The internet and social media are one of the most impactful technologies introduced in the last thousand years. Throughout history it's the social technologies that have had the greatest impact. Where would science be without writing, books, the telegraph, cell phones...etc. Without the recorded and shared knowledge of books all of science would have been hopeless. The ability to store and communicate information is essential to innovation and progress.
While written language and books served as our first global network of information, the newborn internet is way more powerful and accessible. Today over half the world’s population has access to thousands of years worth of recorded knowledge. That is pretty amazing if you stop for a second to really think about it. Of course this is going to reshape the fabric of society and with change we’re also going to see plenty of conflict.
Given that we’re social animals, one of the first things that happened with the internet is that we made it social. Social media represents a bulk of internet traffic.
At our core we are social animals. The one key thing that allowed us to take over the planet is our heightened social capabilities (sorry to all the neanderthals and other species we wiped out along the way). These include being able to coordinate and function within larger social groups. As well as create and believe in social constructs that are not real, such as monetary and legal systems. Our brains are hardwired to be oriented around social cognition, because humans who were able to band together in large numbers were much more likely to survive and pass on their genes.
Code of Hammurabi: One the earliest legal codes written sometime between 1792 - 1750 BCE.
The main reason social media makes us feel like shit sometimes is because the environment in which our brains developed looks very different from the world we live in today. The number of connections between different communities and individuals is several orders of magnitude higher. Our brains are geared to be extraordinarily sensitive to social stimuli and many of the reasons social media causes so much psychological distress is because we’re basically turning the social stimulus level to 1000. We can break this down into five key sources of distress.
Part of what allowed humans to succeed and maintain cohesion in large groups is that we’re sensitive to social pressure and expectations. We have very deep motivations for maintaining good relationships with the people around us. I’m sure you can relate to the feeling of guilt about not texting someone back, or feeling like you havent reached out to that one friend in a long time. Social media, phones and the internet have made it easier than ever to stay in touch with people but that also increases the guilt we feel for NOT staying in touch. In addition we just have way more social connections than ever before which is exhausting for the social machinery in our brain that developed to maintain relationships limited to mostly the people who were close by.
One of the core drivers of evolutionary selection is competition, we’re hardwired to look at our peers and compare ourselves because without that drive, we wouldn’t be very likely to pass on our genes. Again, in small groups this works pretty well, it motivates us to contribute and make sure we’re taking care of ourselves. Now instead of comparing ourselves to the smaller group of people in our immediate surroundings we are comparing ourselves to everyone who we see online. They’ve done studies that show it feels better to be big fish in a small pond then an average fish in a huge ocean. It’s an impossible task to feel comfortable when comparing ourselves to so many people, and oftentimes what is on our feeds is fabricated or enhanced. Even being aware of this, it is almost impossible to turn off the comparison machinery in our brains because it was so essential to survival and reproduction.
Social cohesion was essential to human progress, but to enforce pro-social behaviors our brain needs a reward system. Dopamine along with other neurotransmitters helps enforce behaviors that increase or chances of survival, and it was social behaviors that oftentimes were the most important to survival. It makes sense then that social activities are strong triggers for all the chemicals in our brain that make us feel good. Social approval and validation is a good example, if your community approved of you, you were likely in a good position to find a partner and have your kids taken care of. Of course now that anything we do can be shared and engaged with by our peers we’re highly motivated to seek out that approval and validation. This desire for validation increases when we're vulnerabl, motivating us further to seek it out.
While it is nice to think humans are logical and fact driven, in most cases we are not. More powerful than almost any fact or logic is social reinforcement. When we look around us and people tell us what we’re doing is OK then we tend to accept and believe that. This is what allows a lot of terrible things to happen, such as war and genocide. If the people around us seem to support and accept what is happening we’re capable of some pretty terrible things. Social reinforcement was previously limited to the people who were around you but now with the internet you can find a community for pretty much any belief or ideology. This is bad when people find themselves welcomed into online communities that have extremist or violent views, where they find the social reinforcement to maintain their beliefs and opinions. It also creates a vicious cycle where if you look hard enough you can find supposed evidence or facts for pretty much anything.
With all this increased social stimuli you would think that we would feel more connected and have vibrant social lives, yet loneliness is on the rise. There are many factors involved in increased loneliness outside of the internet, like the development of nuclear families or a shift to urban living, but the internet also plays its role. We may have increased online interactions that give us a quick hit of dopamine but in person interactions are down, why go out or get dinner with a friend when you can check up on them with a quick text?
All this being said, these are things to take into account and be aware of, but at the end of the day social media and the internet are not going anywhere. What needs to be done is not get rid of social media but find ways to offset the chaos introduced by the impact and speed of this new technology. There are plenty of far reaching and positive impacts of social media and the internet and there will continue to be many more. This is a tool like any other that we need to teach ourselves and others how to interact with and apply in the right directions.