huge amounts of information about people's interests based on their activities on their site, they can offer companies to tailor marketing campaigns for specific target groups. For a relatively small penny, you can reach out to just the people you think are interested in your product. Gone are the days when you had to print thousands of copies of posters

and distribute it to lots of people who probably couldn't care less about your slightly dysfunctional olive oil-powered vacuum cleaner. With the help of targeted marketing, you can receive help from Facebook to get information about which people might be interested in your product and target your ads precisely to them. Smart algorithms can figure out how people work based on what they do. That information is then resold in exchange for money. There are thus strong incentives for companies like Facebook to keep you and your attention on their app, so that information can be sold. And if those responsible for advertising start to feel that they are not really getting value for money, they will of course turn to social media and pressure them to invent even more effective strategies to capture and retain users' attention. And companies like Facebook have an sometimes frightening power over us.

The creation of a target group

Emotional Contagion is the term for people's tendency to reflect the emotion, purely implicitly, that they have been exposed to. A happy facial expression immediately triggers the same emotion in the recipient, to varying degrees depending on the context.