Cesspool of negativity.
while on social media, we get anxious and induce the desire to continue staying connected with what others are doing. so when you are on your phone, you see the Instagram, why are you doing it? because you need to see photos? NO! because of somebody smarter than you, (definitely smarter than me), wrote an algorithm that's designed to trick our brains into wanting to look at these programs as much as humanly possible.
The FOMO factory goes like this:
You open up the twitter, you read interesting information, you close the app, you are thinking about that information, you wanna know more about it, you open up the app. Then, you get curious, you read about different information, you close the app, you think about that information, you get curious, you open up the app, you read the next information.
so this FOMO factory has you consuming a lot of information. So the cost of that cycle is you're filling your brain with all of this information, so what is the value of that information, what is the return on that cost.
see, I think the cost versus the value is a very important equation. so for me, the COST of using Twitter or Instagram for a couple of hours a day was all of my damn attention and the VALUE or the return of that cost was a little bit of information, for sure, but a LOT of noise.
you think about maybe youtube on the cost versus value equation, the cost is a lot of your attention, you sort of know where you are getting yourself into when you click play on a video on youtube, you are consuming three minutes or ten minutes whatever of something that you chose to engage in. the value is that I am learning something new, am consuming somebody else’s artistic creation, its something I appreciate (i mean yeah, sometimes it is garbage). But you get the point that I am trying to draw. There's a lot less NOISE in other forms of media than there is on social media. for every tweet that you think is thought-provoking, there are hundreds of tweets that are just noise.
I know that I make noise, I participate in those tweets and I post on Instagram, I am also the part of this noise. I follow almost 300 people on Instagram who are making noise.
Instagram for an instance, it's like a TV analogy, its equivalent to sitting in front of the television and just clicking the remote for like an hour and every day you are consuming 2 seconds of each channel. It's the NOISE. IT’S STATIC.
Hang on, I am gonna take this to a positive place, am a big fan of social media. let me finish.
Instagram.
I was spending more time on Instagram than I was spending on twitter. I think of any social media platform, Instagram if by far the most addictive. and I do think that there's less noise when it comes to how your brain processes photos versus how your brain processes 280 characters people’s ideas on twitter. I think spending an hour plus on Instagram can be more destructive to my brain health, than spending an hour a day on twitter. and that's because of their algorithm.
Instagram's algorithm scares the ever-living sh*t out of me, and it scares the sh*t out of you too.
it sounds conspiratorial, but it's not conspiratorial.
you ever read about facebook’s quarterly earning calls? basically what the financial health of the company is?
there are a couple of metrics that they always brag about. they talk about DA use (daily active users), MA use (monthly active users). and how much time they are spending on their sites, apps, networks. that like literally means, the more time you spend on their platform, the more successful they are as a company.
ok, to bring that full circle, its in a company’s absolute unequivocal interest to build a product that is going to get you to spend as much time as possible on it.
“These are programs designed to monopolize human attention by any means necessary because that is their business.”- New York Times.
