Mad about Science: Digital addiction part II

By Brenden Bobby
Reader Columnist

In last week’s column we discussed the effects of video game addiction and how it sockets into digital dependency. This week, we will be exploring the effects of social media addiction.

I shared an anecdote about my partner’s friend last week. He was unable to communicate outside of social media, relying on feeds to initiate conversation and is now unable and unwilling to ask an individual: “What’s new with your life?”

This is a common sign of social media addiction. Similar to substance addictions, social media physically alters the chemistry of your brain over time when used without restraint. Make no mistake — it was designed with this purpose in mind.

Idaho joined the 29-state coalition in the federal trial against Facebook’s parent company, Meta, which began on Aug. 18. Leading the coalition, lawyers from California, New Jersey, Colorado and Kentucky claim that Meta developed a product that was addictive, targeted at teens and children, and misled the public about the effects of their product on developing minds.

Meta’s lawyers have argued that the accusations are blown out of proportion. Defenders of the company claim that you cannot become addicted to social media, as it is not an addictive substance like heroin or alcohol. However, the parallels between the design of social media and gambling, for instance, are hard to refute.

Video game design has borrowed heavily from casinos, utilizing flashy rewards that draw in the user and give them rapid dopamine hits while encouraging them to spend more money to keep chasing those feelings. Social media has very similar design philosophies, but its pay structure is obfuscated from the viewer.

Video games extract value directly by keeping users chasing the high. Social media extracts value through a mix of advertising and data collection. Both products are designed to keep users engaged for as long as humanly possible, and the most effective way to do that is to copy the psychology used by casinos for decades.

First, they create an interface that rewards engagement, then present a somewhat unpredictable element that can either reward the user with a dopamine hit or provide a bad outcome that can be expanded to create another dopamine hit. 

Every like, comment and notification is analogous to a spin on the slot machine, and research shows that our brains process these events almost identically. The potential of virality is the winning lottery ticket — always looming yet barely out of reach.

Social media addiction has real consequences for the brain. The rapid-fire pursuit of cheap dopamine hits causes deregulation, which increases anxiety and leads to heightened risk of depression. Compulsive scrolling at night causes sleep disruption through blue light exposure, imbalancing the circadian rhythm and reducing the quality of our sleep. This makes us even more anxious throughout the day, and more eager to chase another hit of dopamine to compensate.

Sustained overuse of social media causes physical alterations to our brains. Heavy use has been linked to a reduction of gray matter in the anterior cingulate and prefrontal cortices. The anterior cingulate cortex is responsible for emotional regulation and impulse control, and its response to prolonged social media has two major features: first, it makes each encounter more important to the user (everything becomes do or die); second, it makes it harder to resist the temptation to check notifications to see what’s going on, to post and to engage. Ultimately, this feeds back into the system to perpetuate the cycle.

The prefrontal cortex governs executive function, impulse control and general attention span. Addictive social media use has a unique effect in the real world by paralyzing a user’s executive function and making them more reliant on information that is borrowed, rather than created. It also creates an optimization loop, whereby tasks that are quickly completed feel more rewarding, while longer and more meaningful tasks and subjects become difficult to sit through or even tolerate. This feeds back into the cycle by rewarding quick scrolls and rapid consumption rather than taking time to enjoy longer activities. 

TikTok’s ability to infinitely scroll through near-instantaneous short-form content heavily rewards and reinforces this cycle.

Taken together, these effects bleed into the final form of addiction, which alters a person’s behavior. As was the case with my partner’s friend, social interaction transforms into consumption. Friends are “content” to be consumed.

The most complicated part about this digital dependency is figuring out exactly where each of us lands on the spectrum. Social media is prevalent in our lives; it’s necessary as a business owner or a social person of any kind. “I’m not an addict” is a mantra for addicts, so what gives?

Social media addiction becomes difficult to quantify by traditional means. Time spent on social media isn’t a quality indicator of addiction, as a business owner or content creator who depends on it for their livelihood may spend 10 hours a day on socials but aren’t actually addicted.

Instead, the mark of addiction starts with dependency and a loss of impulse control. Compulsive swiping or filling every empty moment with screen time is the first major symptom and one virtually all of us have experienced. Withdrawal symptoms are another clear indicator, where anxiety, depression or obsessive thoughts of “what if I miss something?” fill the gaps between use.

In the most extreme cases, personality changes and offline social interactions change. People stop asking questions and instead exclusively talk about their own accomplishments or constantly check their phone while talking in person.

It’s not all doom and gloom, however. Of all the addictions humans are prone to suffering, social media addiction is one of the easiest to conquer. Our final installment of this series next week will look into methods to overcome digital addiction.

Stay curious, 7B.