The Social Slot Machine

 “There are only two industries that call their customers ‘users’ - illegal drugs and social media”

-Edward Tufte (American statistician and Professor at Yale University)

Ever had that tingling, unbearably irresistible feeling of grabbing your phone and scrolling through every single media outlet that is possibly available at your fingertips? We see flashing icons before us Google, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, Pinterest, Reddit, Youtube, Tiktok, Whatsapp, Telegram, Twitter, Threads, Quora ... .okay I’m out of breath now. These flashing icons all offer us something our brain craves the most, information. We often look at information as a boring article that no one wants to read in a newspaper but really information is all around us and we consume it voraciously every day. 

Consider the analogy for a second that likens our brain to a data processing machine. A machine that can process images, sounds, taste, touch and smells and produce something meaningful out of it. Think of the brain as an advanced AI model, with millions of connections, electrical signals and neural activity running around. Now, take your smartphone, a cleverly designed tool that’s sole purpose is to overload your circuits with data and destroy it. 

A study conducted by Government and Private PU Colleges situated in a cross sectional model of Bangalore revealed some interestingly shocking facts. Out of the 1870 users who were monitored, 74.2% were social media users and 25.8% were non social media users. Now to put this in context, 1383 individuals use social media and 487 did not. A median time of 14 hours per week was spent on the phone, that's approximately two hours in a day and out of the 1383 people who had a social media account 27.4% were severely addicted while 36.9% were slightly affected. Again, that's 378 out of 1383 who are severely addicted and 510 out of 1383 who are mildly addicted. 

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Now if you haven’t read through the stats and jumped directly over here, good for you, you’re wasting your time reading them anyways. The numbers are irrelevant here, we already know that it’s bad. I personally believe there are two people in this world, one that deludes themselves into believing that you are an individual that is not affected by the effects of social media or you are the person who knows they are being affected and they blame themselves for being unable to break away. To the first kind, you are deluded. To the second kind, it's not your fault your fighting a losing battle.

Social media and its proximity to smartphones, is a cleverly designed system that gives you something your brain craves the most, dopamine. Dopamine is a chemical neurotransmitter released to act on the brain that gives you feelings of pleasure, motivation and satisfaction. It has a role in controlling memory, moods, sleep, learning, concentration, movement and other body functions. It’s interesting to know that having too much or too little of dopamine in your system leads to depression, schizophrenia, psychosis, ADHD and severe addictions. 

Take one of the most popular social media platforms in the world for millennials, Facebook. When it was being developed as the first social media platform Facebook may have been to connect people from across the world but eventually the model it was built on was one that had one purpose, to keep users perpetually online and it all started with a simple like button. 

Likes in the online world can be considered equivalent to money. It brings you satisfaction unparalleled to anything some people have ever felt before, it’s a part of clout, of social status and influence. 

From an evolutionary standpoint, we are hardwired to seek social acceptance. We are hardwired to be accepted by our tribes, communities and families. This has been one of the reasons for our survival and propagation. We are social creatures, but till now our tribes, families, friends and societies have been limited to a maximum of a hundred people. So, that craving for social acceptance has always been limited to the people we interact with physically. 

Social media has no limit. Tens of thousands of people can in theory follow you, like your posts and validate your existence. We are exposed to greater social structures that contain tens of thousands of opinions and ideas and we have the innate desire to conform to each and every one of those opinions, making us lose sight eventually of our own opinions and ideas. This can also lead to a new form of disease, something which has been unheard of until the evolution of social media, body dysmorphia and ‘FOMO’ - the fear of missing out.  

Now, every time one of your posts gets liked the reward center in your brain is flushed with dopamine. This is a reward for conforming to a certain standard or ideal in society. When someone comments on your posts, again a hit of dopamine and your brain looks at it very much like how a dog’s brain might look at a treat after it has finished rolling over. Now, think about it inversely when you don’t get that like or that comment from the person you want, your dopamine levels immediately drop and you're left feeling unnoticed or irrelevant. You feel like you haven’t gotten any rewards for being good. You feel worthless. 

Facebook wasn't just built in a day. This idea wasn’t just invented without any trials or thought. People knew that this form of drug would hook, line and sink people. It would always make them come back, wanting for more. In fact, Instagram that has been recently acquired by Facebook’s parent company, Meta has actually been designed to emulate slot machines in casinos. The lever is your finger and the jackpot is the post that you stop scrolling for. This is no coincidence, this was done on purpose knowing that like any other addictive substance such as alcohol, drugs, gambling and sex, social media could perhaps rule them all in terms of the sheer pleasure gained from being a part of it. 

Social media creates a fantasy world, but this fantasy has no dragons or castles or princesses in towers. This fantasy is so close yet so far off from our own reality and that is the beauty of it, it seems so real but it isn’t. Friends on social media may not even know you, friends that you talk to in real life might, family on chats doesn’t count, the family you eat dinner with does, your fake anime girlfriends that you dream of being with aren’t real, the girl in your class is and the person whose taking that smiling picture of themselves in front of a beautiful sunset should stop and actually see with their own eyes, the future they want to be a part of.