'The Twisted Truth- Social Media'

Today I watched a video which was edited and created using a combination of a range of different video sources- the effects of social media are talked through in depth, but in particular the ways in which Social Media platforms are made to control us and manipulate us and our lives. The video was titled 'You Will Wish You Watched This Before You Started Using Social Media' and has received 3.8 million views since April 2018.

Speakers in the video:

-Cal Newport 
-Mark Zuckerberg
-Tristan Harris
-Steven Kotler
-Chamath Palihapitiya
-Steve Bartlet

• Social media platforms are made to be as addictive as possible, that is the desired use case of these products is that you use these in an addictive fashion because that maximises the profit that can be extracted from your attention and data 

• These companies offer you shiny treats in exchange for minutes of your attention and bytes of your personal data which can then be packaged up and sold 

• The race for attention gets more and more competitive- the more competitive it got for peoples attention, the more they needed to add these design principles and more manipulative design tactics as ways of holding on to your attention 

• If you spend large portions of your day on social media/glued to a screen, it is proven that it can permanently reduce your capacity for concentration 

• ‘The magic of maybe’ when you look at your phone like maybe there’s a message or maybe there’s not ? The constant checking is the maybe. The high you get when something does pop up on your phone 

• When you upload a new profile photo that’s when our minds are most vulnerable to what other people think of us- Social media platforms knows that we care about these things, the technology companies control the dials for when and how long our profile photos show on other peoples feeds so that they can orchestrate it so that other people more often end up liking your photo over a delayed period of time, so that you are constantly checking your phone and waiting for this ‘validation’ off others?!

• ‘Facebook depression’ everyone is looking at their feed and comparing their lives to highlights of other peoples lives 

• Over use of social media links to lack of something better to do and also interferes with things that you should be doing

• Research shows that the more you use social media, the more likely you are to feel lonely and isolated 

• Social media isn’t real- everything is edited, links back to the ‘highlight reel’ whereas no one sees the behind the scenes (our actual lives). We spend our time comparing ourselves to others but this won’t stop as comparing things to others is a natural human thing to do

• Comparing our selves to others: a big reason to why things have value is because there’s something better or worse to compare it to, e.g a the Nokia phone was only considered amazing before all of the other better phones came out, now Nokia phones are often seen as low-end and rubbish OR another example is a horse and carriage, it was amazing until a car came along. In the same way likes and comments = value