Yuxin Liu 

This blog post was produced as part of the course “Social Media, Ideologies, and Ethics in the United States” at the University of Turku.

When I was a child, I watched the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, which tells the story of a media mogul trying to launch a global war to control global public media. When the movie was released in 1997, the Internet was still unknown, so the weapons of the villain Carver were only a “Tomorrow Newspaper” and some satellite TV. Maybe no one thought that controlling public media would gradually become a reality with the rise of the Internet and social media.

Media is the most important link

Firstly, we must understand the relationship between media, information, and people. Human beings need a lot of communication – to pass their cognition to others, to seek approval, or to accept the information of others. What’s the role of media? Media delivers information to people.

Granted, social media offers a lot of conveniences. Criminals can be brought to justice, people around the world can communicate for free and sharing information becomes very fast. We generally recognize that social media is a double-edged sword, emphasizing that the user’s ability to control social media determines whether it is positive or negative. But what if social media was born to manipulate and make everyone addicted?

Social Media, Born for Addiction

All addictives have the following characteristics:

  1. The stimulus to break the “boring”

  2. This stimulation is effortless

  3. Once addicted, withdrawal is painful

So, is social media addictive? The answer is obvious. Looking at these several definitions of addictions, we may get a better understanding of the strange phenomena of social media.

●The stimulus to break the “boring”

Why is social media always full of weird pop culture? You can find everything but the normal. Because most of our lives are boring, lackluster, and ordinary. Our lives start and end, like a Mobius ring with no end. However, human existence is complex and sensitive. We are always looking for our kind, but we are eager to be different. This is one of the root causes of the popularity of social media. 

●This stimulation is effortless

The stimulus brought by addictions is effortless. Smoking marijuana is just like smoking cigarettes, the only action required is to light it. In other words, addictions relax the brain and make it stop working. Addictions can degrade the brain. The same is true of social media. After all, taking and editing a photo to convey a false location may take only 2 minutes – effortless compared to the hard work and toil of an actual trip. 

●Once addicted, withdrawal is painful

It took my father three months to quit smoking and he told me that it felt awful. Can you stop checking your social media in a day? No Facebook, no Instagram? Will you feel like there is nothing to do? Or will you feel inexplicably empty inside? If the answer is “yes”, as for most of us, maybe leaving social media is not easy for you. This is good to notice. When social media has been an indispensable part of your life, how could it be easy to get rid of it?

Evolve? Degrade?

Generally, the reading time of a social media article is limited to about 5 minutes. For videos on Tik Tok it is even less, 15 seconds, 30 seconds, etc. Article after article, video after video, your attention is being torn. At the same time, the soundscape is so diverse that it weakens your ability to think independently.

Some people liken these characteristics to “new evolution” and believe that the future of humans will be more short-term, efficient, and multi-threaded. But unfortunately, the ultimate goal of this evolution is not for the progress of the human race, its goal is to eliminate the vast majority of people.

At present, manipulating personal thoughts through media is already a routine operation. “Mimeng” cheated a lot of people by sensational titles and spurious content. But think about why some people are willing to become her followers? The reason is the lack of attention and ability to think independently. The followers gradually become the tools of a manipulator. This evolution is in progress. I hope everyone can distinguish whether they are headless animals or manipulating hands.

Read more: 

New York Times, March 6, 2017: “Why We Can’t Look Away From Our Screens” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/science/technology-addiction-irresistible-by-adam-alter.html?_ga=2.135890993.1049120896.1574975315-191515546.1574975315

What’s on Weibo, Feb. 6, 2019: “Mimeng and ‘Self-Media’ under Attack for Promoting Fake News Stories to Chinese Readers” https://www.whatsonweibo.com/mimeng-and-self-media-under-attack-for-promoting-fake-news-stories-to-chinese-readers/