Slashdot Mirror
Social Media Are Driving Americans Insane (bloomberg.com)
Deena Shanker, writing for Bloomberg: If you pull out your phone to check Twitter while waiting for the light to change, or read e-mails while brushing your teeth, you might be what the American Psychological Association calls a "constant checker." And chances are, it's hurting your mental health. Last week, the APA released a study finding that Americans were experiencing the first statistically significant stress increase in the survey's 10-year history. In January, 57 percent of respondents of all political stripes said the U.S. political climate was a very or somewhat significant source of stress, up from 52 percent who said the same thing in August. On Thursday, the APA released the second part of its 1 findings, "Stress In America: Coping With Change," examining the role technology and social media play in American stress levels. [...] The highest stress levels, it should be noted, are reserved for those who constantly check their work e-mail on days off. Their average stress level is 6.0. So those of you who think it's somehow pleasant to work from home on a Saturday afternoon, you're actually fooling yourself.
...than the current Psychotic-in-Chief?
I definitely got a little burned out on Social Media since the election. I think I've used Twitter a half dozen times since then, and am only checking Facebook once or twice a day, usually to send birthday greetings. Some days I don't get on at all. It definitely lets you do more important/productive things, and you stay out of arguments with your left/right friends who are posting fallacious memes.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
It is not driving me insane!
now give me a minute to see what fark, deadspin, facebook, twitter, reddit, tumblr, livejournal, wordpress, and blogger have to say about it.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I think the big problem is that everyone seems to want to use social media to shout their political and social beliefs constantly and non-stop. Before the rise of social media I had a pretty good idea of where my friends were in the political/social spectrum, but we never really discussed it. Now it seems that everyone must not only tell you where they stand on issues, but they have to tell you why you're wrong for not taking the same stance. Day after day with the smug condescending memes, fake news pieces from whacked out websites, pointless hoaxes that Snopes debunked years ago ad nausem. After a while it just gets on your nerves and you either join them, drop out, or go insane. I've pretty much filtered or unfollowed just about everyone on Facebook because I'm tired of it (whether I agreed with them or not). If it wasn't for some of the computer groups I follow I'd probably never log into FB anymore.
Humans spot risk, oddities in recognisable patterns and are far more likely to remember negative events because they are hard wired to do so.
As hunter-gatherers (you know, in the time before writing and the invention of religion) we'd either learn to spot danger and do what we can to avoid it or have decreased chances of survival...fast forward 100(?) thousands years or so and the information revolution gave us access to numerous sources of negativity and percieved risk. Once upon a time to find a heretic you had to travel! -now you can speak with a blasphemer in under 10 seconds just go to a forum or heck, skype them!
Some people are unable to detach, disassociate or become desensitised. Often the stress is not even about real threats just amplified mass fear of awful weather, cheating in their favourite sport, injustice of what they consider their basic rights etc.
Basically like all humans, people suffer from the human condition. Humans are irrational. They are more concerned with controlling borders than traffic accidents despite traffic being the proven killer. They are more worried about terrorists than the flu and yet one kils hundreds of times more. Humans are scared their children might develop diametrically opposed beliefs if they associate with certain other kids but turn a blind eye to the negative imapcts of their own beliefs because they seldom scrutinize it...the list goes on.
Americans are not crazy but they are being driven crazy by a political system that preys on fear. News network that compete to report the latest disaster. Corporations that research their insecurities about their body and sell them shit they do not need.
Actually this happens everywhere...somehow this more pronounced in the US for reasons I'll let others suggest.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
For whatever extent you want to talk about the news itself being the cause of stress (which is fair to do), I think we have to look also look at the setup of the platforms, human nature, and the culture around social media, as likely contributing factors.
Because really, however bad the news was, 20 years ago you'd be waiting for the nightly news to find out about it. Several decades before that, you'd be waiting for the following day's newspaper. Now, we're getting constant updates, and those updates may be causing a device in your pocket to vibrate and make noise every time something new comes out. We know that checking all of those notifications is addictive, and not checking causes stress. However, constantly feeling the need to check also causes stress. (human nature)
Also, we have grown to expect that everyone is constantly online, always checking all of their platforms. Speaking for myself, I get messages via various social networks, and if I don't respond immediately, people freak out and take personal offense. Even when I try to remove those apps from my phone or turn off notifications, I get angry messages from people because I'm ignoring them. (culture)
I think it's also worth pointing out that most of these platforms are not really designed for occasional use. I've thought it would be nice if you could set a time-based digest of a social networking site. For example, instead of looking at Twitter, give me a weekly digest of the tweets that (based on some criteria) I'm going to be most likely to want to read and respond to. Only update Twitter at 9am on Sunday mornings with the 25 most important tweets of the week. But Twitter doesn't work that way. It's basically built on the idea that you're always looking, always paying attention, because if you stop paying attention for a day or two, you're just going to miss things and they'll get buried under a flood of other tweets. (the platforms)
Basically, I don't think we can do much about the human-nature aspect. Realistically, I don't foresee the platforms changing because they're providing the instant-feedback that people want. In my thinking, they key would be to change the culture and expectations around social media, which would change what we want from the platform, which would change the platform.
But then, intentionally changing culture is not so easy either.
Before Nintendo and Sega, there was Atari, Mattel and, later, Coleco. Yet, it never stopped us from playing outside. What your mother doesn't tell you is that kids stopping going outside was mostly because women became the head of the household during the 80s (instead of men), and so making sure kids were safe became the utmost priority. On the one hand, mothers said they wanted their kids to play outside, but, on the other hand it had to be in a controlled way and kids had to be watched all the time. So kids ended up preferring to stay in their rooms. Don't blame consoles or the Internet, blame mothers.
It's the reason we have the term "FOMO", or Fear of Missing Out. By not being attached to our phones 24/7 we fear we're going to miss big news about something (... almost always trivial in the big scheme of things).
If you hate that term, get used to it - it's a root of the term for the phobia, and as a medical diagnosis.
I've the exact opposite problem. I managed to 'train' my friends to never send me SMS messages except for emergencies. I could carry my old cell phone with me just for emergencies. Smart Phones are something else however. You are constantly updated with all kinds of notifications. Even when you turn out all notifications and want to use your smart phone you see all those numbers of missed notifications, messages or emails on your screen. That's the reason why I gave up on smart phones. I still have my iPhone 4S but it just lays on my desktop connected to my computer. I never take it with me. I've also given up on emails entirely, except at work. I don't check work email at home. I've never made profiles on any social network. I rarely watch television, only when there is a program I would like to see, after recording it of course.
I only read newspapers on the internet on a tablet or at my desktop at home (I pay for the digital edition) and I sometimes read Slashdot. I don't use internet everyday. In summer or weekends when the weather is nice I prefer to hike or bike or I go out with friends in my free time. Although I'm more disconnected than most, I still feel the pressure of the always connected people in my life.
Many people have similar opinions about some issues. I never understood why all of the sudden when we grow older most of my friends have the same opinions. When we were teenagers and in our twenties we had interesting discussions about small problems and world politics. Today they all have similar ideas. I've noticed when a friend tried to convince me, he pulled out his smartphone and showed websites that he learned through facebook. That's when I was struck. Have my friends become drones? The most frustrating part is that lately they have become anti-Trump drones. I didn't know Trump except that he was a wealthy non politician going for president, I just understood that he was hated by established media and politicians but loved by the voters. That can happen. But how can someone who isn't American become an anti-Trump drone and even start using American English slogans. I've even heard them talk about 1984. I told them that they looked more like the 1984 workers who knew the truth about some far away event from the screen then that inexperienced president who doesn't know how to talk like a politician and offends a lot of people with short tweets. When I told them they were drones of the cultural hegemony as described by Antonio Gramsci I expected an interesting discussion like in our younger years. Instead they became offended and angry and compared me with Hitler...
This happened a few weeks ago, and it is just one of the many anecdote that slowly turns me crazy. It seems that the always connected people stop thinking about the information they read. There is probably too much different information on a short time that makes it impossible to actually think things over. This makes them take over opinions from the national media without forming their own opinion. I don't know. I do know that more and more people are convinced about an opinion and don't accept a different opinion and sometimes even freak out when you say you don't agree.
Like that overweight girl that started convincing me about the fact that meat is very unhealthy and that we were not build to eat meat, while she was eating an orange carrot. I told her we were evolved to eat meat hence why we have large brains, but we are definitely not evolved to eat orange carrots because orange carrots are a result of the meat powered human brain who managed to selectively breed the woody texture out of carrots to make them edible and even managed to selectively breed the colour orange as a tribute to "Willem van Oranje". The ancestors of the carrots could only be harvested in the wild for a limited period before carrots/roots became like wood. She didn't know what to say. This was information she never heard about. Instead she started to call me names and walked away with an angry face when nobody