Why Social Media Sucks - Chapter 4 - How to Break Up with Your Phone
Author: Catherine Price
“Why Social Media Sucks - Chapter 4.” How to Break up with Your Phone, by Catherine Price, Ten Speed Press, 2018.
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Even more than it is in the advertising business, Facebook is in the surveillance business.
Facebook, in fact, is the biggest surveillance-based enterprise in the history of mankind.
It knows far, far more about you than the most intrusive government has ever known about its citizens.
—John Lanchester
its crazy how people will get addicted to social media and post things they wouldn’t actually post. it’s affecting our mental health,which can cause the society to go crazy over social media
People can post whatever in social media but if someone takes a screenshot of your post or that posted them self and someone takes a screenshot of it and sends it to other people its obivoes that people will spread a picture of you
i think this is true because it has happened a lot and it is still going on
its crazy how much facebook and other social media apps know more about people than the government. people dont know what these social media apps can do to their lives.
I agree with you because a lot of apps can steal your information and spared it around and can put you in dangerous situation when people know were you live.
Any person can steal your information and know how old are you and know exacly what state or country you live in and i wouldn’t like someone to know where i live which is very scary bad people can go to your house and never know what they will do
i dont think it sucks because it can help you learn and study
I myself do have to say media does suck because it just takes control of you and also your mind just looses track of time.Social media can also be very toxic for such different ages, like rude comments or inappropriate images,words or far more worst. Also young kids are eligible for predators,rapists and perverts.Social media just has many risks we can never know of and later we can fall into that trap.
Don’t get me wrong i love social media i’m on it all the time.but,it can be scary at times like you can get hacked anytime and have you info given to strangers on the internet.or when making online friends you never truly now who your talking to. there is also people who post gore or other stuff that people shouldn’t be seeing and call it dark humor.social media is amazing but there is just no sense of privacy
I love social media cause i can meet people who are nice and get to know anyone but same time its scary cause you never know a 10 year old can be texting a 66 year old which is scary and you never know if a 66 year old man can do something to a poor 10 year old but social media can be privacy sometimes but it can sometimes can steal your own informatin
sometimes the social media can bring us together when you cant solve a really bad problem alone and gotta ask for help by talking to each other.
i dont think social media sucks because it can bring people together in ways reality cant.
i agree because sometimes you have problems and you cant solve it in person
Dont get me wrong, I love social media but it can be very addicting and distracting to many students and can cause people to lose track of time during class periods and during home. You can also leak a lot of information without you even knowing. You can easily get hacked and whenever you make online friends, you never know who they are and who you are actually texting. People would keep on scrolling as there is an endless amount of content on these media apps and would forget to do everything they were assigned to do.
I think social media is cool because it can tell you about sports, family, etc. But when people start to be rude and start making fun of people that’s when social media becomes bad. If you go on social media to make fun of people just keep it to yourself because that can cause someone to go hurt themselves. But if you just watch stuff and not make fun of people it will be fun. So just be nice on Social Media and it will be fun.
social media could be the home to some very dangerous and scary things but i agree, when you’re focusing on other things it can be entertaining
The thought of talking to friends at home or just anywhere is amazing but it comes to a stop when scary things like stalkers happen or hackers. It is scary to think you might let your address get leaked or someone you don’t know calls you. Overall social media is a toxic fun place we cant escape.
social media is dangerous because people can get information easily
Social media can be dangerous cause bad people can be in it and also if your buying something from social media they can just steak your money
social media has many sides it can either be happy, funny but theres also this dark side, sites or videos that can lead to depression, anxiety, loneliness, self-harm, and even suicidal thoughts. Social media may promote negative experiences.
Although Social Media can be pretty mean, there are benefits like starting a new business or selling things like cookies or many other things so there are many good benefits for social media
Social media is vert addicting and it can take control of you i am myself addicted to social but sometimes it gets annoying because people can hack into your account and spread your information and than its sometimes with social media you can lose track of time and than it can also affect different ages and people because of bulling,inappropriate images and words.
I dont think social media is a pain or it sucks i think it depends what they do with it such as a gun can be used for self defense murder hunting etc.
Any social media can be dangerous it reallt can like if u found someone in facebook or added u as a friend and they expect it its most likely they will text u and might want to take your own inforimation
People think social media sucks because it is very problematic thing. There is lots of problems that happen and people can change because of social media.
other people start using the information that you put on social media. also, the government uses your information without you knowing.
i think when people leak stuff it can be bad or serious and it can cause people to go crazy
Social media is a good place to make friends but it can be very dangerous at the same time. Sometimes I think social media can be bad but sometimes it can be good. You can have a private account on any app but you can still get followed by some people and you will probably accept some follow requests even if you don’t know them. Social media does suck at times, but other times is can be really entertaining.
I agree
people can post anything they want in the internet but you should be carful when u do because you can post somthing innaporpite
i dont think it sucks because it helps you learn and its a way to stay conected
people trust technology and put so many info on them also so many people are addicted to them and its not good for mental health
people can look at whatever they want and they can screen shot and keep pictures and videos and some can be something you didnt want to share and once its up on someone elses socail media you cant take it down
i think social media is just normal but it may seem unsafe for some people and that might be true and i kinda have to agree because sometimes the internet is wierd
Some apps can take your information thats why you have to be carful with what you download
social media gets a lot of hate but its also really beneficial for a lot people
i do agree that social media can suck cause people can be vary toxic and body shame people and more.but other then that social media can bring people together.like some people it can be hard to make friends in person so they might use social media to make friends cause they might be more okay with that,but what im trying to say is social media has its downs but it can be really fun
I don’t think its bad because it can help in a lot of way.You can find things out that you didn’t know before,you can have conversations with your friends,and you can share your opinion and thoughts.
When people look online and see they’re excluded from an activity, it can affect thoughts and feelings, and can affect them physically or mentally ?
why because it keeps intertain when there boared.
I like social media but then it could suck because people could expose you.
i think for people that think social media sucks its addicting but sometimes it can have private things and people would hate it if if others see them
For my networks they are not bad but except yes but these facebook intagram or another network for my taste is bad
Social media is suck because they could get information and sometimes it’s not safe for kids.
people put stuff on social media good and bad they can make others feel a type of way because everyone thinks it true
Social Media can be bad because people could cyberbully.
when you post a picture it gets added to your story and stays their and plus you gotta give them youre gmail to enter but it probably will hack you and get important information
I agree because there are many programs or applications or other things that can even steal your identity and money among other things.
social media is really bad because it can sometimes expose u
sometimes social media sucks because people can be mean to others and they will start to get mad or sad
social media can suck for teenagers because they could be giving personal information to strangers.
what i think this means is that people put there information out and they don’t know that companies save there information overtime to build up a record of all of there information.
WHEN I ASK PEOPLE WHICH category of apps they find the most problematic, social media is the most common response. Like junk food, the content of these apps is hard to stop consuming, even when you’re aware that it’s making you feel sick.
social media keeps kids on it forever because the kids are so easily addicted
People are able to acknowledge that there are negatives that some along with the content of social media, yet are not able to change anything. We all know that we would be better off without using phones, yet are so addicted that we cannot stop.
we get adicted to using social media because like facebook tracks down what you like to wach and they put more vidoes that have the same content
its 2021 where social media like tik tok make the new “generation” full of weird, cringy, fake, kids, not only that its influenced us with the thing we dont wanna know like the lgbtq i dont support them or black lives matter i dont support it but its good for acknowledgement. its just a broken world with weirdos, anti vaxers, republicans, pedophiles and its safe to say the this generation is ruined
it is true that there is endless content and this ends to wanting to watch more and more and this leads to many problems like sleep deprivation and not doing assignments and falling behind in school.
It should make you feel sick. From its deliberately addictive design to its surveillance-based business model, social media represents the epitome of “Trojan horse design”: it’s meant to manipulate us into doing and sharing things we otherwise would not—often with negative effects on our mental health and society at large. And once you understand the forces behind social media, you may begin to think differently about many of the other apps and features on your phone, too.
i really do agree with this like there are so many people that i know on a daily that literally have an emotional attachment to their social media and its made to do that to people but over all you just have to becareful
how social media becomes addicting and than over time it gets boring cause your on that thing everyday so now just being on those apps all day is boring . people dont even sleep cause of there phone and that is how addicting it is cause there so many new apps and so many new things and those apps become a distraction
Businesses create addictive designs and ignore the fact that its making people sick.
Social media catches are attention and constantly manipulates us into spending more time on these harmful apps. We know social media is bad for us but we continue to come back to it which effects are mental health in a negative way.
social Media has created a addictive enviroment to say negetive stuff and stuff thats not tue
socail media is fun and stuff but theres like a dark side to it were all the drama starts with people and ost of the time people take it to seriouse because most of the time drama starts from a joke and people take it to personal
Let’s start with a question: have you ever wondered why social media apps are all free? It’s not because their creators are driven by a philanthropic urge to help the world share selfies. It’s because we are not actually the customers, and the social media platform itself is not the product.
people that work at social media company’s can look at your information by going into there data base and looking at the information
Instead, the customers are advertisers. And the product being sold is our attention.
Phones are disguised as amazing objects that supply the world at our fingertips, and if used in the correct way, they are very useful. However, they manipulate us into overuse and devotion of time that isn’t necessary. This can cause mental issues, anxiety, depression, etc. It is all because of the applications that drive our attention. These creators work to make the most attention grabbing app that can appeal to a large population. They work to use our attention for money, and the results can be negative.
Think about it: The more attention we devote to Facebook or Twitter or a dating app or other social media, the more chances there are for the program to show us a sponsored post. And the more information we voluntarily post, the more personalized, attention-stealing, and profitable (for the social media company) the sponsored posts and ads will be.
It is crazy that the more you are on social media the more it will make a personalized profile about you. It will suggest different things you might like based on what you have already searched, liked, and posted.
In the words of Dopamine Labs founder Ramsay Brown, “You don’t pay for Facebook. Advertisers pay for Facebook. You get to use it for free because your eyeballs are what’s being sold there.”
As we touched upon earlier, the prize these advertisers are after is “engagement,” which is the metric by which companies evaluate the number of clicks, likes, shares, and comments associated with their content. Engagement is sometimes referred to as “the currency of the attention economy,” and advertisers are willing to spend a lot of money for it. Global ad spending on social media in 2016 was $31 billion, almost double what it was just two years before.
The fact that people have become dependent on our phones is not a surprise. We know that the constant clicking and tapping away on our devices is not beneficial to our mental health, yet many of us refuse to change our actions in spite of this. These behaviors emulate an addiction.
In other words, every moment of attention we spend scrolling through social media is attention spent making money for someone else. The numbers are staggering: a New York Times analysis calculated that as of 2014, Facebook users were spending a collective 39,757 years’ worth of attention on the site, every single day. It’s attention that we didn’t spend on our families, or our friends, or ourselves. And just like time, once we’ve spent attention, we can never get it back.
All social media is designed to make money for advertisers. This is why it is free for its users; they are selling our attention.
This is a really big deal, because our attention is the most valuable thing we have. We experience only what we pay attention to. We remember only what we pay attention to. When we decide what to pay attention to in the moment, we are making a broader decision about how we want to spend our lives.
To be clear, there is nothing wrong with spending your attention on social media (or on any other app). There is also nothing wrong with a designer trying to make an app that’s fun, engaging, and profitable. But as users, we should be using our apps because we’ve made a conscious choice to do so—not because of manipulative psychological tricks that are meant to make money for someone else.
This is important for the writer of this article to point out. For the people reading, it could seem like it is being hinted that we shouldn’t use social media anymore. As long as we are using it in an engaging and conscious way, we should still use it.
SOCIAL MEDIA KNOWS HOW TO STEAL OUR ATTENTION
Once you’re aware of the motives behind social media platforms—namely, attention stealing and information gathering—you’ll begin to notice how these motives are incorporated into their designs.
As we’ve discussed, “Like” buttons and comment features aren’t just there to help us connect with other people; they’re there because adding metrics to social interactions is a guaranteed way to keep us going back to see our “score.”
I think using the term “score” to describe the relationship between likes and self-esteem/self-worth is particularly powerful because it truly is a score. A lot of people I know, including myself at times, obsess over the amount of views, likes, retweets, etc their posts receive. It is sickening to me that social media has this effect on users.
HOW TO UNLIKE “LIKES”
If you find yourself obsessed with amassing likes, you may want to install a Facebook demetricator browser plug-in—it removes all the “scores” from Facebook so that instead of saying “57 people liked your post,” it will simply say, “People like this.” See if this makes a difference. Then ask yourself why Facebook itself doesn’t provide this option.
Similarly, it would be easy for social media apps to be built with optional “stopping cues” to help us control our consumption. An app could give you the choice to see posts only from the last hour or day, or to set a limit for how much time you want to spend looking at your feed. But providing options like this might reduce “engagement.” So instead, the feeds are deliberately designed to be endless. And even though we know that we will never “finish” our feeds, we keep scrolling, in pursuit of the dopamine hits that we get from every new post.
SOCIAL MEDIA IS MAKING US DEPRESSED
If you think about it, ever since the social media came into play on our society a whole lot of people became absurdly sensitive to almost everything. I think our mindsets have changed from “oh this is pretty cool” to “god it got so many likes i HAVE to do this” we seek more attention than we originally did as human beings and when that attention gets rejected we feel neglected. It promotes a whole lot of negativity, way more than the positivism coming from it.
Perhaps one of the most disturbing aspects of social media is the effects that it is having on our real-life relationships with other people—and, as a consequence, on our mental health.
Most people sign up for social media accounts out of a desire to feel connected—but numerous studies suggest that the more we use social media, the less happy we will be. In 2017, the American Journal of Epidemiology looked at the same group of people over time, hoping to determine whether social media use actually caused unhappiness, as opposed to simply appealing to people who are already unhappy. It concluded that there does indeed appear to be a causal relationship. As the authors described their results in the Harvard Business Review, “We found consistently that both liking others’ content and clicking links significantly predicted a subsequent reduction in self-reported physical health, mental health, and life satisfaction.”
In an article in The Atlantic titled, disturbingly, “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” psychologist Jean Twenge presents compelling evidence that, as she puts it, “the arrival of the smartphone has radically changed every aspect of teenagers’ lives, from the nature of their social interactions to their mental health.” (While teenagers are extreme examples of this, I would argue that smartphones are doing the same to the rest of us, too.)
The article includes charts representing various trends in teenage behaviors from 1976 to 2016. From time spent hanging out with friends to the age of getting drivers’ licenses to dating to sleep to sex to (most strikingly) loneliness, the charts all have one thing in common: the slope of their lines changes dramatically after 2007, the year the first iPhone was released.
Look at this data together and it’s hard not to come to the same conclusion as Twenge: “There is compelling evidence that the devices we’ve placed in young people’s hands are having profound effects on their lives—and making them seriously unhappy.” As she puts it, today’s teens may be physically safer than their predecessors (less likely to drive drunk, for example). But that is likely because they are “on their phone, in their room, alone, and often distressed.” Depression among teenagers is way up. Suicide rates are, too.
Smartphones have isolated teens and placed them alone in rooms with nothing but their phones. Teens and others are not interacting as much as other generations and its increasing depression level among all teens.
SOCIAL MEDIA IS BIG BROTHER
Imagine that someone knocked on your door and asked you to register the following information with the government: your full name, birth date, phone number, email address, physical address, education and work history, relationship status, names and photographs of all family members and friends, photographs and videos of yourself for as far back in time as possible, your political leanings, your travel history, your favorite books, your favorite music, and your favorite, well, everything. Would you?
On social media, we provide this information (and more) voluntarily—and with virtually no thought as to what the social media company might do with this information. As Antonio García Martínez, former product manager at Facebook, writes in his memoir, Chaos Monkeys, “The biggest thing going on in marketing right now, what is generating tens of billions of dollars in investment and endless scheming inside the bowels of Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple, is how to tie…different sets of [information] together, and who controls the links.”
The amount of information that Facebook has about its users is truly shocking—García Martínez refers to Facebook as “the regulator of the biggest accumulation of personal data since DNA.” What most of us don’t realize is that Facebook doesn’t just know everything you do and share on Facebook. Thanks to Facebook buttons and cookies (small files left behind on your computer that make it possible for companies to track your activities across sites), Facebook also knows many of the websites you’ve visited, apps you’ve used, and links you’ve clicked on. And thanks to partnerships with external data-collection companies such as Equifax, it knows countless details about your offline life, too, including (but not limited to!) your income and basically every purchase you’ve ever made with a card.
Finally, there’s one more important reason to be aware of the motivations behind social media: the effects all this targeting and personalization is having on society as a whole.
It is not question that young adults are the primary targets of a variety of social media outlets. Through instagram and snapchat, they are being lured into the addiction.
For as creepy as it might be to think of a company controlling this much data about such an enormous number of people, the only purpose, from Facebook’s perspective, is to make Facebook money. On the positive side, this means that Facebook is very protective of its data because it’s valuable. But the negative side is that Facebook does not have any intrinsic reason to care about whether the content that it’s helping its advertisers share with us is factually accurate. Instead, the goal is clicks. And when it comes to garnering clicks, the more sensational a post is, the better.
When you put this together with Facebook’s ability to target ads (in this example, in the form of fake news stories) to the people who are the most likely to click on and share them, we end up in a situation where the stories that show up in my newsfeed might be completely different from those that show up in your newsfeed—and where none of them have been vetted to make sure they reflect any version of reality. The more this happens, the more we risk creating a society in which we no longer have a shared definition of the “truth.”
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I think that she has a really good point social media is bad and hurtfull
Social Media can suck because of how much power you can get from the internet/social media, its easy for people to cyberbully, leak/expose, inappropriate images, hacking, and just doing things that you know are wrong. But it can be hard to take them down, which sucks.
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