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Speaker 1: Are you looking for brand new episodes of a short
Speaker 1: how Stuff Works podcast that explains the everyday world around us,
Speaker 1: Then check out brain Stuff with me Christian Sager. New
Speaker 1: episodes hit every Monday and Wednesday on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify,
Speaker 1: or anywhere else you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey,
Speaker 1: welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is
Speaker 1: Robert Lamp and my name is Christian Seger. So we're
Speaker 1: recording this a week after the election here in the
Speaker 1: United States. Uh, and we're kind of reeling not just
Speaker 1: from the election, but from the social media reverberations around it.
Speaker 1: And so Robert and I were talking about it, and
Speaker 1: we said, you know, there's a lot of research. We
Speaker 1: see a lot of research fly across our screens about
Speaker 1: mental health and social media. Let's do a dive and
Speaker 1: figure out what we know so far about this, because
Speaker 1: it seems like a topic at least from my social
Speaker 1: media feeds, that people are interested in right now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, there's there's absolutely no escaping it, um, because
Speaker 1: here we are at the the tail end of s
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, just looking back on it, taking
Speaker 1: into account everything that sort of happened with social media.
Speaker 1: Let's say we had billions of tweets and Facebook status
Speaker 1: updates about the US election as they were happening. Yeah. No,
Speaker 1: I don't know about you, but like everything, I'm seeing everything.
Speaker 1: But I'd say a good fifty percent of the people
Speaker 1: in my feet are saying, like, sorry, I've got to
Speaker 1: take a step away from this. On top of this, uh,
Speaker 1: political activity and political inactivity. Um, you also have seen,
Speaker 1: of course, a lot of slanted and misinformed articles that
Speaker 1: have made the rounds, and that is something that is
Speaker 1: being covered in the media currently, How does uh, how
Speaker 1: does Facebook? How does Google as um uh as a
Speaker 1: as a as a manager of these different properties, as
Speaker 1: a curative of these properties, how does how do they
Speaker 1: factor into this equation? Um? You know, and and of
Speaker 1: course on top of that, we also had a really good,
Speaker 1: in a really depressing season of black Mirror. Just put
Speaker 1: it all in the perspective. But but you know, we
Speaker 1: we have to we come back to looking at social
Speaker 1: media and what its role is this thing that we've created,
Speaker 1: this thing that we use every every day. So how
Speaker 1: much of what we're feeling now? And uh and and
Speaker 1: these um, these opinions, these these emotions that are being expressed.
Speaker 1: How much of that can we blame on social media itself?
Speaker 1: How much of it is just what people have always felt? Uh?
Speaker 1: You know, it's just the immediate concern is always more pressing,
Speaker 1: more real, there's always more fire to it. So and
Speaker 1: you know, are we just are are we just blowing
Speaker 1: everything out of out of proportion and simply looking for
Speaker 1: forces to blame? Yeah? I think, uh, well, we're gonna
Speaker 1: really get into it with the research today. But I
Speaker 1: just like to say that I think that there's a
Speaker 1: certain amount of technological determinism that goes along with the
Speaker 1: idea that it's social media's fault quote unquote. UM. And
Speaker 1: from the research, the big lesson that I learned, and
Speaker 1: maybe you know at the end we'll revisit this is
Speaker 1: that it's not the medium, it's how we approach the
Speaker 1: medium and what we bring to it. Um. And before
Speaker 1: we start, I think, I think, like I just want
Speaker 1: to share a little bit with the audience. I have
Speaker 1: personal social media policies already in place. I've talked about
Speaker 1: these on other shows before. I probably talked about them
Speaker 1: on here before. Um, this one's a little weird. I
Speaker 1: only read Facebook, my Facebook personal stream if I'm in
Speaker 1: a bathroom. Yeah, I that's my My policy is, I
Speaker 1: don't want to read it at my desk. I don't
Speaker 1: want to read it if I'm in my living room
Speaker 1: or my bedroom, or if I'm on bus whatever. Uh,
Speaker 1: it stays in the bathroom and and whatever it brings
Speaker 1: up for me, if it's anger or sadness or frustration
Speaker 1: or even happiness or whatever, I keep it there. Um.
Speaker 1: Now that's for personal stuff. We always advocate at the
Speaker 1: end of every episode. Hey, visit us on social media
Speaker 1: My job is to look at social media for stuff
Speaker 1: to blow your mind and how stuff works in our
Speaker 1: other brands. Yeah. I wish I could step away from Facebook, really,
Speaker 1: but it's this thing I gotta do every morning. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I curate all my feeds, meaning for both Twitter
Speaker 1: and Facebook. So on Facebook, if i'm quote friends with
Speaker 1: a person and they're posting things that upset me, then
Speaker 1: I'll do the I forget what the terminology is hide
Speaker 1: or uh. I basically make it so I can't see
Speaker 1: their stuff, but I don't say to them I hate you,
Speaker 1: I don't want to be friends. And there's there's unfollowing,
Speaker 1: there's there's fighting, there's requestion to see the less of somebody.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's the That's the thing is that everyone engages.
Speaker 1: Unless you're just like a rare and novice user of
Speaker 1: say Facebook or Twitter or what have you. There's always
Speaker 1: a certain amount of curation. You're choosing who to follow,
Speaker 1: then you're choosing who to unfollow or hide. The algorithm
Speaker 1: on Facebook is U is accounting for your preferences and
Speaker 1: you're getting this custom stream of information and uh. On Twitter,
Speaker 1: I make use of lists tremendously. I mean, and I
Speaker 1: think I probably follow six hundred people on Twitter, and
Speaker 1: I actually follow less than a hundred people on Twitter
Speaker 1: because I have a list of what I actually look at.
Speaker 1: You know, I don't want to offend people by unfollowing
Speaker 1: them or you know, I use Twitter for networking. Uh
Speaker 1: you know, so sometimes if I'm seeing stuff that's just
Speaker 1: overwhelming me, I say, you know what, you don't need
Speaker 1: to be in the list anymore. I'm gonna You're gonna
Speaker 1: take a break from you for a little bit. Um
Speaker 1: And all this is, you know, in my posting, I
Speaker 1: just try to share things that I enjoy about the
Speaker 1: world or communicate with people who are in my areas
Speaker 1: of interest. Podcasting, we talk a lot about horror on
Speaker 1: the show, things like that, and especially with people who
Speaker 1: are physically far away. I mean, I won't deny social
Speaker 1: media has been a great tool for me to meet
Speaker 1: people within our field and to make friends. Um. So, again, like,
Speaker 1: there are problems here, and we're gonna talk about a
Speaker 1: lot of problems that have been found with the research
Speaker 1: in this, But I don't want to be technologically deterministic
Speaker 1: and say Facebook is bad. Yeah, yeah, I mean I
Speaker 1: love Facebook as a as a as a method of
Speaker 1: sharing pictures of my my son, pictures of my family,
Speaker 1: keeping up with with with with friends and family members
Speaker 1: that are far away. Uh. And that's probably what I
Speaker 1: use it for Facebook for the most personally, that and
Speaker 1: just sharing of things that relate to my interests. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then here at work, of course for stuff to
Speaker 1: blow your mind. We share our content. We we curate
Speaker 1: content that fits either our show brand or sort of
Speaker 1: the loose host brand. So if you follow our our
Speaker 1: our Facebook feed, you'll see a lot of stuff that's
Speaker 1: not really attributed. But if something's like a little more
Speaker 1: of a Christian thing or a little more Robert thing, etcetera,
Speaker 1: then you're gonna see that we've we've tagged it, or
Speaker 1: if the statement on is a little more in our
Speaker 1: individual boys usually try to put our initials or something
Speaker 1: like yeah yeah, But you know, it's basically comes to really,
Speaker 1: I guess my approach to all the very social media
Speaker 1: uses that I I use them as a way to
Speaker 1: share things that I think are pretty cool or I
Speaker 1: think are important. Yeah. I remember reading a blog post
Speaker 1: when smartphones first started becoming popular, and it was basically
Speaker 1: like a like a sort of guide for for newbies
Speaker 1: on like, what should you be posting to social media?
Speaker 1: You want to get involved in this, how do you
Speaker 1: do it? And you know, obviously we've gone awry since then,
Speaker 1: but it was basically, what throughout your day as you
Speaker 1: go throughout the world do you see that's wondrous that
Speaker 1: makes you laugh or that you find interesting or insightful
Speaker 1: or mean? Like, do you physically see something, take a
Speaker 1: picture of it, share that and that excites you. Or
Speaker 1: if you read an article that you think is insightful,
Speaker 1: share that something along those lines. That's and that that's
Speaker 1: for the most part, how I've always held it. I
Speaker 1: am absolutely guilty any stuff to blow your mind. Listeners
Speaker 1: who have followed me on Twitter know that I like
Speaker 1: a good presidential debate and I like to live tweet
Speaker 1: and make jokes during it that that I'm totally guilty
Speaker 1: of that. But you know, for the most part, I
Speaker 1: try to make it a curation of things that I
Speaker 1: find in the world that are great. One thing that
Speaker 1: really like about your social media feed is your wife's
Speaker 1: a photographer, and so there's always these gorgeous pictures of
Speaker 1: either your family or stuff that she's shooting out in
Speaker 1: the world. As you guys travel around. Yeah, yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: looking in that regard because the imagery is so important
Speaker 1: on social media. And even though I know less about
Speaker 1: photography and how to work the camera than virtually anybody
Speaker 1: I know, my wife does all that, and uh, we're
Speaker 1: able to get a good image out there. But you know,
Speaker 1: that's that kind of ties into a lot of what
Speaker 1: we're going to discuss today. It's the the image, the representation,
Speaker 1: the thing that you put out there. Because ultimately, what
Speaker 1: we're getting around to with all of this is that
Speaker 1: your social media presence is kind of a is a
Speaker 1: piece of you, but it is not the whole of you.
Speaker 1: It is a version of yourself. And then everything that
Speaker 1: you consume out there is a version of reality. So
Speaker 1: you have this creation of the subjective self, a creation
Speaker 1: of the subjective reality. And that is where we find
Speaker 1: ourselves here, Um at the close and the dawn. We're
Speaker 1: all performing ourselves in different ways. It always makes me
Speaker 1: think of um, the great monologue play actor, uh Spalding Gray.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you've ever listened to Spalding Gray's
Speaker 1: stuff before, but he would give these long, hour long
Speaker 1: monologues about events in his life and people felt like
Speaker 1: they knew him, they felt like he was their best friend.
Speaker 1: And he would say that person who you're listening to
Speaker 1: on stage, that's me, but that's not actually me. That's
Speaker 1: a performance of myself. And he committed suicide before social
Speaker 1: media really got big. So I would I would be
Speaker 1: curious to see how what his opinion of Facebook or
Speaker 1: Twitter would be, because I think that we're all kind
Speaker 1: of doing the same thing. Now. Yeah, I mean, I've
Speaker 1: I've read very compelling arguments that really even outside of
Speaker 1: social media, where none of us are a particular individual,
Speaker 1: where there's kind of this chorus of selves, right, with
Speaker 1: some with louder voices than others, some with with voices
Speaker 1: that are trailing off as we age, some with the
Speaker 1: voices that are growing louder um. But yeah, the idea
Speaker 1: that there's a particular you maybe doesn't even hold up
Speaker 1: in the real world or in social media. Yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: where that's that's I guess. Uh, this is the hippiest
Speaker 1: thing I'm gonna say on stuff to bile your mind.
Speaker 1: The beauty of humanity is where a myriad of identities.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, that on that note, let's let's move
Speaker 1: into a little bit let's uh, let's let's get into
Speaker 1: the meat of this episode and uh and discuss where
Speaker 1: we are with social media, where we what the research
Speaker 1: is saying. Okay, So, reportedly one in four people worldwide
Speaker 1: are on social media, and fort of online adults are
Speaker 1: using multiple social networking sites. That would include both of us.
Speaker 1: On average, Americans spend seven points six hours a month
Speaker 1: using social media. That sounds really low to me. I
Speaker 1: would think it would be more like three hours a
Speaker 1: day or something like that. There's a lot of of
Speaker 1: of using social media while you're doing everything everything else, right, Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: So I wonder if there's some misreporting going on there
Speaker 1: or something. I'm not quite sure. Um, sixty of American
Speaker 1: Facebook users logging daily, of them logging multiple times a day? Again, guilty,
Speaker 1: So I'm I'm even though I'm only doing it in
Speaker 1: the bathroom, it's multiple times a day. Uh. And a
Speaker 1: good starting point for this episode that I found was
Speaker 1: an article called Online Social Networking and Mental Health. It's
Speaker 1: written by a guy named Igor Pantic and it was
Speaker 1: published in the Journal of Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking.
Speaker 1: So it's two years old. It's a little there's there's
Speaker 1: a little bit more research that's been published out there,
Speaker 1: but it's basically a review of all the research on
Speaker 1: this topic that was done up until this point. Uh,
Speaker 1: And so we're gonna throw it in along with the
Speaker 1: research that we did for this episode. Before we get started, though,
Speaker 1: let's let's acknowledge it's difficult to assess social media's effects
Speaker 1: on mental health. Most of the studies that we're going
Speaker 1: to present here, they use an approach a methodology of
Speaker 1: correlation analysis. And remember, correlation doesn't actually equal causality. So
Speaker 1: for example, we can't tell if Facebook causes low self
Speaker 1: esteem or if people who already had low self esteem
Speaker 1: are more likely to use it. We just we can't
Speaker 1: tell which is the cause and which is the effect.
Speaker 1: But regardless, there seems to be a relation, as we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk about between low self esteem and Facebook. UM,
Speaker 1: So just keep that in mind as we're going through
Speaker 1: these studies. Yeah, and some of the studies we turned
Speaker 1: to as well, like they're they're more general media studies,
Speaker 1: so they may refer either to an earlier mode of
Speaker 1: the Internet they may or social media use. They may
Speaker 1: refer even to other media um services out there or
Speaker 1: platforms such as television, so as far as our social
Speaker 1: media age, the place where we're currently standing in the
Speaker 1: needed uh it it all started innocently enough. Um. The
Speaker 1: author Nicholas Carr has a wonderful article from Ian magazine
Speaker 1: published earlier this year titled The Worldwide Cage, in which
Speaker 1: he discusses the rise and in a sense, the spiritual
Speaker 1: fall of social media. So you know, he points back
Speaker 1: to the summer of two thousand five just being the
Speaker 1: time when when Web two point oh really arrived and
Speaker 1: and pump new life and money into my space flicker
Speaker 1: linked in in the recently launched Facebook. Car rights quote cyberspace,
Speaker 1: with its disembodied voices and ethereal avatars, seemed mystical from
Speaker 1: the start. It's unearthly vastness a receptacle for the spiritual
Speaker 1: yearnings and tropes of the US. What better way, wrote
Speaker 1: the philosopher Michael him in The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace,
Speaker 1: to emulate God knowledge than to create a virtual world
Speaker 1: constituted by bits of information and uh and Car points
Speaker 1: to an August two thousand five Wired magazine cover article
Speaker 1: that proclaimed the birth of a new world, empowered by
Speaker 1: what he referred to as the electricity of participation. And
Speaker 1: this is the quote from that particular article by Kevin Kelly.
Speaker 1: We are the web. The electricity of participation nudges ordinary
Speaker 1: folks to invest huge hunks of energy and time into
Speaker 1: making free Encyclopedia is creating public tutorials for changing a
Speaker 1: flat tire or cataloging the votes in the Senate. More
Speaker 1: and more of the web runs in this mode. One
Speaker 1: study found that of the web is commercial, the rest
Speaker 1: runs on duty or passion. So we have this, this
Speaker 1: this idea that the electricity of participation. It sounds great, right,
Speaker 1: it does sound great, but it's also from the from
Speaker 1: the inside of the media organization looking out. We know
Speaker 1: that this is something that comes around and around again,
Speaker 1: and if you google it you can learn more about it.
Speaker 1: User generated content is the term that is used to
Speaker 1: describe a lot of what Kevin Kelly is talking about here.
Speaker 1: Now everything from reviews on Amazon to comments on a
Speaker 1: YouTube video or every post on Facebook. Right, all of
Speaker 1: it is content that's generated that makes somebody money. But
Speaker 1: the but the people who are creating and the people
Speaker 1: who are writing it or posting it or taking these
Speaker 1: pictures or whatever, they're just doing it. Out of their participations.
Speaker 1: Electricity of participation. Um, And I can't tell you how
Speaker 1: many times as I've been working in this business. Every
Speaker 1: couple of years it comes back around again. What if
Speaker 1: we figured out some way to get the audience to
Speaker 1: make something and then we can make money off of it. Right? Well,
Speaker 1: and for me, the electricity of participation, it makes me think. Certainly,
Speaker 1: you can think of all sorts of positive modes of
Speaker 1: people getting involved, participating and creating great things, creating some
Speaker 1: of the most amazing things in human history. But there's
Speaker 1: also an electrictyer of participation to say, burning a witch
Speaker 1: or something. Sure so yeah, so in these cases, particularly
Speaker 1: what Kevin Kelly was talking about, it's really summoning up
Speaker 1: to like the best high minded futuristic ideas of what
Speaker 1: this could mean. But his car lays out these notions
Speaker 1: were essentially blown up by quote over indulged rich guys
Speaker 1: unquote who often went a bit cessational and forecasting the
Speaker 1: coming tech utopia. So they based their predictions on their
Speaker 1: early web, which was a smaller system and it was
Speaker 1: populated by a smaller sampling of society. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: I feel like the the ideal here was that like
Speaker 1: the Internet was supposed to become sort of like the
Speaker 1: modern era public coffee house, where there would be civilized
Speaker 1: discourse and critical thought and everybody would respect one another.
Speaker 1: And hey, it's early days yet, maybe it'll become that
Speaker 1: at some point. But the most part what we see
Speaker 1: is people trying to express really complicated ideas in a
Speaker 1: hundred and forty characters or less. I'll read one more
Speaker 1: quote from from car here, but I and and encourage
Speaker 1: everyone to check out the article in full length. I'll
Speaker 1: include a link to it on the landing page for
Speaker 1: this episode. But he said, the culture that emerged on
Speaker 1: the network and that now extends deep into our lives
Speaker 1: and psychees, is characterized by frenetic production and consumption. Smartphones
Speaker 1: have made medium machines of us all but little real
Speaker 1: empowerment and even less reflectiveness. It's a culture of distraction
Speaker 1: and dependency. Uh so here we are, Yeah, yeah, we
Speaker 1: really have. I mean, it's it's kind of crazy to
Speaker 1: me when I think back on how ingest a little
Speaker 1: over ten years, we've just gone from zero to sixty
Speaker 1: with social media. You know. Um, and this isn't to
Speaker 1: be like I'm older or anything like that, but like
Speaker 1: I remember getting my first iPod Touch and being like, oh,
Speaker 1: I can take this with me anywhere where there's WiFi.
Speaker 1: At the time, I had to have WiFi, and I
Speaker 1: can write an email, or I can take a picture
Speaker 1: or whatever, you know. And it was it literally was
Speaker 1: like a sci fi thing had happened and just dropped
Speaker 1: into my hand. And now it's just every day, you know.
Speaker 1: And it's not just every day for our generation or
Speaker 1: the generation before ours. I have friends who are baby
Speaker 1: boomers that are in their mid to late sixties, and
Speaker 1: they're using smartphones and Facebook and Twitter just as much
Speaker 1: as the rest of us. It's a misconception to think
Speaker 1: that it's just a tool for young people. Yeah, indeed,
Speaker 1: I mean it's it's everywhere. It's it's through throughout society
Speaker 1: and and the sci fi aspects of it. I can't
Speaker 1: help but think back to to Doone Frank Herbert's done,
Speaker 1: and the idea of the Butlerian Jahad, where people rose
Speaker 1: up against against machines again, and we're empowered by this
Speaker 1: notion that thou shalt not make machine and the likeness
Speaker 1: of the human mind, which was never completely fleshed out
Speaker 1: in Herbert's books. But it lends itself to different interpretations,
Speaker 1: either the straight up termin or robots are coming to
Speaker 1: get this idea, or machinery. Technology has changed the way
Speaker 1: that we think too much, has changed the way that
Speaker 1: we interact with the world, the way we process the world,
Speaker 1: and that there is something inhuman about it it should
Speaker 1: be rebelled against. Well, I'm gonna throw an idea out
Speaker 1: here and then maybe let's go to an ad break. Uh.
Speaker 1: This is based on a recent sci fi movie I saw.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to say the name because I don't
Speaker 1: want to spoil it, but we know there's a theory
Speaker 1: that language. Different languages change the way we think. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so if you think of social media as a language,
Speaker 1: then of course the way we think is going to
Speaker 1: be uh malleable around that absolutely. All right, Well on that.
Speaker 1: Now we're gonna take a quick break and we come back.
Speaker 1: We're gonna jump back into into the topic. We're gonna
Speaker 1: get into some more research, some more stats, and see
Speaker 1: where we are in terms of social media sanity. The
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Speaker 1: So in the late nineteen nineties, studies were originally published
Speaker 1: that indicated that the internet's use had general effects on
Speaker 1: our social relationships and our participation in community life. The
Speaker 1: findings here were that increased time spent online related to
Speaker 1: a decline in communication with family members, as well as
Speaker 1: a reduction of the internet's user or the internet users
Speaker 1: social circle, and all of this led back to depression
Speaker 1: and loneliness. Let's step back from this for a second, though,
Speaker 1: and evaluate these early studies weren't able to take into
Speaker 1: account the new ways in which humans were creating communication
Speaker 1: and social relationships outside of real life. Uh. And some
Speaker 1: of these studies really read to me like a long
Speaker 1: history of academia's phobia of new media when it first
Speaker 1: comes up. Think of television, think of comic books, even right,
Speaker 1: all of them had this backlash when they had a
Speaker 1: urgent popularity. Now, for instance, these studies refer to social
Speaker 1: media interactions as being shallow and unable to replace every
Speaker 1: day face to face communication. I agree that they can
Speaker 1: often be shallow, but there's also a possibility for meaningful,
Speaker 1: deep communication there that might not be facilitated in real life,
Speaker 1: especially for some people who maybe have real life social anxiety. Yeah,
Speaker 1: or you're you're you know, you're you find yourself in
Speaker 1: an area where like minded individuals are not necessarily there,
Speaker 1: or or individuals who maybe um have a philosopher have
Speaker 1: ideas that are beneficial to your identity. Um. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: I always have to remind myself, you know, it's we
Speaker 1: shouldn't forget that there was There was this time not
Speaker 1: long ago, when there was this definite weird otherness to
Speaker 1: online society and relationships. Like I remember not to sound
Speaker 1: old or to sound like I'm trying to make myself
Speaker 1: sound like this was you know, asked, Yeah, yeah, but
Speaker 1: you know, like what ten years ago or so or
Speaker 1: more like the MySpace era. Uh. You know, I remember
Speaker 1: when you you maybe were less inclined to mention that
Speaker 1: you met your significant other online because that would would
Speaker 1: be kind of weird, Like that the kind of thing
Speaker 1: you would in the best case scenario, you might make
Speaker 1: an amusing rom com about it. But it's like what
Speaker 1: you're meeting people online and dating them? Uh, there was
Speaker 1: a weirdness in discussing online friends versus real friends, like
Speaker 1: and and maybe even processing it, like coming to terms
Speaker 1: with the fact. And I've certainly been there where like
Speaker 1: the the there have been times in my life where
Speaker 1: I feel like the online relationships and discussions I'm having
Speaker 1: we're definitely more meaningful than than the ones I was
Speaker 1: having in the real world. Yeah I had, I don't know.
Speaker 1: It's a profound experience with this. Uh. That definitely changed
Speaker 1: how I approached electronic media mediated communication, which was I was.
Speaker 1: I am a recovering World of Warcraft addict, and I've
Speaker 1: talked about this on on our sister podcast here Stuff
Speaker 1: of Life before with Tracy V. Wilson Um. We both
Speaker 1: played World of Warcraft. I replaced my social relationships with
Speaker 1: World of Warcraft when I moved to Atlanta because I
Speaker 1: didn't know anybody, and my wife and I would spend
Speaker 1: I would say, eight to nine hours a day on
Speaker 1: it um and the people who were on that with
Speaker 1: us were our friends, and that was where we had
Speaker 1: social relationships and we talked about what was going on
Speaker 1: in the real world and and it was and I
Speaker 1: knew people who were all who were even deeper into
Speaker 1: it than I was, and they would say things to
Speaker 1: me like I like this better than the real world.
Speaker 1: I would rather be in here. And so we would
Speaker 1: remember all the articles that were coming out around that
Speaker 1: time of like like I believe that there was one
Speaker 1: pretty infamous World of Warcraft player who died and they
Speaker 1: had a funeral for this person in the game, hundreds
Speaker 1: of thousands of avatars all showed up in this one
Speaker 1: location and maybe crash the server or something like that. Uh.
Speaker 1: And I have to say that during that time I
Speaker 1: was depressed and was certainly addicted to that game, especially
Speaker 1: like when I read through the research for today's episode,
Speaker 1: I recognized behaviors in myself from that era. Uh. That
Speaker 1: doesn't mean like I was like, oh, I'm never gonna
Speaker 1: play video games again, you know it could we talk
Speaker 1: all the time on the show about video games and
Speaker 1: stuff like that. But but immersing myself like that, the
Speaker 1: way I did it, it wasn't healthy. So do you
Speaker 1: feel like it was? It was more of a detriment
Speaker 1: than a coping mech And because because you can, I
Speaker 1: can also see like you could do the spin on
Speaker 1: it where you could say, hey you it was a
Speaker 1: kind of a lonely time and this was a social
Speaker 1: um and biblical cord to connect you to like a
Speaker 1: social existence. Yeah, it was both. Frankly, I mean like
Speaker 1: it was it was one way to connect me with
Speaker 1: people I had just moved to a new city where
Speaker 1: I didn't know all to people. But then at the
Speaker 1: same time, it was also like the the how do
Speaker 1: I put this? World of Warcraft is a really good
Speaker 1: job of stringing a carrot along in front of your face,
Speaker 1: so you you have to keep playing right, And sometimes
Speaker 1: it became outside of the social relationships. It was just
Speaker 1: like I have to be on to do the thing.
Speaker 1: I can't miss the thing. Uh, And man, did I
Speaker 1: see a lot of human beings have meltdowns in that game?
Speaker 1: So uh, it's just it's interesting. I mean, also, if
Speaker 1: you if you go and look, I'm sure there's probably
Speaker 1: a hundred dissertations that are written about social communication and
Speaker 1: World of Warcraft. But that's just my personal experience with it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't have any personal experience with World of Warcraft,
Speaker 1: but I've certainly turned to games at times, like I
Speaker 1: remember when the first SIMS game came out. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: was that like kind of a an unemployed, un unguided
Speaker 1: phase in my life. I want to say, it was
Speaker 1: like the it came out like the one of the
Speaker 1: summers after I graduated high school, and I just wasn't
Speaker 1: sure what I was doing. But you could go in
Speaker 1: and play the SIMS game, and it was It got
Speaker 1: surreal and depressing pretty quickly when you realize you're sending
Speaker 1: your fake people out for job interviews and they're buying houses,
Speaker 1: and then you're like, God, what am I doing? And this?
Speaker 1: What am I listening to? This this awful ambient piano music. Um,
Speaker 1: do you want to hear a really messed up story
Speaker 1: about the SIMS that will probably make you think less
Speaker 1: of me? Okay? And that goes for you too, audience.
Speaker 1: When I played the SIMS, I got addicted to it
Speaker 1: for about a month or so. And what I would
Speaker 1: do is I was in a job that I was
Speaker 1: very unhappy and at the time, and I used the
Speaker 1: SIMS to construct my office uh floor plan exactly like
Speaker 1: my office was. And then I would put SIMS in
Speaker 1: who are all of my coworkers, including my boss, who
Speaker 1: we all really hated at the time, and they gave
Speaker 1: them personality attributes that were similar to what their's were
Speaker 1: in real life. And then I would occasionally do things
Speaker 1: like my boss would, you know, go into the bathroom
Speaker 1: and I would freeze time and some put a put
Speaker 1: a cement wall in front of the door. And and
Speaker 1: lock him in there for a week with no food,
Speaker 1: and that came fed into every like dark fantasy, you know,
Speaker 1: and I would just sit there and and laugh at it,
Speaker 1: and it was cathartic. But it's also looking back on it,
Speaker 1: that's some that's some messed up stuff. Yeah. I certainly
Speaker 1: can relate to some of that with some of the
Speaker 1: Grand Theft auto games. I guess the Vice City when
Speaker 1: that came out, I remember spending way too much time
Speaker 1: in that. And it's not always being a you know,
Speaker 1: like a positive expression of self. Yeah, this is very
Speaker 1: West World now, Yeah, getting into that territory. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: any of Philip K. Dick readers out there, if you've
Speaker 1: read the story The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldric, there's this, uh,
Speaker 1: there's this little plot. I don't know if it's even
Speaker 1: a plot points, but once since I've read it, but
Speaker 1: there's this thing that comes up. These perky pat dolls
Speaker 1: they're called, that people were assed with and they build
Speaker 1: these little houses, or that they buy these little houses
Speaker 1: and they film with these dolls, and these dolls kind
Speaker 1: of live out their live out their own little lives,
Speaker 1: and people, you know, kind of live through them. I
Speaker 1: feel like that in a way like served as a
Speaker 1: as a as an excellent metaphor for a lot of
Speaker 1: what's going on today with virtual worlds and in the Internet. Again,
Speaker 1: not to say that that that encapsulates all of it,
Speaker 1: not to discount all the positive aspects, but there's certainly
Speaker 1: a perky patentist to it. Weird easter egg that I
Speaker 1: just figured out from you mentioning that short story. Isn't
Speaker 1: Palmer Eldritch the name of the bad guy in the strain?
Speaker 1: So that must be an homage to Philip I think
Speaker 1: it is. Yeah, I think the the old corporate guy
Speaker 1: who's working together with the vampiresh How did I never
Speaker 1: put that together? It's strange anyways. All right, so let's
Speaker 1: let's move on and discuss some more of the depressive
Speaker 1: symptoms associated with social networking. Right, So, after these nineties
Speaker 1: studies that were just sort of generalizing the Internet, it
Speaker 1: led to studies into pressive symptoms that were associated with
Speaker 1: social networking. One study found a correlation between high school
Speaker 1: students and depressive symptoms, and the way they did this
Speaker 1: was by using something called the back depression inventory. Now, Robert,
Speaker 1: you wanna give us just like a primer on how
Speaker 1: that works. Yeah. So basically, this is a twenty one
Speaker 1: question multiple choice self report inventory. So it's a common
Speaker 1: psychometric test for measuring the severity of depression, scoring minimal
Speaker 1: to severe depression based on questions such as, uh, which
Speaker 1: of which of these you know expresses your feelings? I
Speaker 1: do not feel sad, I feel sad, I am sad
Speaker 1: all the time and can't snap out of it. Or
Speaker 1: I am so sad and unhappy that I cannot stand it.
Speaker 1: And those would be like you would score like a zero,
Speaker 1: a one, or two or three depending on which one
Speaker 1: you picked. Based on my Facebook feed in the last week,
Speaker 1: I am seeing a lot of the last one. I
Speaker 1: am so sad or unhappy that I can't stand it. Um.
Speaker 1: And I don't know if that's hyperbole or if it's
Speaker 1: what people are actually feeling or not, but these tools
Speaker 1: seem to be adequate. Yeah, I mean it comes to
Speaker 1: an important question, like the expression of feeling is his
Speaker 1: emotional reality? If you if you, if you, you know,
Speaker 1: accuse somebody of expressing something and say like, oh, you
Speaker 1: shouldn't feel that or you don't feel that, Like that's
Speaker 1: that's ridiculous. Yeah, it's kind of like a paranormal experience,
Speaker 1: it's still an experience. What an individual's experience is their
Speaker 1: subjective experience. UM, don't try and put this objective mold
Speaker 1: over how they should be feeling A reactive Yeah. I
Speaker 1: think we've said this on the show before, when we've
Speaker 1: talked about like the paranormal and science and relation to it.
Speaker 1: I may not believe in the paranormal, but I believe
Speaker 1: that that the people who are experiencing it believe it right,
Speaker 1: and so therefore it's real to them. So when they
Speaker 1: use this study, they compared it to television, and they
Speaker 1: found that there is no correlation between television and depression.
Speaker 1: Other authors argued that this isn't true for older adolescents.
Speaker 1: It's only true for younger ones that they get depressed
Speaker 1: when they're on social networking. So there's a possibility that
Speaker 1: different age groups react differently to the challenges of social networking.
Speaker 1: Then there's this study that found that that young adults
Speaker 1: subjective perception of well being and life satisfaction was possibly
Speaker 1: being undermined by social networking. The way that they did
Speaker 1: this was they would text message the participants five times
Speaker 1: a day for two weeks to evaluate at that point
Speaker 1: in time, what their mental state was, what kind of
Speaker 1: social interactions they were having, and what their Facebook use was. Now, personally,
Speaker 1: I'm trying to imagine the challenges I went through in
Speaker 1: a high school being kind of a nerdy, geeky kid,
Speaker 1: and I can't picture how Facebook would have made my
Speaker 1: life better. I just I really can't. Uh So, It's
Speaker 1: that's tough for me to wrap my head around. But
Speaker 1: the other tricky thing here is that researchers have found
Speaker 1: that Facebook creates altered perceptions of physical and personality traits
Speaker 1: of other users, leading us to incorrect conclusions about what
Speaker 1: their characteristics are. So, for example, when four and twenty
Speaker 1: five undergraduate students at a state university in Utah were studied,
Speaker 1: they reported that Facebook made them think other people's lives
Speaker 1: were happier than theirs, which lead them to constantly feeling
Speaker 1: like life wasn't fair. And then this in itself doesn't
Speaker 1: lead to depression, but those who are already predisposed to
Speaker 1: anxiety or depression may find that it negatively impacts their
Speaker 1: mental health. And there's still no conclusive evidence that Facebook
Speaker 1: causes depression. I want to reiterate that there's no there's correlation,
Speaker 1: but there's not causation here. Um, where we are in
Speaker 1: the infancy of these studies, there's still a lot more
Speaker 1: to go. People have started confronting this on Facebook or
Speaker 1: Twitter or wherever by writing about how they may look
Speaker 1: okay in their profile or their feed, but in reality
Speaker 1: they're dealing with anxiety and depression, and they're confronting that
Speaker 1: it's a curated version of reality. Even when we're being
Speaker 1: honest about the negatives in our lives, it's still a
Speaker 1: curated version of reality. So when researchers have tracked online behaviors,
Speaker 1: they've found that there are certain Facebook habits that accompany depression.
Speaker 1: For instance, people are more likely to focus on features
Speaker 1: that focus on depression tips and facts on Facebook if
Speaker 1: they're depressed. Well, that seems like a no brainer. But
Speaker 1: they've also found that depression is related to having fewer
Speaker 1: Facebook friends. This one's weird to me. Location tagging, the
Speaker 1: whole geotagging phenomenon is has a correlation to depressed users
Speaker 1: as well. I guess you kind of have to be
Speaker 1: excited about where you are on some level to tag
Speaker 1: yourself there. Like I don't really use duo tagging a lot.
Speaker 1: But if I do, it's probably because say I went
Speaker 1: to the zoo with my son and we had a
Speaker 1: good time, or we went to the Center for Puppetry
Speaker 1: Yards we had a good time. You know, it's I'm
Speaker 1: I generally don't do it, say at the doctor's office.
Speaker 1: You know that's the right thing. Yeah. Um, And this
Speaker 1: seems like a good point. I want to remind everybody
Speaker 1: of something. This pops up on a ton of house
Speaker 1: stuff works programming, whether it's a video or text or podcasting,
Speaker 1: something called Dunbar's Number. We have a brain stuff episode
Speaker 1: of this. The way it goes is like this, it's
Speaker 1: a study. First of all, there's a study that indicated
Speaker 1: that the average American knows about six hundred people. Okay,
Speaker 1: another study said, no, that's wrong, the average American only
Speaker 1: knows two hundred and nine people. Well why is there
Speaker 1: such a difference. Well, it depends on how well you
Speaker 1: actually know them. So incomes Robin Dunbar, who's an anthropologist
Speaker 1: and evolutionary psychologist from the University of Oxford, and he
Speaker 1: proposes that our brains are hardwired to have a cognitive
Speaker 1: limit on the number of people we know. This is
Speaker 1: based on the correlation between the size of a primate's
Speaker 1: brain and the size of its average social group. Now,
Speaker 1: for humans, Dunbar's number was one hundred and fifty on average.
Speaker 1: This means you can only have stable social relationships with
Speaker 1: between roughly a hundred and two hundred people. Again not
Speaker 1: conclusively proven though, Okay, but when researchers at Indiana University
Speaker 1: analyzed the history of three million Twitter users, they identified
Speaker 1: that twenty five million of these conversations where people maintain
Speaker 1: actual relationships only occurred between one hundred and two hundred people.
Speaker 1: So this seems there seems to be evidence that's leaning
Speaker 1: towards this that you know, Yeah, I've got six hundred
Speaker 1: people I follow on Twitter or however many on Facebook, right,
Speaker 1: but I'm really only having relationships that are like quality
Speaker 1: communication with somewhere between a hundred and two hundred people. Okay,
Speaker 1: but that's online, right, exactly. Well, and in real life too, right,
Speaker 1: I mean you have to consider a lot of the people. Frankly, nowadays,
Speaker 1: a lot of the people that are part of your
Speaker 1: real life world are also your online friends. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think I certainly don't know a hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty people in my real life. Yeah, Like, like I
Speaker 1: think about say, for instance, you, me and Joe, we work,
Speaker 1: we work together, we see each other like I see
Speaker 1: you guys more than I see uh like most of
Speaker 1: my friends. So we don't. We don't actually interact like
Speaker 1: socially on social media all that much because you kind
Speaker 1: of don't have to. Likewise, um, you've probably seen these,
Speaker 1: uh these little clouds of terms that come up where
Speaker 1: people show like what they were facebooking about this year
Speaker 1: and and you know it'll be the big world center. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the word clouds. So so like, I found this this
Speaker 1: trend with a lot of people where like the thing
Speaker 1: in the center of their life was not their significant other.
Speaker 1: And I'm one level you might say, like, oh, why
Speaker 1: why wasn't your your wife, your husband, etcetera in the
Speaker 1: center of your cloud in big bold letters. Well, I
Speaker 1: think part of that is that, like the relationship with
Speaker 1: your signal now that goes beyond it goes beyond face.
Speaker 1: You see them every day, you're talking to them, uh,
Speaker 1: so you're not having to tag them necessarily, you know,
Speaker 1: in a post all the time. Yeah, I mean my
Speaker 1: wife is one of the few people who's privy to
Speaker 1: what my actual life is. Like, Yeah, she knows about
Speaker 1: the ups and downs. Uh, so I don't need to
Speaker 1: post to her. I mean we do, we chat on
Speaker 1: Facebook occasionally and stuff like that and make jokes, but like,
Speaker 1: you know, she knows what's really going on with me.
Speaker 1: I know what's really going on with her, So we
Speaker 1: don't need to have that mediation in between. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that sometimes we lose sight of that, that fact
Speaker 1: that that the this, this social realm and the social
Speaker 1: media realm is not the be all, and it's not
Speaker 1: Also it's also not a one to one reflection of
Speaker 1: what our social life consists of. So let's also remember this.
Speaker 1: There's other research that's out there that online communication with
Speaker 1: friends and family is associated with a decline in depression
Speaker 1: and can strengthen social ties to benefit mental health. So
Speaker 1: there's contrary views here. Once again, I think it's how
Speaker 1: you're using the medium, not necessarily that the medium itself.
Speaker 1: Um yeah, it. So there's this Pew research study. We
Speaker 1: bring them up all the time on the show that
Speaker 1: I call them the Masters of Surveys. They do all
Speaker 1: the surveys and they've got all this data on um,
Speaker 1: just just contemporary life Uh, And they did a survey
Speaker 1: to establish whether and how much social media is stressing
Speaker 1: people out. And to this end, they used a different scale,
Speaker 1: it's called the perceived stress scale, to quantify how people
Speaker 1: were upset, maybe out of control, feeling stressed, nervous, irritated,
Speaker 1: or they were unable to cope with things in their lives.
Speaker 1: And these were their findings. Those who are more educated
Speaker 1: and those who are married or live with a partner
Speaker 1: have less social media related stress. So that's interesting. That
Speaker 1: relates to what we're just talking about, that you've got
Speaker 1: somebody to sort of be yourself with. I suppose the
Speaker 1: frequency of social media use has no direct relationship in men.
Speaker 1: And what they mean by this is that men that
Speaker 1: they've studied would have the same level of stress regardless
Speaker 1: of whether they're using social media or not. But in women,
Speaker 1: the use of some technologies is actually tied to lowering
Speaker 1: stress for them. Uh. Social media users may be more
Speaker 1: aware of stressful events happening to their friends and family,
Speaker 1: and they perceive higher levels of social support within these networks. Generally,
Speaker 1: we see this as a benefit. Right. It's sort of
Speaker 1: like returning to the sort of what what's the term
Speaker 1: like world village, you know, that kind of thing where
Speaker 1: we're we're interacting as if we do physically live in
Speaker 1: proximity to one another, even though we don't. So it's
Speaker 1: seen as having a benefit. But but what if it
Speaker 1: comes at a cost. So the average adult they interviewed
Speaker 1: experienced five out of twelve possible stressful events solely through
Speaker 1: their family and friends on social media. So social media
Speaker 1: users are much more aware of major events in the
Speaker 1: lives of the people close to them. But also they're
Speaker 1: getting this surge of all these bad things are happening,
Speaker 1: all these major quote unquote negative events are happening. Oh
Speaker 1: my god. But when you pull back and you look
Speaker 1: out at the lens, it's like, well, they're not all
Speaker 1: happening on your street. They're all they're just happening in
Speaker 1: the world. But it it comes back to a cultivation
Speaker 1: and it it reminds me of mean World syndrome, which
Speaker 1: stems from cultivation theory. This is a social theory developed
Speaker 1: by George Gerbner and Larry Gross of the University of
Speaker 1: Pennsylvania in the mid nineteen sixties, and their whole focus
Speaker 1: was examining the long term effects of television. So very
Speaker 1: different form of media. But but but but very related
Speaker 1: in many senses, because in essence, the idea here is
Speaker 1: that TV was slash. He is cultivating our culture. Like
Speaker 1: I can't help but think of you know, Shepherd, Fairies,
Speaker 1: Obey and John Carpenters they live. You know, the idea
Speaker 1: that TV is feeding our brains, that it's informing our minds,
Speaker 1: both explicitly and implicitly on who and what we are,
Speaker 1: what sort of world we live in, cultivating viewers conceptions
Speaker 1: of social reality. And it seems that you know, much
Speaker 1: of the same as going on in social media age.
Speaker 1: We cultivate our cultivation to some degree, but we're still
Speaker 1: shackled to external views of social reality, social reality on individual,
Speaker 1: on the individual, on subcultural cultural international levels. What should
Speaker 1: my life look like? What should my body, Addie look like?
Speaker 1: What what should the world look like? Now? I'm thinking
Speaker 1: that what the world needs, as John Carpenter to make
Speaker 1: they live too. And it's all about social media and
Speaker 1: it stars the rock and uh, you're more of a
Speaker 1: wrestling fan than I am. Who else would work in there?
Speaker 1: John Cena? I guess Uh, he's the roddy Roddy Piper
Speaker 1: of our time. Either's not one that's true, you can
Speaker 1: never be read, can't be replaced, and and he sadly
Speaker 1: passed away. Um, but yeah, we need a roddy roddy piper,
Speaker 1: somebody who's willing to fight through the subjective reality that
Speaker 1: are that that social media and uh, the media is
Speaker 1: reflecting on its someone that passes the shades. Yeah, absolutely so,
Speaker 1: all right, before we get into whether social media is
Speaker 1: quote unquote destroying our self esteem, let's back up what
Speaker 1: self esteem. It's defined generally as the evaluative component of
Speaker 1: the self, the degree to which one prizes, values, and
Speaker 1: approves of or life makes oneself, and it's crucial to
Speaker 1: maintaining quality of life. If you have low self esteem,
Speaker 1: that leads to depression. It can also lead to eating
Speaker 1: disorders and addiction and other health problems. Now, one explanation
Speaker 1: for a negative relationship between social networking and self esteem
Speaker 1: is that self presentation is the primary user activity there,
Speaker 1: and it seems like narcissistic behavior to us if we're
Speaker 1: watching it from afar. Right, So, a study of a
Speaker 1: hundred Facebook users at York University found that individuals with
Speaker 1: low self esteem are more active online promoting their own
Speaker 1: content but another study included groups of students parts who
Speaker 1: are participants and exposed them to first a mirror and
Speaker 1: then second their Facebook profile, and third a control setting,
Speaker 1: and the results show that there were positive effects on
Speaker 1: their self esteem for Facebook. Uh. Objective self awareness theory basically,
Speaker 1: see just that any stimulus that causes ourselves to become
Speaker 1: an object, like looking in a mirror, for instance, will
Speaker 1: lead us to a diminished impression of ourselves. Now consider
Speaker 1: when you're looking at your own Facebook profile, You're looking
Speaker 1: at photos, biographical data, your relationship status, all of this.
Speaker 1: So some people theorize this may lead to a reduction
Speaker 1: and self esteem. So again we've got some contrary research
Speaker 1: and points of view going on here. There's also something
Speaker 1: called the hyper personal model, and it proposes that there
Speaker 1: are advantages to computer mediated communication for self esteem. The
Speaker 1: argument here is basically that online you have the time
Speaker 1: to select the aspects of your character that you believe
Speaker 1: will be viewed most favorably by the receivers of your content.
Speaker 1: When you contrast this to your real life interactions, you
Speaker 1: don't have the time to constantly present your most positive
Speaker 1: features to the people around you. So social media may
Speaker 1: even spread happiness in some situations. So we we talked
Speaker 1: about that Pew research study that said that women find
Speaker 1: that it increases their their their happiness. Happy status updates
Speaker 1: encourage others to post happy status updates about themselves, and
Speaker 1: some some researchers even worry that it could cause something
Speaker 1: that they're titling the epidemic of well being, that there's
Speaker 1: no Heaven forbid too much. Yeah, of showing how great
Speaker 1: your life is in the world. Uh, this is interesting
Speaker 1: because this is something that will definitely come up later
Speaker 1: again in the podcast when we're specifically discussing Facebook's utilization
Speaker 1: of their algorithms. Oh yeah. Uh. All in all, again,
Speaker 1: this is super complex. It doesn't necessarily seem that the
Speaker 1: medium itself is inherently leading to poor self esteem, but
Speaker 1: the habits of being competitive, comparing your achievements with others,
Speaker 1: incorrectly perceiving others, as well as jealousy and narcissism all
Speaker 1: contribute to negative self esteem. Now, from my point of view, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, my my education background is in communication. This
Speaker 1: all seems to relate to general communication theory and how
Speaker 1: interpersonal relationships are maintained and how conflict is managed. It's
Speaker 1: just in a different way, right, But but the general
Speaker 1: sort of way that we model communication from one human
Speaker 1: being to the next still applies here. Some studies even
Speaker 1: indicate that social networking sites may actually be a useful
Speaker 1: tool in identifying individuals with mental health issues. And I
Speaker 1: wrote next to this, you think after looking at Facebook
Speaker 1: profile for the last year, I think some of the
Speaker 1: people I know who might have mental health issues are
Speaker 1: starting to realize that themselves. But there are indicators that
Speaker 1: there's fewer pictures, less communication, but maybe they have a
Speaker 1: really long filled out profile and fewer friends. These people
Speaker 1: were more likely to experience social in headonia while there
Speaker 1: on social media, meaning that they did not have the
Speaker 1: ability to encounter happiness from the activities in their life
Speaker 1: that they normally found enjoyable. All right, so we have
Speaker 1: this thing that paradoxically it seems to make us happy
Speaker 1: and you know, help us live our lives, but then
Speaker 1: at the same time just really pushes us to two
Speaker 1: loads of of self loathing or you know, the apathy
Speaker 1: and just despair. Uh. Are we addicted to it? Are
Speaker 1: we addicted to this thing that makes us happy and miserable?
Speaker 1: It certainly wouldn't be the first, uh uh property. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was gonna say that. That's the way you're describing it.
Speaker 1: It's just it sounds like all the other things that
Speaker 1: were It sounds like sounds like alcohol. Yeah. So we're
Speaker 1: gonna take a quick break and we come back. We
Speaker 1: will get into the social media addiction. Are you hiring?
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Speaker 1: mind blown. Okay, we're back. So the big question here
Speaker 1: on the table is are we actually addicted to social media? Well,
Speaker 1: whether or not it's addictive has not been debated for
Speaker 1: very long in psychiatric literature. But what would define it
Speaker 1: is if social media users had a mental preoccupation with
Speaker 1: social media that leads to their neglect of other social functions,
Speaker 1: whether that's family or real life friends. In addition, they
Speaker 1: would suddenly cease their online social networking sometimes and that
Speaker 1: would cause signs and symptoms that resemble those of people
Speaker 1: abstaining from drugs and alcohol. It's one of the problems, right,
Speaker 1: is that with addiction you kind of have lower case
Speaker 1: addiction and capital letter addictions. So there's there's the there's
Speaker 1: the there're the little addictions that we talk about in life, um,
Speaker 1: and then there are the big ones that you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of us are fortunate enough to not have
Speaker 1: to deal with, yeah, or at all. But then there
Speaker 1: are things that seem to sort of uh, we've in
Speaker 1: that space between yeah, I mean, for my part um.
Speaker 1: So I grew up in a household with a parent
Speaker 1: who was an alcoholic, and luckily they went through alcoholics anonymous,
Speaker 1: they're sober now. But I recognized within myself from that experience,
Speaker 1: I have an addictive personality. It's something that I inherited.
Speaker 1: Uh And so yeah, I'm always conscious, especially if things
Speaker 1: like this. You know, I mentioned that whole world of
Speaker 1: warcraft thing earlier, that there's uh possibility there for me
Speaker 1: to get too far into something like if it has
Speaker 1: that addictive quality. Now with social media again, let's look
Speaker 1: at some of the research. According to Dr Shannon m.
Speaker 1: Rauch of Benedictine University, which is in Mesa, Arizona, one
Speaker 1: of the main reasons we use social media is to
Speaker 1: distract ourselves or maybe we're bored and we want relief
Speaker 1: from that boredom. So every time we log in, we're
Speaker 1: delivered reinforcement in the forms of likes and comments or
Speaker 1: whatever people communicating back with us. So when behaviors that
Speaker 1: are reinforced are heated, it becomes hard to stop doing them. Right,
Speaker 1: You're you're being You're given positive reinforcement for them. This
Speaker 1: is like Pavlov one on one uh. In addition, researchers
Speaker 1: at I Believe It's Free University in Germany found that
Speaker 1: this positive feedback correlation shows strong activity in the nucleus
Speaker 1: accumbents of our brains where we associate reward processing. So
Speaker 1: in two thousand twelve, a group of researchers developed something
Speaker 1: called the Facebook Addiction Scale to score mood tolerance, withdrawal, conflict,
Speaker 1: and relapse, and they tested it on four hundred and
Speaker 1: twenty three students and found that it was relatively reliable.
Speaker 1: What's worth noting here, though, is that there are a
Speaker 1: variety of activities that you can do on Facebook beside
Speaker 1: quote unquote social networking, right, Like people play games on there.
Speaker 1: They're doing all kinds of things. Facebook has made itself
Speaker 1: ubiquitous in our lives because it's not just social networking anymore.
Speaker 1: I always forget that they have gains, Like they don't
Speaker 1: get invites anymore to like whatever, you know, farm coaster. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's never that was never my thing either. But maybe
Speaker 1: that's just maybe we're a different generation or something. Maybe
Speaker 1: they're really fun, we're just missing out. Yeah. Another study
Speaker 1: adapted the Internet Addiction Questionnaire, which was a pre existing document,
Speaker 1: to test Facebook dependence with students, and then they tested
Speaker 1: the sleep quality of these Facebook users. What they found
Speaker 1: was that Facebook dependence may be related to poor quality
Speaker 1: of sleep. What's worth remembering here is that we don't
Speaker 1: know if social media addiction is an actual disorder or
Speaker 1: maybe it's a manifestation of other mental issues. As it stands,
Speaker 1: the good old d s M, the d s M
Speaker 1: five is our our current one, I believe, which is
Speaker 1: the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It does
Speaker 1: not list social media addiction as an actual mental disorder.
Speaker 1: If it is an addiction, per the latest revision of
Speaker 1: the International Classification of Diseases and Health Problems, it would
Speaker 1: have the following symptoms. A strong desire or sense of compulsion,
Speaker 1: difficulty controlling consumption behavior, and psychological withdrawal after reduction or cessation.
Speaker 1: I can I can relate to all of those. I
Speaker 1: think I've mentioned on past episodes that when it was
Speaker 1: January when with my family to Jamaica and our our
Speaker 1: crappy phone plan just did not work at all on
Speaker 1: on the island of Jamaica, so I just did not
Speaker 1: use my phone and it was was it was maddening
Speaker 1: at first, like I kept like reaching from my pocket
Speaker 1: to make sure it was there, and and it took
Speaker 1: it took a couple of days to sort of move
Speaker 1: through the idea that I was not connected to this
Speaker 1: thing anymore, right, Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I mean I know
Speaker 1: I've talked to Joe about this before. Well Joe, uh,
Speaker 1: not to speak for him here, but he for the
Speaker 1: most part doesn't use social media, I think because of
Speaker 1: a lot of the things we're talking about here, but
Speaker 1: he's definitely taken like internet vacations you know where I've
Speaker 1: done this before, to where you get you rent a
Speaker 1: cabin in the woods somewhere, you have your phones but
Speaker 1: you just don't look at them for a weekend or
Speaker 1: something like that, and it could be cathartic. Uh. Last
Speaker 1: thing here, Dr Cecil and Drayson from the University of
Speaker 1: Bergen in Norway has developed the berg Facebook Addiction Scale
Speaker 1: and they use six criteria to measure this thing. What
Speaker 1: they found is that people who are already anxious and
Speaker 1: socially insecure are more likely to use social networking. So
Speaker 1: potentially Facebook addicts are using the site to gain attention
Speaker 1: and boost their self esteem. So it becomes this like
Speaker 1: vicious circle. Basically that like they're using it to make
Speaker 1: themselves feel better, but they're already insecure and depressed. They're
Speaker 1: gonna circle back around to that and then go back
Speaker 1: to the uh trough literally for this reward, you know.
Speaker 1: All right, So let's let's think about the children then
Speaker 1: for a minute, as we we often do with the
Speaker 1: technology and with the evolution of social media and the
Speaker 1: and the Internet, because you always have the generation that
Speaker 1: came into it more or less fully formed, and then
Speaker 1: there's the generation that's born into it. Uh. And I
Speaker 1: mean that's just going to continue. Uh. You know. For
Speaker 1: for us, it's like, oh, I remember growing up without
Speaker 1: the Internet in the house. Other people I remember growing
Speaker 1: up about Facebook in the house, and then it's gonna
Speaker 1: be I remember growing up with my my own organic
Speaker 1: eyes as opposed to these uh metallic implants that are
Speaker 1: now mandate eyes. Uh. Yeah. So a great quote that
Speaker 1: I found that I want to start this off with
Speaker 1: was from Time Magazines. Susannah Shrubsdorff. She wrote a piece
Speaker 1: in Time that was called the Kids Aren't All Right,
Speaker 1: and it uh is about general mental health issues in
Speaker 1: teenagers in America, but does discuss social media a lot.
Speaker 1: And she says in my dozens of conversations with teens, parents, clinicians,
Speaker 1: and school counselors across the country, there was a pervasive
Speaker 1: sense that being a teenager today is a draining, full
Speaker 1: time job that includes doing school work, managing a social
Speaker 1: media identity, and fretting about a career. Climate change, sexism, racism,
Speaker 1: you name it. Every fight or slight is documented online
Speaker 1: for hours or days after the incident, and it's exhausting.
Speaker 1: So again, I said this earlier, I can't imagine my
Speaker 1: high school experience, which I feel was challenging. I'm so
Speaker 1: glad I'm not in high school anymore. I love being
Speaker 1: an adult. Uh, how it would be made better by
Speaker 1: social media? And then I think about these kids. I
Speaker 1: thought about about you and Bastion, because you've got a
Speaker 1: son who's grow growing up in a world of social media. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's uh, it's it's tough to think about. Hi, I
Speaker 1: worry about it quite a bit. So we worry, you know,
Speaker 1: about things that we've already discussed here today, like if
Speaker 1: social media is addictive, it's especially going to affect teenagers
Speaker 1: due to the social pressures to be involved in it.
Speaker 1: And as we learned previously, a study has shown that
Speaker 1: this could be damaging teenagers sleep and increasing their risk
Speaker 1: for anxiety and depression. So teenagers require more sleep than adults,
Speaker 1: which we know this, so waking up to use social
Speaker 1: media in the middle of the night is actually really
Speaker 1: bad for their health and this can subsequently lead to
Speaker 1: cold's flu and even gastro and nitas. Another study that
Speaker 1: was done by Britain's National Citizens Service says that teenage
Speaker 1: girls seek comfort on social media instead of from their family,
Speaker 1: So this suggests that they experience more stress more often
Speaker 1: than teenage boys don't do. And that kind of lines
Speaker 1: up with a Pew research stuff that we were talking
Speaker 1: about earlier as well. Yeah, I mean I remember in
Speaker 1: high school just watching like, you know, six hour blocks
Speaker 1: of of television and that was kind of my coping mechanism.
Speaker 1: Um and and playing magic the gathering. Now you do
Speaker 1: all of that online, um M, you could do both online,
Speaker 1: Yeah at the same time. Probably. Now where are you
Speaker 1: touched on, you know, cultivation theory and the and in
Speaker 1: the way that the are cultivated ideas of reality then
Speaker 1: manifest in our our own anxieties. Uh, there's a there's
Speaker 1: a spin on it. That's often referred to as thin
Speaker 1: World syndrome. Uh And in particular, there was an article
Speaker 1: two thousand three the effects of thin ideal television commercials
Speaker 1: embodied U dissatisfaction and schema activation during early Adolescence published
Speaker 1: in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence by Dwayne Hargrives
Speaker 1: and uh Marika Tigerman. And. In the study, they presented
Speaker 1: two groups of girls with different sets of ads, once
Speaker 1: set with the undernourished women and one set without. So
Speaker 1: the results saw that girls who saw the ads with
Speaker 1: the emaciated models experienced immediate episodes of insecurity and distress
Speaker 1: about their weight. What's more, two years later, those same
Speaker 1: girls still reported greater dissatisfaction with their bodies as compared
Speaker 1: to other groups of girls. Continued exposure to unrealistic body
Speaker 1: types in the media affected the girls perceptions about what
Speaker 1: a normal, healthy human female body looks like. So again,
Speaker 1: if the idea that the media is cultivating our understanding
Speaker 1: of reality, our expectations for self and in this case,
Speaker 1: what a normal body looks like. And and it's certainly
Speaker 1: that I think that the evidence indicates that the case
Speaker 1: is stronger with with females, but that you also see
Speaker 1: varying levels of this with with males as well, because
Speaker 1: there's still there's still very much this, uh, this vision
Speaker 1: of of what the perfect male body looks like, and
Speaker 1: it's out there and it maybe isn't as it's not
Speaker 1: stressed as much as the female model, but it is
Speaker 1: there and there are people that they have been out
Speaker 1: of shape over it. I was actually talking about that
Speaker 1: we were preparing for this episode with our colleagues from
Speaker 1: Stuff Mom and Ever told You, and they mentioned to me, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: we've done episodes relating to this before, and they said, yeah,
Speaker 1: one study they came across and I definitely would recommend
Speaker 1: going and seeking out this podcast on their site. Uh
Speaker 1: found that the exactly what you're talking about with television
Speaker 1: ads and comparison of body types is actually worse on
Speaker 1: Facebook for people because they're comparing their body types to
Speaker 1: people they know in the real world and it's easier
Speaker 1: for them to create a disassociation. Still happens, but a
Speaker 1: disassociation from models that they've never met before versus people
Speaker 1: in their real life when they're looking at their collections
Speaker 1: of photos. Okay, so this all this stuff is going on,
Speaker 1: We're all stressed out. We're all anxious, our self esteems
Speaker 1: low or depres rest. We're trying to deal with it.
Speaker 1: Maybe social media is helping, maybe it's making it worse.
Speaker 1: What are some coping mechanisms? What can we do? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean the terrible thing is that a lot of
Speaker 1: times the social media is the coping method because we
Speaker 1: have this environment and then something bad happens. Right, there's
Speaker 1: a terrorist attack, there's a match shooting, there's political unrefts,
Speaker 1: there's a disaster, uh, be it local or larger in scale,
Speaker 1: and we take to social media. Well. I think one
Speaker 1: of the best localized examples is that you if you
Speaker 1: hear gunshots in your neighborhood, what do you do you
Speaker 1: in around here, you often head to the local neighborhood
Speaker 1: association Facebook group and start asking questions, Hey, what's happening?
Speaker 1: What's going on? Someone tell me, Yeah, I don't know
Speaker 1: about other cities, but here in Atlanta. And this is
Speaker 1: no slight to our news organizations, but we don't really
Speaker 1: have reliable news sources that can very quickly tell you
Speaker 1: what's happening on the ground, especially in your neighborhood. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, the the Atlanta Journal Constitution is great, but
Speaker 1: they're not going to have an up the minute story
Speaker 1: about the noise you just heard that it was just
Speaker 1: a transformer exploding, especially and and not a Transformer robot.
Speaker 1: I mean, I would hope they would really pick up
Speaker 1: on trans But this is especially true if you hear gunshots,
Speaker 1: which unfortunately, I guess you're getting a little insight into
Speaker 1: what the neighborhoods are, like the Robert and I live in.
Speaker 1: But uh uh, for me personally, when we hear gunshots,
Speaker 1: we turned, like you said, to Facebook or next door
Speaker 1: is the thing. And in fact, I finally, after doing
Speaker 1: all the research on this, I was like, all right,
Speaker 1: I gotta sign up for next door and so I
Speaker 1: can go to my neighbors to find out information. And
Speaker 1: this is just one example of how social media is
Speaker 1: replacing our investment in journalism. Right, we're defunding journalism and
Speaker 1: instead we're turning again, like I called it, user generated
Speaker 1: content earlier. I don't know if my neighbor down the
Speaker 1: street actually knows if it's a gunshot or not, but
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go to next door dot com and see
Speaker 1: what he has to say about it, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: uh so yeah, it's the confusing time. And all this
Speaker 1: is coming from a biologically authentic place. We're biologically hardwired
Speaker 1: to try to understand and control our environment. We need
Speaker 1: to know what's happening. We need to know the extent
Speaker 1: of the threat to us personally, to our family, our friends,
Speaker 1: and they figure out what to do next. But it
Speaker 1: often means that in our media age, and this entails
Speaker 1: certainly television news as well as uh as social media,
Speaker 1: but we end up binging on the chaos and disturbing details. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know that often just come detail after detail, right
Speaker 1: uh Um. We also binge on the compassion that spins
Speaker 1: out of it, also on the hate that spins out
Speaker 1: of it. Uh. And all the while we're trying to
Speaker 1: we're absorbing the fear, the anxiety, the story of the violence,
Speaker 1: and it brings it brings me back to the mean
Speaker 1: world syndrome which we mentioned earlier. So while while Gardner's
Speaker 1: work centered around TV that the Internet is an even
Speaker 1: more powerful media fund. It just accelerates the news cycle
Speaker 1: and allows title pools of hermetically sealed extremism overreaction hate.
Speaker 1: Uh you can, you can. In a way, it's like
Speaker 1: a purification of it. It's it's it's it's uh. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, it's completely distilled into a sticky paste. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and outright false information served up hot and steaming, just
Speaker 1: the way we like it. Yeah. As you mentioned at
Speaker 1: the beginning of the episode, this is a major debate
Speaker 1: that's going on through uh digital media news right now
Speaker 1: about the election in itself. Was it affected by false news? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And this is a top this is a topic that's
Speaker 1: it's being discussed right now, even like Facebook is putting
Speaker 1: out new responses. So there's no way we're gonna be
Speaker 1: up to the minute on this story. But uh, I
Speaker 1: was just reading a New York Times article, uh that
Speaker 1: that that came out in the wake of the election
Speaker 1: said that forty percent of American voters used Facebook to
Speaker 1: get their news. And Facebook, Uh, no matter, you know,
Speaker 1: no matter what else it is, it's important to realize
Speaker 1: that it is not a journal the stick organization. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I really want to spell this out for you out there,
Speaker 1: so our show stuff to blow your mind. We're a
Speaker 1: part of a digital media organization, and in the last
Speaker 1: three years we've had to completely change our business approach
Speaker 1: because of the shift from what is called organic reach
Speaker 1: which was basically like people going into Google and typing
Speaker 1: in stuff to blow your mind. Social media to social
Speaker 1: media reach, most people are just getting their information from
Speaker 1: social media now rather than going out and searching for it.
Speaker 1: Like it or not. Facebook is not only changing the
Speaker 1: way that we're consuming news, but it's also changing the
Speaker 1: way that news is made. Right, So think about these
Speaker 1: organizations like ours. In order to survive, they need to
Speaker 1: curate for that medium, and so they're doing a variety
Speaker 1: of things to make them fit in better with Facebook. Right. Uh,
Speaker 1: think about this the next time that you click on
Speaker 1: a news feed in your article, and also in that
Speaker 1: same vein, I'd like to remind you this is why
Speaker 1: there is an industry for fake news sites. They can
Speaker 1: monetize the web traffic by manipulating the social media game.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you this, and Robert Kennon too. It's a
Speaker 1: lot easier to write a fake news story, or even
Speaker 1: a poorly reported news story, than it is to do
Speaker 1: thoughtful research and critical evaluation. So for me personally, I'm
Speaker 1: always wary of any story that comes out super fast,
Speaker 1: even like I said, uh, whether I'm looking on Facebook
Speaker 1: or or next door or whatever. If it's some neighbor
Speaker 1: of mine and they're telling me something a little wary, like,
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's a true, So you know,
Speaker 1: give it some time. Uh. We we expect to have
Speaker 1: all this knowledge, all this information at our fingertips, like
Speaker 1: like where genies or something. Uh. And it's it's not
Speaker 1: that simple. Um, So don't necessarily trust things that just
Speaker 1: immediately come out, Yeah, such as and this is this
Speaker 1: is a real one. I did not see this in
Speaker 1: my Facebook feed, but apparently leading up to the U
Speaker 1: s presidential election, stories were making their rounds that the
Speaker 1: Pope u as in the the head of the Catholic Church,
Speaker 1: that endorsed Donald Trump for president. And I don't believe
Speaker 1: it happened. Um and uh And according to a report
Speaker 1: in BuzzFeed News. And I know, just mentioning BuzzFeed News
Speaker 1: in this conversation might be a little tricky, But there
Speaker 1: was a report that a bunch of young people in
Speaker 1: a town in Macedonia ran more than a hundred pro Trump.
Speaker 1: But websites full of fake news and an attempt to
Speaker 1: manipulate the US presidential election. So there's all this fake
Speaker 1: news out here, this misinformation that is being Um that
Speaker 1: that is going through the the curator system. The curator
Speaker 1: is a business. The curator is not a journalistic uh
Speaker 1: um enterprise and uh and and that can have some
Speaker 1: very dire consequences. So Mark's upper Zuckerberg in the past
Speaker 1: has claimed that that Facebook doesn't actually cause anyone to
Speaker 1: make up their minds. And I'm and I'm not necessarily
Speaker 1: suggesting that's the case either here, but Facebook's own research
Speaker 1: suggests that it's no mere neutral arbitrator in the trade
Speaker 1: of real or fake news. Oh yeah, sure, well, especially
Speaker 1: again given the algorithm. We've sort of mentioned the algorithm obliquely,
Speaker 1: but yeah, I mean the algorithm of Facebook is designed
Speaker 1: to feed you what it thinks you want to see. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and no matter where you stand politically, socially, what have you,
Speaker 1: you've probably come up against the algorithm and ask, huh,
Speaker 1: why am I seeing this? Why am I not saying
Speaker 1: that two thousand and ten experiment with go vote boxes
Speaker 1: with or without photos of friends who voted is one
Speaker 1: of the studies that comes up. The second version, the
Speaker 1: one with people actually turned out hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 1: voters in this particular exercise. Then in twelve they secretly
Speaker 1: tweaked the news feed, so that some users experienced slightly
Speaker 1: more positive or negative streams, and the nature of those
Speaker 1: streams influenced the nature of the user's own posts. So
Speaker 1: negativity begot negativity, positivity begot positivity, which ties in with
Speaker 1: some of the things we've been discussing here. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: and I'm seeing this play out in my own Facebook
Speaker 1: feed right now. There's a lot of people talking about
Speaker 1: the quote echo chamber effect of social media, especially on Facebook,
Speaker 1: that could have contributed to decision making for the election.
Speaker 1: But also I believe it's the Wall Street Journal, is
Speaker 1: that right, who has created this filter that allows you
Speaker 1: to see what a Facebook feed would be like if
Speaker 1: it was curated on like a quote unquote liberal algorithm
Speaker 1: versus a conservative algorithm that's been shown up in my
Speaker 1: feed as well. Links over to that. Well, there's a
Speaker 1: piece that came out in the New York Times just
Speaker 1: last week, so I guess it'll be like two weeks
Speaker 1: ago by the time this episode comes out, And it's
Speaker 1: from Za Nip to Feci and U two faccy rights
Speaker 1: and the dangers of Facebook's current set up are not
Speaker 1: limited to the United States. The effects can be even
Speaker 1: more calamitous and countries with fewer checks and balances and
Speaker 1: weaker institutions in independent media. In Mayan, mar for example,
Speaker 1: misinformation on Facebook has reportedly helped fuel ethnic cleansing, creating
Speaker 1: an enormous refugee crisis. Facebook may want to claim that
Speaker 1: it is remaining neutral, but that is a false and
Speaker 1: dangerous stance. The company's business model, algorithms, and policies entrenched
Speaker 1: echo chambers and fuel the spread of misinformation. I mean
Speaker 1: that that really strikes you right there. Like it's one
Speaker 1: thing to say, like, oh, well this quote echo chamber
Speaker 1: affected how people voted, But then when you hear well
Speaker 1: this could have affected ethnic cleansing, you know, I mean
Speaker 1: that's heartbreaking. Yeah. Uh. In December of will Or Amous
Speaker 1: of Slate reached out to Facebook about the spread of
Speaker 1: false information on Facebook and reported the following quote. I
Speaker 1: ran this idea by Greg Mara, a Facebook news feed
Speaker 1: product manager, in a recent conversation about another of the
Speaker 1: company's efforts to improve the quality of users feeds. He
Speaker 1: saw it vaguely intrigued, but said his team probably wouldn't
Speaker 1: be making it a priority anytime soon. Quote. We haven't
Speaker 1: tried to do anything around objective truth. Mar amused, It's
Speaker 1: a complicated topic and probably not the first thing we
Speaker 1: would bite off. So yeah, objective truth. Yeah yeah, why
Speaker 1: why get involved in that? Uh? And then uh. I
Speaker 1: also ran across an excellent piece in Ian magazine from
Speaker 1: Liz Lenz and they shared the following quote. Facts are
Speaker 1: at our fingertips, but instead of liberating us, they seem
Speaker 1: to become a casualty in the war of ideas. My
Speaker 1: husband has an aphorism that states, if you google long enough,
Speaker 1: anything becomes the truth. That's nice. I like that. Uh.
Speaker 1: And none of this even takes into account the rise
Speaker 1: of bullying and trolling on social media. We're just talking
Speaker 1: about the mental health issues that are brought to it originally,
Speaker 1: not even the ones that are that are coming out
Speaker 1: of it. The majority of those on social media are
Speaker 1: under third two years old, and most of those are adolescent. Now.
Speaker 1: The Enough is Enough organization reports that of teenagers who
Speaker 1: have used social media have witnessed cyber bullying. And I
Speaker 1: just want to give a personal aside about our work.
Speaker 1: This isn't a SOB story, but um, given what we
Speaker 1: do and how Facebook and Twitter and YouTube, I'll play
Speaker 1: into our you know, our business, not just stuff to
Speaker 1: blow your mind, but how stuff works in general. We
Speaker 1: see a lot of cyber bullying and trolling, especially targeted
Speaker 1: at our hosts on various shows. Video, Uh, definitely on Facebook.
Speaker 1: And it's um, it's tough, you know, and it's it's
Speaker 1: something that kind of comes along with this gig that
Speaker 1: not a lot of people think about, Like the emotional
Speaker 1: toll of constantly seeing people tell you I don't like
Speaker 1: the way you move your hands or your hair is stupid.
Speaker 1: These are things that I get as a man. Our
Speaker 1: female colleagues get horrific abuse by trolls on the internet. Now,
Speaker 1: how do you cope with that? How do you cope
Speaker 1: with all of this? I often say, like, man, I
Speaker 1: wish we just had like a counselor Troy here in
Speaker 1: the office that we could go to to talk about
Speaker 1: this stuff. Um, is it realistic to just go completely
Speaker 1: cold turkey off of social media? Well after the election,
Speaker 1: the Seattle Times actually interviewed one of their local mental
Speaker 1: health counselors and several social media experts for how you
Speaker 1: can set boundaries. So these are a couple of things,
Speaker 1: And I'm also going to add in here that the
Speaker 1: American Psychological Association says that fifty of adults expressed that
Speaker 1: they felt stress related to the campaign. If that is
Speaker 1: the case, experts then recommend limiting social media engagement and
Speaker 1: definitely limiting engagement with the twenty four our news cycle.
Speaker 1: But hey, like we said before, some people turn to
Speaker 1: social media for support or to offer it, especially for
Speaker 1: those who are already suffering from addiction, depression, or anxiety. Right,
Speaker 1: so here's a couple of tips. One is, ask yourself
Speaker 1: if you really need to log in? Right. I found
Speaker 1: myself doing this today where I was just like sitting
Speaker 1: there kind of hanging out with my dogs, and I
Speaker 1: popped Twitter on and I was like, I don't need
Speaker 1: to do that. I'm just I'm just doing it out
Speaker 1: of habit. We'll log in. Is an interesting thing to
Speaker 1: bring up here because log in and and it brings
Speaker 1: the mind the idea that you're actually inputting your password. There,
Speaker 1: you're sticking a key into the horrible box that you
Speaker 1: keep under your bed umu. And either either way, like
Speaker 1: this is the decision to unlock, it is in play.
Speaker 1: But for the most like our browsers remember our passwords.
Speaker 1: It's like the it's just this thing you do. I mean,
Speaker 1: how many times have have have you the listeners found
Speaker 1: yourself just at the site that you go to every day.
Speaker 1: It's just like a muscle memory thing. And then you're there,
Speaker 1: you're reading it. You're like, what am I even doing here?
Speaker 1: I was here five minutes ago. There's not even any
Speaker 1: new content to look exactly. Yeah. Uh so just think
Speaker 1: to yourself. And I've been doing this in the last
Speaker 1: couple of weeks. Maybe there's something else you can do. Right.
Speaker 1: For instance, I've been listening to music a lot more
Speaker 1: rather than going on to social media. I I finally
Speaker 1: invested in one of those subscription services, and I'm just
Speaker 1: listening to a lot of new music and listening to
Speaker 1: a lot of music old music from when I was
Speaker 1: a teenager that I don't have anymore. And it's just
Speaker 1: been that's been very helpful. Maybe you could play a
Speaker 1: video game, you know, uh, or hey, here's a novel,
Speaker 1: idea exercise, or call a friend up you know, I
Speaker 1: have a friend. A number of these can be done
Speaker 1: at the same time. Yeah, I mean, I could play
Speaker 1: video games and talk to my friends at the same time.
Speaker 1: That's often how I have phone calls with them. But
Speaker 1: you know, so that's one thing is like just always,
Speaker 1: you know, ask yourself, do I need to be doing this?
Speaker 1: Then here's the thing. If you're still going to use
Speaker 1: electronic devices, prioritize which sites are important to you, and
Speaker 1: then set a time limit for yourself to log off.
Speaker 1: Don't just scan where we I do this so often,
Speaker 1: especially given the nature of our work where I'm just
Speaker 1: scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and looking for the next fix. Right,
Speaker 1: I'd also throw in turn off those updates if you don't,
Speaker 1: I've already yeah, I don't have any of that stuff.
Speaker 1: Decide how much time in your day is devoted to
Speaker 1: consuming news and whatever form, whether that's social media or
Speaker 1: on television. If you're really committed to getting a fix
Speaker 1: of news, look for well written, well reported articles, especially
Speaker 1: by someone who has views that oppose your own. Okay,
Speaker 1: try thinking from another person's perspective, even if you totally
Speaker 1: disagree with them. If it's well written enough, it'll at
Speaker 1: least give you pause for consideration. Uh. Also decide what
Speaker 1: to keep out of your feed, right, skip past the
Speaker 1: disturbing images or video h stuff that's in your feed.
Speaker 1: Acknowledge that some people are more important to you than others.
Speaker 1: So you know who to respond to and who to ignore.
Speaker 1: And you can always, as I mentioned at the top,
Speaker 1: as I do quietly unfollowed or unfriend people. I use
Speaker 1: lists for this on Twitter. It's great cure. Eight year
Speaker 1: feed You've become responsible for it yourself, and it's um,
Speaker 1: it's just better for your mental health overall. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I want to drive home to that again. Remember that
Speaker 1: the person that an individual is online on Facebook, it's
Speaker 1: not the sum total of who they are. That's just
Speaker 1: one aspect of their person. And so there there there
Speaker 1: may be situations where you say, you know, I'm still
Speaker 1: totally friends with this person, but you know, maybe all
Speaker 1: they do is share turn up recipes on their Facebook
Speaker 1: and you love them, but you're just not into turn
Speaker 1: ups and you're not into turn up recipes, so maybe
Speaker 1: this is just not the platform where your friendship exists.
Speaker 1: I absolutely have relationships like that. Uh. And look, if
Speaker 1: you've got to engage with people, try to do it positively,
Speaker 1: either like those other people's posts or share something that
Speaker 1: you found inspiring. If it's a political matter, try using
Speaker 1: a neutral tone. I know it's tough, right now. I
Speaker 1: know it's real easy to say that, and it's difficult,
Speaker 1: but present evidence based information in your post or hey,
Speaker 1: here's something you could do. Get involved in constructive causes
Speaker 1: by signing petitions or writing letters, or calling politicians, or
Speaker 1: or getting involved with some local group that you support.
Speaker 1: The first thing that I saw when I um joined
Speaker 1: next door this morning was that there was a long
Speaker 1: post of my neighbors talking about, Hey, what local groups
Speaker 1: can I go out and volunteer for and get involved?
Speaker 1: Like I feel like I need to do something. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And that allows you to act, to to do actually
Speaker 1: act from from a position of of of of optimism,
Speaker 1: because it's it's difficult to act from a state of pessimism.
Speaker 1: And the last coping mechanism I would say is don't
Speaker 1: let yourself start worrying about something that may not have
Speaker 1: actually even happened. Remember what we said here about false
Speaker 1: news and rumors that spread real easily on social media.
Speaker 1: So people have researched this. It can take fourteen hours
Speaker 1: to debunk false claims online. So wait before you get angry,
Speaker 1: come back, do some research, look into whether this is
Speaker 1: a real thing or not, and then move forward and engage. Now,
Speaker 1: let's take this and flip it on its head. What
Speaker 1: if we used social media as a data mining tool
Speaker 1: to assist psychologists in community health forecast. Well, that is
Speaker 1: something that that a project called the World Well Being
Speaker 1: Project is talking about doing. They've evaluated a hundred million
Speaker 1: tweets and they found that the preponderance of negative tweets,
Speaker 1: especially those with anger or hostility linked in them, reliably
Speaker 1: predicts a rise in deaths from heart disease in their
Speaker 1: given locations. That's crazy to me that they can look
Speaker 1: at Twitter and say, what the death rate is going
Speaker 1: to increase, I don't know in Chicago or something like that. Well,
Speaker 1: it's not surprising. I want to say there was a
Speaker 1: I wish I had the study in front of me,
Speaker 1: but I believe there was a German study years back
Speaker 1: looking at like high engagement soccer games or football and
Speaker 1: in looking at rises in heart attacks or heart conditions
Speaker 1: around that. Just the idea that here's this thing that
Speaker 1: everyone's a number a large sections is the population are
Speaker 1: invested in. It's right right, raising everybody's blood their heart rate,
Speaker 1: and they're going to be physical ramifications of them. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Google is also tried doing this in a similar way
Speaker 1: with flu symptoms. Um, so they track in real time
Speaker 1: the emergence of flu outbreaks. They tried doing this and
Speaker 1: they stopped. But what if we could apply machine learning
Speaker 1: methods to determine areas where stress, anxiety, and depression are
Speaker 1: breaking out? We could provide those areas with more assistance theoretically,
Speaker 1: so could we end up in a situation where negative
Speaker 1: to too much negativity on social media it causes the
Speaker 1: metibots to come to your house they started administering give
Speaker 1: us impacts. Um. Okay, so we've got over a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff with you all in this episode. Let's extrapolate
Speaker 1: what we've learned here and take what's going on in
Speaker 1: the world right now with social media and and just
Speaker 1: you know, what do we get out of this? Well,
Speaker 1: first of all, Facebook could be altering our perceptions of
Speaker 1: people in the world right and in the sense that
Speaker 1: we may not be getting the full story through social
Speaker 1: media and you know, beyond mere perception. Uh, there's an
Speaker 1: ongoing conversation to what extent is Facebook empowering the dissemination
Speaker 1: of false information, building at times dangerous perceived realities for
Speaker 1: its users. Again, this is something that is an ongoing
Speaker 1: conversation and this episode is not going to be standing
Speaker 1: on the cutting edge of that, as there's a week
Speaker 1: delay in it coming out. Uh. And look, if you're
Speaker 1: already anxious, using social media could make your self esteem
Speaker 1: even worse, so consider that before you hop on. But
Speaker 1: positive feedback to political post is only going to reinforce
Speaker 1: your own beliefs, so it's less likely to challenge you
Speaker 1: to think from someone else's perspective. And this, in turn,
Speaker 1: from what we learned, becomes addictive in how it forms
Speaker 1: our worldviews. So we're combining our political philosophical society with
Speaker 1: have Love's reward system. And that seems dangerous. Yeah, it does. Um.
Speaker 1: As a final note, my personal advice, get a fish tank.
Speaker 1: Fish tanks are great, so soothing, They're so great. That
Speaker 1: does sound nice. I don't know how I've been living
Speaker 1: this long without a fish tank in my life, but
Speaker 1: I'm loving it so Uh. Here on stuff to blow
Speaker 1: your mind. We wanted to take this opportunity, uh to
Speaker 1: advocate for a group that would be related to this,
Speaker 1: an organization ourselves that we looked into and that we
Speaker 1: feel like we'd like to support, and the one that
Speaker 1: we found for this episode is called stomp Out bullying
Speaker 1: and they're a group that is the leading national bullying
Speaker 1: and cyber bullying prevention organization for kids and teens in
Speaker 1: the United States. They focus on reducing and preventing these
Speaker 1: things as well as sexting and other digital abuse. UH.
Speaker 1: They educate, educate against homophobia, racism and hatred, decreased school
Speaker 1: absentee ism, and deter violence in schools, online and in
Speaker 1: communities across the country. UM. We were looking at this
Speaker 1: this morning and it seemed like a great way to
Speaker 1: you know, if you're feeling I need to do something,
Speaker 1: this is this is something to take a look at.
Speaker 1: They've got seven ways that you can make a difference
Speaker 1: by by you know, working together with their group. Of course,
Speaker 1: the easy ways you can donate give them money. UH.
Speaker 1: You can also participate in their campaigns. They have these
Speaker 1: various campaigns that help with bullying prevention. UM. They have
Speaker 1: an online store where you can shop, and that's kind
Speaker 1: of like combining the donation with getting something that you can,
Speaker 1: I don't know where, or give to somebody else out
Speaker 1: in the real world. You can also volunteer. UH. They
Speaker 1: actually have a help chat line and peer mentoring groups
Speaker 1: in schools to help raise awareness about bullying, so maybe
Speaker 1: you want to participate that way. And then finally they
Speaker 1: partner with corporations, media, and celebrities uh to end bullying.
Speaker 1: So if you're any of those three things, if you're
Speaker 1: a corporation, media entity, or a celebrity of some kind,
Speaker 1: maybe you want to participate in this. Yeah. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: they seem like a really good group. They're doing a
Speaker 1: lot of good work, so we wanted to highlight them
Speaker 1: here real quick, and we would we'd like to do
Speaker 1: more of this in the future. So if there are
Speaker 1: any uh worthy causes out there, groups, nonprofits that are
Speaker 1: engaged in some real positive efforts in the world, let
Speaker 1: us know about them and uh and and we're gonna
Speaker 1: we're gonna try and make this a regular thank here
Speaker 1: on the show. And here's the irony of it. How
Speaker 1: do you let us know about it? Well, social media.
Speaker 1: So yeah, we're on Facebook, we're on Twitter, we're on Tumblr,
Speaker 1: and we're on Instagram. We are trying to make those
Speaker 1: positive places, uh. We do. We sometimes do live video
Speaker 1: performances where we talk about um monster movie trailers and
Speaker 1: how they relate to the science that we talked about
Speaker 1: on the show. Sometimes we share links to things that
Speaker 1: we're pretty excited about. Um. Sometimes we just share I
Speaker 1: don't know. I like to take photos of bizarre things
Speaker 1: that I find while we're doing research to give people
Speaker 1: a hint as to what's coming up on the show.
Speaker 1: But those are all places where you can reach out
Speaker 1: to us, to talk to us about um, what we're
Speaker 1: doing on the show, provide us with some feedback, or
Speaker 1: like Robert said, tell us about another organization that maybe
Speaker 1: we can promote here. Uh. The all those are in
Speaker 1: somewhere or another. Blow the mind, yes, and I if
Speaker 1: you want to cut all that out, just come straight
Speaker 1: to Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, a social
Speaker 1: media free website as celebration of everything we do, all
Speaker 1: the episodes, the podcast, the blog post, you name it,
Speaker 1: it's there. There will also be links out to our
Speaker 1: so for media accounts, but you don't have to click
Speaker 1: on notes. You really don't. And finally, there is an
Speaker 1: old fashioned way to get in touch with us. Uh.
Speaker 1: And I'm not talking about finding us on the street
Speaker 1: and talking to us, though I guess that would work.
Speaker 1: They can use ravens Ravens, yes, owls, um, you know,
Speaker 1: whatever you have at your disposal. But Yeah, there's the
Speaker 1: email address. Yeah, that's blow the mind at how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com for more on this and thousands of
Speaker 1: other topics. Is that how stuff works dot com. The
Speaker 1: homographic artises found back by