A well-known poet T. S. Elliot once said a quote which read - "Distracted from distraction by distraction". This quote is quite exaggerating and it will become more evident as you read on this article. How often do we find ourselves reaching out towards our phones to use social media be it Instagram, Snapchat, Whatsapp, Facebook, Twitter and find ourselves spending hours on it and only to realize it later that we were supposed to complete more important tasks in that same time? Yeah, we have all been through this more often than not and it is very hard to control it. We are going to look into the facts and the reasons why we should start learning to control this urge to move towards social media over and over again.
What science has to say about this?
Scientists have a lot to say about the social media addiction amongst the people and especially the younger generation. The reason being the sense of pleasure which one gets while accomplishing something or getting more attention on apps in the form of likes and comments which make them feel good which in turn releases a hormone called dopamine in the body which is also called a feel-good neurotransmitter. This hormone is responsible for your mood, health, attention and even decision making. The blame for any kind of addiction in the human body goes to this hormone and which is something the scientists have to say that the feeling of getting more likes and attention from many people plays an important role in the increasing levels of the same. The increase in this hormone makes us gravitate towards the things which gives us more of the same feeling. This does not mean that we should not use it or get our dopamine levels low, instead, this is a reason we should consider for our betterment and look for ways to find the right balance between our professional lives and social media. Let us look into it in detail.
What is it that we are doing on social media that gives the creators an edge?
The fact that millions and millions of users are posting pictures and videos while others are liking and appreciating the posts is not a bad thing. The one thing which should bother everyone but isn't is that many people tend to like the same post which they had already liked from a different account. This just kills the base for the new creators to create new content and the people at fault should realize that by liking the same thing again and again, they are proving that they can commit a mistake and have a high possibility of repeating it. They do not learn from their mistakes because the post they liked did not change them in any way. We have to realize that social media is a platform for creators and consumers and we fall into the trap by being foolish enough to repeat the same mistake over and over again. Now whoever reading this should ask yourself whether you are going to choose to learn or repeat it again and again. The most important aspect which is to be observed here is that by repetition of the same reactions, it can be observed that it affects the learning ability of a person and the capacity of reasoning which means you may have to repeat same thing while explaining something to them and that does not look good!
The impact of "scrolling" in our lives
Okay, we all are guilty of scrolling through many social media apps and most of us love it. What if I tell you right now that it affects us severely especially our grades? Obviously everyone would agree but we cannot stop doing it because we do not know how it is affecting us even though we keep a separate time for that in our time table and manage to keep up with the rest of our productive work. Here's the thing, in our schools, the time assigned for teaching of one particular subject ranges from 40 minutes to one hour. This used to be a fair amount of time when it was introduced long time ago with the people during that time did not have social media and could concentrate for an hour with lesser distractions. Now, you may be wondering how scrolling is related to this, so imagine you are scrolling Instagram and you read a post which was very serious news about a topic. You concentrate on that post for a few seconds, understand it and scroll to another post which is way different than the previous one. This second post maybe a meme which made you laugh and completely diverting you from the serious feeling to finding something funny. Now laughing isn't wrong, but what happens is that you jumped through different emotions in a matter of seconds which affects your ability to focus on one thing for a longer time. When you are technically training your brain to switch between different forms of feeling, how can you expect your brain to concentrate in a class or seminar for an hour? This is the impact which scrolling is having in our lives and we have to learn to manage our time in controlling it.
It doesn't matter how hard we try, we can't stay away from it and we am quite aware of that. One way we can get a hold on it is by finding reasons more important than it and comprehending with them, which makes it easier for more productive work. We can also not get carried away by appreciating the same thing again and again and make way for new creators with better and helpful content. We should have control over it before it controls us and by which we should know the reasons for using them. Either be a creator or a consumer, but we as the right people should not get carried away and be the flow for the better future of social media and how we intend to handle it.
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