There has been lots of scientific investigation into the effects of social media on the human brain, the reward system, and the broader psychological impacts of migrating our real world social interactions over to the internet. Social media addiction is real.
Basically they’ve discovered that the effect on the reward system of the brain is similar to compulsive gambling and cocaine. Kids have committed suicide over things that have been posted on social media.
The problem is that we’ve taken the same evolutionary flaws that we had before the internet was invented, and mapped them onto this new platform of interaction. Algorithms have been specifically engineered by tech companies to funnel people’s interests into highly specific niche’s, thus actively shaping your opinion, and your circle of “friends” on the go.
It’s a dream come true for advertisers, because you can target and re-target people for you’re ads in very specific demographics with surgical precision in order to maximise click-through and conversion rates.
But the sorting algorithms also apply to your online friends and their posts. This supercharged the incentive for people to try to always be visible and get the most likes and comments, because if you don’t your posts don’t get seen and you don’t your dopamine hit.
And all the sociopaths and narcissists know exactly how to use this to manipulate others, by playing the same boring ego-games they play in real life but in cyberspace. Love-bombing you, ignoring you, gaslighting you, hoovering you on messenger. Social media is the narcissists’ playground.
It’s all fucked up, because the kinds of things that people post to get “likes” are generally not reflective of what’s going on in their daily lives anyway. If you scroll through a narcissist’s Facebook profile, it’s just an endless showreel of the best, most “successful” and happiest moments in their life. And so their clique tend to be their circle of flying monkeys.
On the other hand, some people who are depressed tend to compete for the most debasing and disgusting/offensive posts (vice-signallers), and their friend circle becomes alchemically reduced to people who enjoy trashy content.
The virtue-signallers post a lot of so-called “memes”, those photos with block capital letters over them saying something sanctimonious or displaying some nugget of urban wisdom, or mocking someone across the political divide from them.
I just don’t get why people prefer to interact in that way as opposed to in real life. Being connected all the time - and all the mind-deranging expectations that generates - is driving people mad.
Yet here we all are on Bluelight, doing exactly the same thing...
