If you don't live under a rock, you've probably noticed that most people seem to be glued to their phones all the time, yes, all generations have phone addiction problems, in fact, the younger generations started using phones at a time when there is more information and awareness about the dangers of excessive use of social media.
But we older generations began to use these incredible artifacts thinking that they were totally harmless and they are not. Why is it so hard to get away from your phone? It's no coincidence, every notification and every post that your phone shows you is carefully designed to activate the reward system in your brain, we are in a massive Pavlov experiment and we have been hacked.
How did they hack our brains? You may wonder, we humans, like many other animals, have reward mechanisms in our brains that help us survive. When we eat something, especially if it is something delicious, dopamine is released in our brain, which is a hormone that the brain loves and motivates it to do what is necessary to repeat the experience and receive that reward. This helps us because it motivates us to eat and that is important because without food you do not survive.
This mechanism also serves us for other activities necessary for our survival as a species, such as sex and socializing, so dopamine gives us the motivation to reproduce and keep our monkey communities together. Another thing that releases dopamine is gossiping, we are social animals and that was the way in which social networks became part of our lives.
But from the beginning the objective of social networks was to monetize, which is just when you offer a service. At first, technology companies were not very clear about how to do it, but with the arrival of smartphones, keeping us glued to the screen turned out to be the best way to make money. With our data, our interests and our attention, they found a way to sell advertising space and connect us with products that the algorithm, which knows us better than our mothers, knows we will be interested in and thus social networks stopped being social.
Every platform that exists now is focused on reducing your interaction as much as possible, they are no longer so interested in us socializing, that's why they change the chat icon's location all the time. What they are really interested in is that we consume content in the most passive way possible, and every time we watch a full TikTok, a real one or a short or we interrupt it by clicking next, we are telling the algorithm what exactly we like and what we don't like, and that information will be used to show us an absurd amount of content personalized to our tastes, virtually endless, in the form of short videos that will keep us hooked indefinitely.
This type of content seems to absorb our attention to the point that we lose track of time, this is because each of those short videos in rapid succession gives us a dopamine reward and the only effort it requires on our part is to swipe, but not only do you receive that dopamine reward when you watch a video you like, you also receive it from the moment you receive a notification, even from the moment you pick up your phone, because your brain associates that action with the pile of dopamine rewards it will receive as soon as you open it. some social network, that's why we develop the compulsion to take it every time we don't have a stimulus.
When we are with someone and there is silence in the conversation, we automatically pick up the phone because those above us trained us that way, this leaves us without the ability to accept moments without stimuli, we do not allow ourselves to get bored or be silent staring at the wall or enjoy food for more than 5 minutes without feeling like we have to check the phone. We are so used to frequent and continuous stimuli that if we don't have them we feel uncomfortable, even a little anxious, like when your phone runs out of battery.
This obviously has a cost, like any substance, if we abuse dopamine we create a physiological tolerance and it is more difficult for us to feel interested, satisfied and motivated by normal stimuli and unfortunately this pushes us to use the phone more and consume content that gives us dopamine, generating a vicious circle, among other things throughout our lives as individuals and as a society.
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