Why is social media so addictive?
Basically, social media is so addictive because it appeals to the human feedback loop. I send a message, I receive a message, I send another message, I get another message, I send yet another message out, lo and behold I get another message coming back! It feels great to be connected with others online. It makes us feel needed and loved and paid attention to, possibly making up for the physical void we find ourselves in. Most households in developed nations have only 1-3 people living in them. I think John Donne’s “No man is an island” summates what I’m trying to say quite well.
“No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;”
As a telecommunications engineer in the late 1990s, I also witnessed first-hand the birth and roll-out of wireless broadband. The time between messages given online communications has shrunk since the mid 2000s when social media entered the fore. In some ways I describe social media addiction as an endless loop we can’t separate ourselves from due to the ubiquitous nature of mobile broadband devices. As our Internet speeds get faster, we send more and more messages out simply because we can. There have been more Internet related deaths in South Korea than anywhere else in the world, for the simple reason that from the outset it was the most interconnected country in the world with ubiquitous high speed access. Personally, I’ve tried to limit my use of the Internet at home, by not having wi-fi while living in America during the academic year. It’s been an interesting experiment since August 2018, often frustrating, but I still have a smartphone plan that is allegedly 4G that I can hotspot to upload a file, if I’m trying to meet a deadline.
Our technologies are always on, always available 24x7. When I think back to gaming in the 1980s, kids would camp out at fish n chips shops in Australia, to play Space Invaders on the old gaming consoles. There was a closing time, a “right kids, we’re closing soon, put your last 20 cents in the slot and we’ll see you again tomorrow afternoon”. But today? There is no closing time. I can go home from school, lock myself in my room, and play X-box for hours on end- all afternoon and all night, if I want to and can overcome my sleepiness. The games of the past also had an end. If I put my 20 cents in that equated to only three lives. If I ran out of money from getting “bombed out” of the game, then that was it. Wait for next week’s pocket money. But now? In the massively open multiplayer games? I can respawn as many times as I want, I can work in teams to “shoot n kill” and survive, and I can play for days and days without repercussions. I can wake up in the morning, log on, and have an experience different to the one of the Space Invaders machine at the corner store.
In some cultural contexts, ranks and leader boards also matter. I need to get to number 1. I need to have the most hits, the most likes, the most points, the best skin, the most time spent online, so I keep coming back again and again, in an attempt not to lose face and to gain greater acclaim and online favour. So while games like Test Drive and Silkworm on the Amiga500 in the late 1980s meant you could reload and try to master the game over a period of 3-6 months, or press a hot key to get to the last level and hope for the best, today we have no end in MMORPG. We can take on roles and personas, and be someone else, and escape into an online vortex that is unlike the roles and responsibilities of the real world we inhabit. From a young age we are taught to excel, to be the best we can be, that coming at the top means trophies and life long rewards. This underlying belief about Society and its leaders is merely exacerbated in the online realm, but with far-reaching social implications in the physical world.
Citation: Katina Michael in Daniel Kolitz column, “Why is social media so addictive?” Giz Asks, Gizmodo.com: https://gizmodo.com/c/giz-asks