27. Is social media corrupting your brain?

This week we discuss the psychology of social media: how it controls our behaviours, social comparison and the what makes tiktok so addictive.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties,
the podcast where we talk through some of the big
life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they
mean for our psychology. Hi, Hello, welcome all. Here's the
question we're asking ourselves this week. Let's jump right into it.

(00:27):
Is social media rotting your brain? And all? The answer
is yes, there you go. End of episode Just kidding.
This week we are going to discuss the consequences of
social media in our twenties and the absolute chokehold it
has over so many of our lives. I think social

(00:49):
media has just recently, in the last decade or two,
become part of people's daily activities. Many of us spend
hours each day on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok and other
popular social media sites. Hours hours of our lives detached
from the real from the real world, from what is

(01:12):
actually happening, you know, connected but not really. There's so
much to discuss when we talk about these platforms. We're
going to consider the issues of social comparison and presentation
to addiction. We're going to talk about exogenous depression caused
by excessive social media usage. How the design of social

(01:34):
media is highly intentional and deliberate to capture of much
of our attention as possible, based on an understanding of
how our brains work, how our brains process social information,
how these platforms are attuned to tribal networks, and the
matter by which dopamine controls every single one of our actions. TikTok.

(01:58):
We're going to talk about, TikTok, why are those short
videos so hard to pull away from? And why it's
probably not your fault that you find yourself in the
TikTok deep dive or black hole of content so much
that we're talking about today, So let's just jump right
in and answer some of those questions. Humans have been

(02:22):
evolving for thousands of years, and many, if not all,
of our current anatomical features and processes, like our limbic
system and our dopamine centers, they have adapted from the
survival priorities of pre human and I guess human ancestors.
And there are a couple of ways that this kind

(02:42):
of evolutionary idea is so important when we consider how
dominating social media is in our lives these days. In particular,
our brains are hardwired towards tribal networks, as this was
kind of the best method for organizing members of a
group to ensure survival in the past. Humans are adapted

(03:05):
to be highly social, and despite platforms like Instagram, like
Facebook being created to help humans connect, social media deliberately
exploit psychological features of our social brains andgeric systems to
mean that we keep going back to receive the reward

(03:27):
of feeling like we are part of a broader group
and connected to others, even if it's perhaps not true,
or even if it's just through a screen. As a
result of that, I guess our social media uses has
just rapidly increased in the past five years, I'd say
five to ten years, and some researchers have even found
reasons to believe that our brains have experienced the kind

(03:51):
of rapid evolution that we never see. There's been these
massive changes to our dopamine systems, our signapses, they of
certain lobes in children and in young adults that have
been noticed since the introduction of social media, changes that
would normally take generations entire generations to show up. In

(04:13):
the past. Social media it evolved. It has evolved beyond
a platform that connects users, but that's not the main
purpose anymore. It's now a significant distraction from daily life,
and many of us prioritize scrolling our feeds or do
it counterintuitively without even wanting to, and the negative impacts

(04:34):
that have emerged from that are just endless. I'm sure
you've experienced that yourself, the use of social media as
a distraction, how it removes value from the moment, seeing
the world through what we can post to receive attention
as a way of connection, rather than seeing the world
through actually kind of enjoying the moment. So to begin,

(04:58):
we are going to examine how social media platforms like TikTok,
like Instagram have been designed in a very particular and
deliberate manner to consume a user. That's you, the user. Okay,
So here's the basis of social media addiction, or at
least attraction or attention. Evolutionary psychologists like we talked about

(05:20):
have observed that prehuman ancestral groups who had greater social
connections were more likely to survive because they had greater
access to food, because they could divide labor, there was
security in numbers, and they had more mating partners, successful
social interactions, and the neurotransmitters that are released during these

(05:40):
interactions can be one of the most fulfilling stimuli for
humans because of the survival benefits of maintaining a large
social network in the past, that instinctual drive towards maintaining
expansive networks and groups has survived the evolutionary process. It's
still here today. Modern day humans, you and me right

(06:02):
now still place great value in an expanse of social
network because it's hardwired into our genetic material and certain
drives that create our lives, and social media naturally exploits
that tribal instinct. It says it in the name social media.
I don't think I'm really converting anything new with that,

(06:24):
but it's really interesting to think about how what once
emerged as something that was social, something that was meant
to cater to our need for connection, has actually created
perhaps more disconnection than previously. So let's do a quick
a quick history, lesson fun fact trivia time. So a
lot of people think that the first social media platform

(06:45):
was MySpace. That's not correct. It was this thing called
six degrees and it was created in nineteen ninety seven.
So six degrees kind of relating to that idea of
six degrees of separation and it essentially connected users with ends,
kind of like what MySpace did after that or what
Facebook did after MySpace. So the premise of social media

(07:06):
was and it continues to be, engaging audiences and connecting
people online whilst accumulating profits through methods like ad revenue,
capitalism and psychology kind of mixing to create the greatest profits,
I guess. And if a site captures more of your
attention and you spend more time on it, the more

(07:27):
ads they can run and the more they can receive
from this income stream, so they have an incentive to
capture as much of your finite attention and time as possible.
So since this platform, six Degrees first launched, more platforms
have obviously been created for different needs or kind of
the same one though, but in different ways, and many

(07:47):
people have become so engrossed by this virtual world that
they suffer from an addiction to these platforms which hijack
not only their social kind of brain, but their reward
systems as well. And these digital kind of technologies as well.
Like our smartphones become more integrated with everyday life, social
media is becoming highly proficient at capturing our attention whilst

(08:11):
kind of producing a global shift, a massive shift and
how people gather information and connect with each other. No
wonder we're seeing these huge changes in our brain formation.
Social media, let's not kid ourselves. It has been specifically
designed to be addictive. It exploits psychological processes to not

(08:33):
only engage users, but to promote addictions. So in twenty
and seventeen, the ex president of Facebook, Sean Parker, if
you've watched The Social Network the movie, it's played by
Justin Timberlake ill, but Sean Parker, Facebook president, he confirmed
that the creators of Facebook deliberately tried to exploit a

(08:54):
vulnerability in human psychology when designing Facebook, with the objective
of consuming as much time and attention as possible or
making the platform as addictive as possible. So one feature
in particular that he kind of cites that they created
to achieve this damaging objective was like the like button. Parker,

(09:15):
this ex president man he stated, in kind of like
a public announcement or a public outing against Facebook, that
the like button it trains users to receive a little
dopamine hit from this feature, as it brings a sense
of social validation and encourages users to engage for longer.

(09:36):
Same with the life button on Instagram. Social media, it
has the ability then to both capture and scatter your
attention because with a simple kind of refresh, there's not
only constant new information at your fingertips, but constant possibilities
for validation. And the true drivers of our attachment to
social media are the hyper social environments that they offer.

(09:59):
Very methods are used and very successful in keeping our
attention because of this innate need for social validation. So
when a person uses social media and posts, you know,
a picture or a status, or a video or a reel,
they receive a like, They receive positive social feedback and

(10:20):
a dopamine hit from a brain from the brain. So,
according to the study by Harvard University, a very big
name social networking, it triggers the same region of your
brain that ignites when you use addictive substances. So this
rewards the behavior and perpetuates the social media habits that
we see these days. The instantaneous gratification from an immediate

(10:43):
release of dopamine that is the basis for addiction and
why you can't stop scrolling, why you can't look away.
So variably rewarding users with stimuli, so likes, notification comments,
that's what keeps you engaged with and companies understand what
causes those dopamine surges and lulls, So not just they're

(11:07):
not just interested in what piques your dopamine, but also
what reduces it, and it creates their product their platform
with those hijacking techniques in mind, that will trigger compulsion loops.
Follow with me here. So the like button, the social
validation features. It basically causes your brain to produce dopamine

(11:29):
and the companies can use that to create these compulsion loops.
The more our brain receives dopamine from social media, the
more the behavior of scrolling your feed, of visiting the
site is positively reinforced, and people crave that instant rush
of social affirmation from the dopamine release. The variable reinforcement

(11:50):
we mentioned earlier is really crucial to this equation. So
variable reinforcement remember that word or that phrase. So in
social media marking, there is this idea called the hook model.
The hook model, it goes beyond reinforcing behavior, It creates habits,
and it spurs users to act on their own. We

(12:13):
no longer need marketing to make people use the platform
or to visit it. You no longer need to invest
in kind of expensive external stimuli or ads or kind
of motivators for people to scroll their feeds. So at
the heart of the hook model is a pretty powerful
cognitive quirk and it was first described by BF Skinner

(12:35):
in the nineteen fifties. BF Skinner huge name in psychology.
He's done so much for ideas of like conditioning and addiction.
And it's called the variable schedule of rewards or intermittent reinforcement.
So Skinner, he's most known for this kind of I
don't know, like an experiment, like a yeah, like a tool.

(12:57):
He's best known for these boxes that he kept rats
in and he observed that these rats they responded most
to random rewards. So basically these boxes were used by
Skinner to understand how we learn how humans learned by
using rats as like kind of proteotypes. And either he
punished them, he removed a negative stimulus, he provided a

(13:22):
positive stimulus, or he removed or he removed a positive stimulus.
So that creates the four types of reward and punishment
that we know, positive and negative reward and positive and
negative punishment. So the mice or the rats, they would
push or press a lever and sometimes they'd get a
small treat, other times they'd get a large treat, and

(13:42):
other times they get nothing at all. So, unlike the
rats in other boxes that when they press a lever
they would receive the same treat every time, the mice
that we're receiving this kind of variable reward seemed to
press this lever more compulsively, more excessively. They pressed it
even when they weren't hungry, and they became obsessed with it.

(14:04):
So humans, like the mice in Skinner's box, we crave predictability,
and we struggle to find patterns when none exist. So
variability is kind of the brain's cognitive nemesis, and our
minds they want to understand the cause and effect of
how things come to be, and we really can't understand

(14:24):
those ambiguous situations. So instead of leaving it, we kind
of become more obsessed with knowing the pattern of the reward,
and we become more engaged in receiving the reward because
we kind of have expectation. Now, So let's explain this
a bit further as to how these ambiguous situations kind

(14:49):
and kind of feed into variable rewards and addiction. So
variable rewards they keep the brain occupied because we want
to find out that cause and effect of when we're
going to receive something, and we become obsessed with it.
It removes our defenses and it removes our kind of
cognitive controls. And that's how you know, either the teacher

(15:12):
in this case, Skinner or social media platforms have the
opportunity to plant these seeds of new habits and these compulsions.
This is how social media gets to us. It doesn't
tell us when we might receive something we particularly like,
so we'll try and find that pattern ourselves, and therefore
we become integrated into the very technology that we are
addicted to. Because we're obsessed with it, we compulsively press

(15:35):
the lever to use that kind of mice example. It's
the same with platforms like TikTok now, but this platform
has added something extra special into the mix that has
already been used by other platforms, but has been especially
fine tuned on TikTok in particular. So what does TikTok

(15:59):
do well that other platforms also do but haven't quite
gotten the perfect formula? For algorithms? Algorithms they are such
astonishing tools for creating addictive platforms because they create a
virtual world that is perfectly curated to the things that
you like and the things that the platform now knows

(16:21):
you'll want to consume and come back to. So a
social media algorithm, it's a compilation of data and rules
that will make decisions almost for you about what you
see on a platform, the social media site. It creates
unique algorithms for every single person, every single user, which
means that no two people will have the exact same

(16:43):
social media news feeds. Besides issues of privacy, there's also
this issue of cognitive exploitation. By monitoring a user's online
behavior and harvesting their private data, they manipulate what they
can see online, and this is a form of manipulation
known as surveillance capitalism. These social media algorithms, they work

(17:06):
without any oversight, and they work twenty four seven to
keep the users addicted to liking and scrolling through endless
ads and content because although that variable reward is still present,
your overall experience with the app is likely to be
more pleasant because you're seeing the things that kind of
pertain to you. So the hijacking of our rewards system
that we've seen with variable reinforcement and with the addition

(17:29):
of things like the like button, it's furthered by this
neurological process called long term potentiation or LTP, so long
term potentiation. It's the process in which neural pathways that
are used frequently they become stronger. It's kind of the
opposite of use it or lose it. As the pathways
associated with social media use are exploited more frequently, they

(17:51):
become stronger, creating the compulsion. The more we open the app,
the stronger these links between our signaps is become. And
if you have an iPhone, you can actually see this
on your phone. You can see this compulsion that's kind
of operating separate from probably your own intentions. So take
a second now, grab your phone, and I want you

(18:12):
to go to the section of your settings that tells
you your screen time. I'm not worried about that. Scroll
down and you'll find this section called first used after pickup.
How many times after you pick up your phone has
the next thing you've done been open an app like Instagram,
Facebook or TikTok Okay. I'll be honest, I'm recording this

(18:33):
early in the morning and already I have forty total
pickups of my phone, and of those fifteen after Instagram,
almost half. I don't even get notifications for Instagram. It
has become a compulsion. The site doesn't even need to
advertise to me. It doesn't even need to motivate me.
I have been overtaken by the hook model, whereby they

(18:56):
no longer have to persuade me to use the app.
I do it, not truly without even consciously thinking about it.
I don't even think about it anymore. And long term
potentiation is responsible for those behaviors, because those kind of
cause and effect behaviors I have. Okay, I see my phone,
I pick it up. My first thought is social media.

(19:17):
It's become, like I said at habit, because I've frequently
checked it in the past, and I continue to do
it because I'm craving that reward, but also because the
more I use it, the stronger those synaptic connections that
associate my phone with the dopamine I get from social media.
The stronger those connections become. And this exploitation has obviously

(19:39):
raised some pretty serious debate over whether or not social
media should be regulated, or at least algorithms should be regulated.
You know. The other thing that really scares me about
social media, particularly Instagram for me, is that if someone
asked me to remember, to recount, to recall anything I'd
seen on Instagram from the past, I wouldn't be able

(20:01):
to tell you the details of a singular post. So
I spent at least probably an hour or two a
day on that platform. Those hours are completely empty. I
have absolutely no memory of what it was that even
captured my attention or anything I saw. I'm completely blind
to those hours, and that's really terrifying. Before we talk

(20:21):
about even social comparison, I want to explain a bit
more about what social media does to our neural networks.
We've talked about dopamine, we've talked about long term potentiation,
but of course there's more to it, so heaps of
studies have been done it. It's really interesting in terms
of social psychology, yes, but also biological psychology and how

(20:43):
our brains have adapted around this new important institution of
our daily lives, because that's what it is. Social media
is an institution. So heavy social media uses they and that. Okay,
I'm just going to say heavy social media is an
hour or more I'm guessing all of us meet that criteria.
So these users, they perform worse on cognitive tests, especially

(21:06):
those that require attention and the ability to multitask. So
compared to moderate or light social media users, heavy users
we need to exert more effort to maintain focused or
to maintain focus. Yet to remain focused or maintain focus
in the face of distraction, and researchers have hypothesized that

(21:29):
since social media is easily accessible and competes for our
attention with the promise of perpetual new content, heavy social
media users they actually become less able to ignore distraction
in general. Not only does this lead to pour a
cognitive performance, but it actually strengths the part of the
brain associated with maintaining attention. So the ability of the

(21:53):
brain to change is called neuropla plasticity neuroplasticity, and it
has a big effect on your attention and cognitive function.
Research it also shows that heavy social media use is
linked with memory deficits, especially in your transactive memory. This
kind of memory involves deciding what kind of information is

(22:15):
important to store in your brain and what kind of
information can kind of been kind of be outsourced. So
social media's central feature, the sharing and storing of your experiences,
may actually be altering which memories you keep and which
ones you don't. So when one study the participants they
were asked to record an experience using their notes or
social media, and the other groups who are asked to

(22:36):
simply experience the event without recording it, without noting anything
down and at the end of the study, those who
had recorded or shared the event performed worse and showed
more memory deficit than those who had just experienced the
event organically without recording it. So externalizing an experience putting

(22:56):
it on social media, it worsened the participants memory because
their brains, they've kind the brain has kind of received
this message that they didn't need to hold onto the
information anymore. It was stored elsewhere. So consequently, not only
did the individuals lose some memory of their original experience,
but they also experience longer term deficits in the size
and functions of their brain if they use social media

(23:19):
again and again and again, and these consequences they're like
genuinely terrifying, especially when you consider young kids now who
are going to grow up with social media present in
their lives from day dot from day one. You know,
I kind of feel grateful, at least me, you probably
if you're in your twenties, if you're over the age
of twenty. At least we kind of got a chance

(23:41):
to have some years without it, back when our parents
were just kind of worried about the TV and not
this like evil capitalist invention at our fingertips that is
individually curated to be addictive just for you. We've talked
about addiction now, we've talked about the New York connections

(24:02):
and how social media kind of changes them, how it
manipulates them. But another result of trapping users in this endless,
kind of scrolling loop of content is that it can
lead to social comparison. It's perhaps one of the biggest
things that people you know, scared about or talk about
when they talk about social media. I don't know what

(24:23):
it has been about my life recently, but I have
been so weak to this, so weak to social comparison.
And it's often thinks like Instagram that are the catalyst
every single time. You know, people's perfectly created lives with
their endless cycle of friends and gorgeous outfits and money
to spend on restaurants. I'm envious. But then I'll have

(24:44):
people turn around to me and say things like, oh,
you know, you look so happy now, you're flourishing, you
look like you're having so much fun. And the only
thing that they have to judge that by is what
I post on social media. These people they haven't seen
me for months, and the impression they get is that
my life is going really well. Let me just say

(25:04):
that has not been the case. Like I had my
heartbroken recently, I had someone really hurt me, like really bad,
and have just been at such a low point in
terms of my self esteem and sense of value. You know,
in the past six months, I've lost countless friends as
I've moved and evolved and shifted into this new version

(25:25):
of myself. I spent like days alone, hours kind of
crying over this person who was never going to love
me back. And I've spent hours looking at other people's
lives through social media thinking that they have everything going
for them whilst they're thinking the same thing about me.
And it's kind of a bit of a fucked game.
It's a facade. We choose those best moments when we

(25:48):
are smiling or watching a sunset, out partying with friends
and the other ninety nine percent that's unaccounted for, but
we judge people on the one percent, And those comments
that I got from a few people actually just really
made me realize that idea so deeply for the first time,
even though it's common knowledge. You know, we do only

(26:09):
share the best moments of our lives, but that becomes
the source of so much social comparison, and you don't
really realize it until you feel it personally, until you
see it. So when presented with the curated feeds of
other people, we are vulnerable to frequent and pretty extreme
upwards social comparison, which can lead to a number of
other negative side effects, some of which I've talked about,

(26:31):
you know, the erosion of self esteem, a depressed mood,
and decrease life satisfaction overall. So social comparison it's a
form of sociological self esteem where we derive our sense
of self through comparing ourselves with others. Many studies have
argued that people have a tendency to make downwards social
comparisons with those who are worse off or less skilled

(26:53):
than them, and this raises your self esteem obviously at
the expense of that other person, and then Conversely, we
have upwards social comparisons and this reduces social that this
reduces self esteem, and it's more likely with social media.
That's when you kind of you see someone who is
more skilled than you, doing better than you, happier than
you can you kind of see where we're going with this.

(27:14):
So there's this guy, his name's Alfred Admer, and he
said to be human is to have inferiority feelings, and
in the age of social media, this is potentially definitely
heightened and amplified. Social comparison in the real world usually
involves the self, you and a few other people, whilst

(27:37):
in the digital universe of social media, you're kind of
presented with limitless potential to compare yourself to other people limitless.
There's thousands and research predating social media. It estimated that
the average person you know back in the nineties, back
in the nineteen hundreds had perhaps ten to twenty close

(27:59):
relations chips and maybe one hundred and fifty people in
their wider social circle. So that includes you know, like
friends of your parents, colleagues, people you kind of know.
Whereas now that number of wider social acquaintances because of
social media, it's up to around four hundred. So whilst

(28:20):
social connection offers people heaps of positive opportunities, the more connections,
the more opportunities there is for social comparison. And that's
what social media does to us. It creates that upwards
social comparison that makes you feel shit about yourself. Think
about this in the context of our twenties. This is
such a formative period for our self esteem, for how

(28:42):
we view ourselves, how we view others, and our identity.
And we spend hours of our daily life in an
online environment of comparison. And the consequences of that aren't
you just felt today and tomorrow? But they're life long.
And here's another related issue. This is the issue of
self presentation and identity. So social media, we've said it

(29:05):
affords you, the user, the ability to carefully curate and
control how you present yourself to your audience and people
you know, you and I. We generally choose to show
an ideal image on social media and in social psychology,
two major motives are believed to influence this positive self presentation.
They are self enhancement and self verification. Self enhancement this

(29:28):
motivates people to present an enhanced positive self image and
to seek favorable self relevant information. Self verification, on the
other hand, drives people to verify or to maintain stability
of their pre existing self views. So that first one
is about presenting this enhanced view and seeing whether people

(29:48):
like it, and the other is maintaining how you feel
about yourself now and making sure that you continue to
be validated for that. Self presentation theory suggests that people
they have to discretion as to how they present themselves
in a variety of performances daily performances, and social media
is one such performance. So the hyper personal model of

(30:10):
behavior argues that with that self presentation, that ability to
present who you want to be, even if it's not real,
that is really promoted by computer mediated or social media
mediated communication, and that has advantages over face to face
communication and how we optimize our self presentation. Think about

(30:35):
this a bit deeper. It's pretty obvious, but really think
about it. If you see someone in your daily life,
you know they're going to see your flaws. Maybe you
like have a pimple. You know they're going to see
the mistakes that you mean, They're going to see that
you're not perfect. But you have the opportunity to screen
those parts of you out on social media, you have

(30:56):
the opportunity to show yourself being incredibly happy when that
might not actually be the case. This isn't really our
true selves, and we can use social media as a
shield for acknowledging not only who we truly are and
our true values, but it's also destruction from what's truly
going on, because we can use that validation and self

(31:19):
enhancement to make us feel better, to make us seem
better to the people that we want to receive validation from,
to the people that we want to win press. Essentially,
you know, you're probably asking yourself, surely, this isn't very
good for our mental health. What are the chances you
would be correct? What gave it away? Time and time again.

(31:43):
Social media has been shown to promote negative experiences like
that feeling of inadequacy about your life and appearance is
because of upwards social comparison and a study by this
English author Primark found not primarch the store the person,
it found a link between the use of multiple social

(32:04):
media platforms and increase depression and anxiety symptoms in young
people age nineteen to thirty two. That's probably you, that's
my normal audience range. Nineteen to thirty two. And think
about that again. If you use social media platforms, it's
literally could potentially be making you more anxious, it could
be making you more depressed. From another angle, though, online

(32:26):
platforms may also have the potential to damage mental well
being through this promotion of unreasonable expectations about what you
look like and how you present social media, it's been
linked to poor self esteem and self image because of
the advent of image manipulation on photo sharing platforms. You know,

(32:48):
you can download face tune and make yourself look amazing.
You can make yourself look skinnier, you can smooth out
your skin, you can make your skin look lowy. And
it's this idea of the idealized body image that has
been promoted by social media that arguably has the most
dental detrimental effect to self esteem and image, especially that
of young people. The twenty four seventh circulation of easibly

(33:13):
viewable manipulated images promotes and entrenches those unrealistic expectations of
how you should look and how you should behave think
about all those photos you know of Kim Kardashian that
people like, you know, screenshot or like repost, and then
you find out that they're edited. Of course they are.

(33:34):
No one looks like that, like have you ever seen
anyone who looks like that? No? No, like, you don't.
And when these expectations we have for what we should
look like based on what we see on social media,
when they're not met, the impact on self esteem is
so damaging and it's really disturbing. You know. There was
this study run by the Australian government, like the Health Department,

(33:57):
and it found that ninety percent night out of ten
young women that they interviewed, and they interviewed quite a
few say they were unhappy with how they look and
a big part of that was because of social media. Obviously,
the rise of social media, it's incredibly multifaceted. It's you know,

(34:20):
we can't explain it simply, but the statistics they do
suggest that it's strongly correlated or at least associated with anxiety, loneliness, depression,
social comparison. And I've been feeling that, you know myself,
I'm sure you have as well. Whether it is you know,
just a causal kind of thing based on the fact

(34:40):
that there is other stuff shown on our feeds that
could be depressing us, like war and terror and awful things.
It's going to have to you know, time will kind
of tell, and there is so much policy research into
this and so much kind of talk around regulation with
the social media industry today as well. A lot of

(35:01):
what we've talked about, it's probably not new to you.
And there are definitely some elements of social media that
are really i would say beneficial and pretty incredible when
you think back. For example, you know, the war in Ukraine.
At the moment, we would know so much less than
we do if people didn't have the ability to share
their experiences on the ground with people across the world.

(35:24):
This is the same with other wars and revolutions. Since
social media kind of became a thing the Me Too movement,
election mobilization social media, it's also a source of connection
and information sharing that may not be accessible elsewhere or
in another manner. Another thing that kind of comes to

(35:45):
mind is how social media can be used to help
educate people about movements like black Lives Matter and spread
awareness around things. You know, I think about when that
girl went missing in wa that was all over social media.
That's definitely something to be positive about. That instantaneous communication platform,
and that's what it was meant to be at its

(36:06):
purest form, but it's really not that anymore. And although
there are some good things, all of these good things
are happening in a virtual environment that is deliberately creating addiction,
and it's hijacking our synaptic connections and our dopamine centers
to essentially make money for big organizations through ad revenue,

(36:26):
and it's kind of running our minds and changing the
very structure of our brains, like I said, and that's
obviously not going to change anytime soon. Like every year,
there's just more and more ways that our society kind
of caters towards social media, like TikTok now is a
marketing platform. I was actually thinking this the other day,

(36:47):
Like I don't see billboards for movies anymore. I don't
see like ads in the paper, like I don't see
like magazine articles about it. I see it on TikTok
or I see it on Instagram. And that's how I know,
Like you know, the Batman came out or something like that.
Those are the kind of things that I'm talking about
of how it's changed how we relate to the world
and communicate and how we get our knowledge. Anyways, I

(37:10):
hope that you enjoyed this episode. I had a lot
of fun researching this. I learned so much like and
I think, especially with the social comparison ideas we've been
talking about, it's really at least inspired me to take
some time off social media, to turn off notifications, to
kind of limit how much I use it, how dependent

(37:31):
I am on it, how much I posed, how much
I share. I just kind of spend more time in
the present moment doing the things I love. Like when
I was in Queensland recently, I would just try and
make a conscious effort to leave my phone in the
car when I was going to the beach, because I
noticed if I brought my phone, I would literally be
sitting there in front of some of the most beautiful

(37:53):
water and clearest guys a girl can find during Lenina,
and I would be on my phone and I wouldn't
even remember what was going on around me. And I
wouldn't remember what was going on on my phone either,
And you just kind of blind to your life in
that moment, aren't you, Eddie. How thank you for listening,
Thank you for subscribing if you have, if not your choice,

(38:13):
but please do it would be very lovely, and if
you feel called to leave a review on either Spotify
or Apple Podcasts, it's so lovely. I've been getting so
many reviews and it makes me so so happy, makes
me a very happy girl. So if you feel called
to do it, please do it. Takes a couple of seconds,
it makes my day. You'll feel good about yourself, unless

(38:36):
you want to stop using your phone as much because
of social media addiction, in which case, don't do it.
Stay away, but we'll be back next week. I'm going
to talk about love languages because that sounds exciting, right
and a friend of my one of my friends, and
I were discussing it the other day and I was like,
this is really interesting. I want to see whether there
is actually like research behind this, whether this is like legit.

(39:01):
So that's what we're going to be talking about next week.
Until then, we've got so many episodes on Spotify at
the moment. If you want to listen back and just
have a great week, enjoy your life, enjoy your enjoy
yourself in the moment, and turn off Instagram. It will
be good for you.