I’m a true 90s kid— I spent most of my childhood without social media. I didn’t have Facebook until I was a junior in high school and my friend created a profile for me. Besides our Gameboys, TV, and the occasional video game, my siblings and I didn’t have a lot of digital distractions when we were growing up. Today, I work at a school — which serves as a constant reminder of the cataclysmic shift in our dependence on social media in a short period of time. I regularly see students with their heads down, staring glassy-eyed at their phones, oblivious of their surroundings. I often wonder how this addiction will impact them later in life. Sadly, schools are not the only place where these behaviors exist. Even as adults, we find ourselves overly linked to our digital lives when we should be present in our real lives.
When we talk about addiction to social media and digital devices in general, the word self-control always seems to emerge. I’ve heard people say “quitting social media is easy, you just have to have self-control.” It’s not that simple. In Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again, he discusses the parallels between social media and overeating. I, like many people, sometimes turn to food when I am tired, stressed, or bored and social media is the same. We get this urge to open an app and scroll when we feel any of those emotions — and honestly, this behavior is hard to control.
It wasn’t until recently that I learned that social media platforms are addictive by design. It all has to do with the dopamine release we get when we receive likes or positive engagement on our posts. There’s also the issue of “infinite scrolling,” which means that there’s never an end to our feeds. No matter how long we scroll there will always be content to view. So even if you want to stop, you can’t. To make matters worse, brands actually pay people, influencers, to market their products on social media. This has created an entire group of people who rely on their phones and social media to make a living.
I want to be clear, when it comes to any addiction, there is some responsibility on the individual to make the necessary changes to help break the cycle of habits, however the root of the problem is systematic. Hari describes the concept of cruel optimism, which means providing someone with an easy fix (e.g. just quitting social media), which will inevitably fail because the problem runs deeper (Hari 151).
Recently I have seen headlines in the news about schools regulating the use of phones. My school is also part of this movement — banning phones for middle schoolers throughout the day and banning phones from the classroom for upper schoolers. This is a great place to start, however, as Hari explains, there will always be engineers behind our screens working against us (Hari 155). Ultimately, social media companies need to take responsibility in finding a solution.
Works Cited
Goldman, Author Bruce, and Author Mandy Erickson. “Addictive Potential of Social Media, Explained.” Scope, Logo Left ContentLogo Right Content Scope Stanford University School of Medicine blog, 9 May 2024, scopeblog.stanford.edu/2021/10/29/addictive-potential-of-social-media-explained/.
Hari, Johann. Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023.
Allison Lucas 