Opinion: The digital dark side

Meaghan Blankenship
Contributor

Would you consider social media a drug? Do you switch between three or four apps all day? Do you feel good while you’re using it, then feel unsatisfied when you’re done? Do you still think it’s not a drug?

As consumers of social media, we are seldom presented with an unaltered picture. Seldom do we see an uncurated perception of people. We see these photographs, we like them and save them, and we don’t think twice as our subconscious sucks these photos up to save them for later.

Later, we look through our own photos and think, “Do I really look like that? Is my life really that boring?”

Your brain is firing off neurons left and right, exhaustingly comparing you to someone you saw on Instagram earlier.

This problem begins and ends with self perception, but how do we confront ourselves about it?

Like most people my age, I used face-altering filters on Snapchat. I abused the infamous dog filter. I scrolled and scrolled through my ‘selfies’ until I reached the perfect one. I snapped, saved and sent. I am not ashamed of this behavior, but I am ashamed of how I have allowed it to alter the perception of my face.

I will open up FaceTime and move the phone around until I am satisfied with the lighting and with what I see before I place the call. Then, rigidly, I stay put, constantly worried that they will see a bad side of me and think I’m ugly. This deeply affects me because I cannot clearly remember a time when I did not feel self-conscious in front of a camera.

In researching, I had a recurring thought: How much time do we actually spend on our phones? How much time out of our week is spent scrolling and consuming? If I were to guess mine, I would probably lowball it to make myself feel better—and I wouldn’t be alone in this behavior. New research from two British psychologists shows that our guesses—these lowball offers— were only about half of what we really are spending on our phones.

This leads to an important question: Are we addicted to our phones? What is an addiction, if not a repeated behavior? The idea of texting while driving in itself is idiotic, but the underlying point is that we are hardwired to check out phones; it is habitual.

A lot of us can’t go thirty minutes without checking our phones, even if that thirty minutes happens to be when we’re driving, or during dinner with friends, or in the middle of a lecture.

As harmless as the act of periodically checking social media may seem, there is a lot going on under the surface. Psychology Today says that, “Dopamine contributes to feelings of pleasures and satisfaction as part of the reward system, the neurotransmitter also plays a part in addiction.”

So, when the little red heart appears in the corner of our screen, we get a little rush of happiness. According to research published by Harvard Medical School, this same chemical is released when a gambler pulls the slot machine handle, or someone takes a drag of a cigarette. Engaging in these behaviors modifies our brain chemistry. Literally speaking, our moods and our reactions are neurological. That takes some of the mysticism and illusion out of social media.

Could thinking about our reactions help us in the mental battle between disconnecting social media life from real life?

Where and when did I learn this behavior? Am I alone in it?

I find myself retracing my formative years. Did it begin with watching beautiful Miley Cyrus change into Hannah Montana? Or did it begin before that? With again, these already beautiful women being altered to become princesses? Like most millennials (for reference, I am 23), I grew up in front of a television, camera, and a computer.

We were raised in the generation of selfies, of posts, of likes, of measuring “likes” to worth. “Likes” being the invisible thumbs up and hearts we send to each other to show we care and we saw it, so, here take this. We were shown that a “good” post garnished a lot of likes and a “bad” post received none.

We were never given the rules and layouts for good posts, so we tried blindly to appease our masses, failed and repressed these failures. We saw people around us figuring it out and becoming successful, which only led us further down the hole. “Likes” turned into real compliments, easily dolled out and easily embedded into our heads.

Comparison is never a conscious behavior; our subconscious is rooted deeply into us and rules how we behave. Comparison is not conscious until we make it so.

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