Social Media Addiction
Can't stay away from social media? You're not alone; social networking is engineered to be as habit-forming as crack cocaine - Mike Elgan
image by: Nick Fancher For Unsplash+
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Social media addiction is a bigger problem than you think
Social networks are massively addictive. Most people I know check and interact on social sites constantly throughout the day. And they have no idea how much actual time they spend on social media.
If you're a social media addict, and your addiction is getting worse, there's a reason for that: Most of the major social network companies, as well as social content creators, are working hard every day to make their networks so addictive that you can't resist them.
Facebook: I wish I knew how to quit you
Cornell Information Science published research earlier this month that looked at (among other things) the difficulty some people have in quitting…
Featured
Is social media addictive? How it keeps you clicking and the harms it can cause
The consequences of social media overuse can be significant. Our research and recent studies have identified a wide range of potential harms. These include “psychological entrapment”. Participants in our study described a “feedback loop of doom and despair”. Users can turn to platforms to escape anxiety, only to find that the scrolling deepens their feelings of emptiness and isolation. Excessive exposure to rapidly changing, highly stimulating content can fracture the user’s attention span, making it harder to focus on complex real-world tasks.
Articles of Interest
Here's Why You Can't Log Off Social Media — Even When It Makes You Miserable
Our feeds can function as personal fun-house mirrors, distorting how we view the world and ourselves — and, according to experts, we're ripe for the shaping.
A Generation Living for Likes
Social media sites can be addictive. Almost as addictive: complaining about what social media does to young people.
Biological & Psychological Reasons for Social Media Addiction
Digital age addiction falls into five types – device addiction (i.e., computer game addiction), information overload (i.e., web surfing addiction), net compulsions (i.e., online gambling or online shopping addiction), cybersexual addiction (i.e., online pornography or online sex addiction), and cyber-relationship addiction (i.e., an addiction to online relationships).
Can’t Put Down Your Device? That’s by Design
There’s even an industry term for the experts who continually test and tweak apps and sites to better hook consumers, keep them coming back and persuade them to stay longer: growth hackers.
Generation X More Addicted to Social Media Than Millennials, Report Finds
Sean Casey, the president of Nielsen’s social division, said the finding initially surprised him because “the going thought is that social is vastly owned by the younger generation.”
How To Break Your Social Media Addiction With The Binky App
If you listen to the news, it will come as no shock to you that social media is ruining our lives. In the past few months I've seen it blamed for everything from reduced workplace productivity to increased anxiety and mental instability. And I believe it.
Network Effect
The Internet is said to show our common humanity. Through its data, it is said to provide a kind of omniscience, and through its social networks, a deeper sense of connection. For those without access, it holds the promise of a better life. For those of us who use it a lot, its power to affect our lives is clear — but what is the nature of that effect? How does it change our behavior? The way we see others? The way we see ourselves?
Quit Social Media Every Other Day
One approach for people interested in breaking a compulsive checking habit.
Social Media Addiction: Why Should Entrepreneurs Care?
Name your poison: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Vine, Tumblr, Google+, apps, games and pretty much anything else connecting us to some kind of software and throught them to other people. It’s good, it’s bad and, depending on the user, it can get ugly.
Social network site addiction - an overview
No well-documented treatment for SNS-addiction exists, but knowledge gained from Internet addiction treatment approaches might be transferable to SNS-addiction. Overall, the research on this topic is in its infancy, and as such the SNS-addiction construct needs further conceptual and empirical exploration. There is a great demand for studies using careful longitudinal designs and studies which include objective measures of both behavior and health based on broad representative samples.
Sucked In by Social Media? Here's Help
Social media can be habit-forming, but WSJ Personal Tech columnist Geoffrey A. Fowler has tips for limiting your Facebook time, and increasing real, live face time.
Tech Bigwigs Know How Addictive Their Products Are. Why Don’t the Rest of Us?
Why are the world’s greatest public technocrats also its greatest private technophobes? It seemed as if they were following the cardinal rule of drug dealing: never get high on your own supply.
The Binge Breaker
Tristan Harris believes Silicon Valley is addicting us to our phones. He’s determined to make it stop.
The Psychology of Social Media Addiction
Psychologists and scientists have now taken the time to study social media in terms of why they believe it interferes with aspects of our daily life.
These Factors Might Explain Why We Can - or Can't - Quit Facebook
Admit it, you’ve thought about walking away from Facebook at one time or another. Perhaps you’ve gone so far as to shut down your account, swearing never to return, only to meekly log back in a week later.
Warning: Your New Digital World Is Highly Addictive
Technology now is designed to make it “irresistible,” argues psychology and marketing professor Adam Alter
Why We Can’t Look Away From Our Screens
In the past, we thought of addiction as mostly related to chemical substances: heroin, cocaine, nicotine. Today, we have this phenomenon of behavioral addictions where, one tech industry leader told me, people are spending nearly three hours a day tethered to their cellphones. Where teenage boys sometimes spend weeks alone in their rooms playing video games. Where Snapchat will boast that its youthful users open their app more than 18 times a day.
Resources
12 signs that you're addicted to social media
A new survey reveals that Instagram is the worst social media site in terms of its impact on the mental health of young people...Here are 12 signs that you too could be addicted to social media.
99 Days of Freedom
Do you ever wonder what life is like without Facebook?
Net Addiction
Social Media Addiction is not a formal clinical diagnosis, it is fair to say that many people spend far too much time on social media and may at the very least describe themselves as being “obsessed”, if not addicted. In recent years the mental health community has become increasingly interested in the impact that modern technology has on our lives – both positive and negative.
