Age and Social Media Addiction: The Surprising Connection
Video Transcript
Steven Gacovino – Personal Injury Attorney – Suffolk County (Long Island), NY
Let’s just assume that it’s most of us, all right? Let’s assume that it’s most of us that have been affected by it. I’ve seen it not just in, and not just in young people. I mean, this is something that we’re, you know, with young people with a formative brain, I am certain that it’s worse. I’ve been told by people that are smarter than me and understand brain development better than I do that yes, the ages of 11 to 26 are the areas of most vulnerability. But I have two eyes and I can see. And I look at people all day long that create their own individual realities, even as adults, whether it’s through their newsfeed or whether it’s through their Facebook feed, where two people could be sitting next to each other, 10 feet away from each other, and have a completely different view of the world, right? So we know that we’re seeing it there. Could you imagine how bad it is for young people that are yet more vulnerable and that their brains are yet more receptive to false information, misinformation, harmful information, negative information, where they continue to pound away and look at this stuff over and over and over. So, yeah, I think that we all understand, whether it’s psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists, counselors, teachers, educators, primary care physicians, parents, children, I think that all of us know that it’s wrong. All of us know that there’s a problem.
As far as some sort of a medical diagnosis, I think that what you have is the fallout from addiction, which becomes the diagnosis. And that’s, so those diagnoses that might exist are anxiety, depression, anorexia, bulimia, other eating disorders. Body dysmorphia disorders, a lot of extreme problems where people look at themselves in the mirror and they don’t feel good about themselves. These things are born out of the exposure to social media, which is just a pounding of negativity that they view on a daily basis. And not only do they view it on a daily basis, they view it for hours and hours and hours at a time. Many of my clients, I talk to them, they say that their children are never off on social media, meaning that that social media app is open while they should be sleeping. And every time some sort of a notification goes off, they feel an immediate need to react to it. That’s the way these services are designed.
Engagement, engagement, engagement is what they want because engagement makes that customer more valuable to whoever it is that wants to sell to them at the end of the day. So when you’re able to say that, look, I have, you know, hundreds of millions of users. And of those hundreds of millions of users, hundreds of millions of them use the product for seven or eight hours per day. My goodness, what a boom that is for those companies to sell advertising to reach their potential customers. And anybody likes to get a more youthful customer. That’s why these things are skewed the way they are.
