Is social media driving us insane?

Episode Transcript
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episodes hit every Monday and Wednesday on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify,
or anywhere else you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff
to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey,

(01:05):
welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamp and my name is Christian Seger. So we're
recording this a week after the election here in the
United States. Uh, and we're kind of reeling not just
from the election, but from the social media reverberations around it.
And so Robert and I were talking about it, and

(01:26):
we said, you know, there's a lot of research. We
see a lot of research fly across our screens about
mental health and social media. Let's do a dive and
figure out what we know so far about this, because
it seems like a topic at least from my social
media feeds, that people are interested in right now. Yeah,

(01:46):
I mean, there's there's absolutely no escaping it, um, because
here we are at the the tail end of s
and uh, you know, just looking back on it, taking
into account everything that sort of happened with social media.
Let's say we had billions of tweets and Facebook status
updates about the US election as they were happening. Yeah. No,
I don't know about you, but like everything, I'm seeing everything.

(02:09):
But I'd say a good fifty percent of the people
in my feet are saying, like, sorry, I've got to
take a step away from this. On top of this, uh,
political activity and political inactivity. Um, you also have seen,
of course, a lot of slanted and misinformed articles that
have made the rounds, and that is something that is
being covered in the media currently, How does uh, how

(02:30):
does Facebook? How does Google as um uh as a
as a as a manager of these different properties, as
a curative of these properties, how does how do they
factor into this equation? Um? You know, and and of
course on top of that, we also had a really good,
in a really depressing season of black Mirror. Just put

(02:50):
it all in the perspective. But but you know, we
we have to we come back to looking at social
media and what its role is this thing that we've created,
this thing that we use every every day. So how
much of what we're feeling now? And uh and and
these um, these opinions, these these emotions that are being expressed.
How much of that can we blame on social media itself?

(03:13):
How much of it is just what people have always felt? Uh?
You know, it's just the immediate concern is always more pressing,
more real, there's always more fire to it. So and
you know, are we just are are we just blowing
everything out of out of proportion and simply looking for
forces to blame? Yeah? I think, uh, well, we're gonna
really get into it with the research today. But I

(03:34):
just like to say that I think that there's a
certain amount of technological determinism that goes along with the
idea that it's social media's fault quote unquote. UM. And
from the research, the big lesson that I learned, and
maybe you know at the end we'll revisit this is
that it's not the medium, it's how we approach the
medium and what we bring to it. Um. And before

(03:59):
we start, I think, I think, like I just want
to share a little bit with the audience. I have
personal social media policies already in place. I've talked about
these on other shows before. I probably talked about them
on here before. Um, this one's a little weird. I
only read Facebook, my Facebook personal stream if I'm in

(04:19):
a bathroom. Yeah, I that's my My policy is, I
don't want to read it at my desk. I don't
want to read it if I'm in my living room
or my bedroom, or if I'm on bus whatever. Uh,
it stays in the bathroom and and whatever it brings
up for me, if it's anger or sadness or frustration

(04:41):
or even happiness or whatever, I keep it there. Um.
Now that's for personal stuff. We always advocate at the
end of every episode. Hey, visit us on social media
My job is to look at social media for stuff
to blow your mind and how stuff works in our
other brands. Yeah. I wish I could step away from Facebook, really,
but it's this thing I gotta do every morning. Yeah. Yeah,

(05:04):
And I curate all my feeds, meaning for both Twitter
and Facebook. So on Facebook, if i'm quote friends with
a person and they're posting things that upset me, then
I'll do the I forget what the terminology is hide
or uh. I basically make it so I can't see
their stuff, but I don't say to them I hate you,

(05:26):
I don't want to be friends. And there's there's unfollowing,
there's there's fighting, there's requestion to see the less of somebody.
I mean, that's the That's the thing is that everyone engages.
Unless you're just like a rare and novice user of
say Facebook or Twitter or what have you. There's always
a certain amount of curation. You're choosing who to follow,
then you're choosing who to unfollow or hide. The algorithm

(05:48):
on Facebook is U is accounting for your preferences and
you're getting this custom stream of information and uh. On Twitter,
I make use of lists tremendously. I mean, and I
think I probably follow six hundred people on Twitter, and
I actually follow less than a hundred people on Twitter
because I have a list of what I actually look at.

(06:09):
You know, I don't want to offend people by unfollowing
them or you know, I use Twitter for networking. Uh
you know, so sometimes if I'm seeing stuff that's just
overwhelming me, I say, you know what, you don't need
to be in the list anymore. I'm gonna You're gonna
take a break from you for a little bit. Um
And all this is, you know, in my posting, I
just try to share things that I enjoy about the

(06:31):
world or communicate with people who are in my areas
of interest. Podcasting, we talk a lot about horror on
the show, things like that, and especially with people who
are physically far away. I mean, I won't deny social
media has been a great tool for me to meet
people within our field and to make friends. Um. So, again, like,
there are problems here, and we're gonna talk about a

(06:53):
lot of problems that have been found with the research
in this, But I don't want to be technologically deterministic
and say Facebook is bad. Yeah, yeah, I mean I
love Facebook as a as a as a method of
sharing pictures of my my son, pictures of my family,
keeping up with with with with friends and family members
that are far away. Uh. And that's probably what I

(07:15):
use it for Facebook for the most personally, that and
just sharing of things that relate to my interests. Uh.
And then here at work, of course for stuff to
blow your mind. We share our content. We we curate
content that fits either our show brand or sort of
the loose host brand. So if you follow our our
our Facebook feed, you'll see a lot of stuff that's
not really attributed. But if something's like a little more

(07:37):
of a Christian thing or a little more Robert thing, etcetera,
then you're gonna see that we've we've tagged it, or
if the statement on is a little more in our
individual boys usually try to put our initials or something
like yeah yeah, But you know, it's basically comes to really,
I guess my approach to all the very social media
uses that I I use them as a way to

(07:57):
share things that I think are pretty cool or I
think are important. Yeah. I remember reading a blog post
when smartphones first started becoming popular, and it was basically
like a like a sort of guide for for newbies
on like, what should you be posting to social media?
You want to get involved in this, how do you
do it? And you know, obviously we've gone awry since then,
but it was basically, what throughout your day as you

(08:21):
go throughout the world do you see that's wondrous that
makes you laugh or that you find interesting or insightful
or mean? Like, do you physically see something, take a
picture of it, share that and that excites you. Or
if you read an article that you think is insightful,
share that something along those lines. That's and that that's
for the most part, how I've always held it. I
am absolutely guilty any stuff to blow your mind. Listeners

(08:43):
who have followed me on Twitter know that I like
a good presidential debate and I like to live tweet
and make jokes during it that that I'm totally guilty
of that. But you know, for the most part, I
try to make it a curation of things that I
find in the world that are great. One thing that
really like about your social media feed is your wife's

(09:04):
a photographer, and so there's always these gorgeous pictures of
either your family or stuff that she's shooting out in
the world. As you guys travel around. Yeah, yeah, I'm
looking in that regard because the imagery is so important
on social media. And even though I know less about
photography and how to work the camera than virtually anybody

(09:24):
I know, my wife does all that, and uh, we're
able to get a good image out there. But you know,
that's that kind of ties into a lot of what
we're going to discuss today. It's the the image, the representation,
the thing that you put out there. Because ultimately, what
we're getting around to with all of this is that
your social media presence is kind of a is a
piece of you, but it is not the whole of you.

(09:44):
It is a version of yourself. And then everything that
you consume out there is a version of reality. So
you have this creation of the subjective self, a creation
of the subjective reality. And that is where we find
ourselves here, Um at the close and the dawn. We're
all performing ourselves in different ways. It always makes me

(10:07):
think of um, the great monologue play actor, uh Spalding Gray.
I don't know if you've ever listened to Spalding Gray's
stuff before, but he would give these long, hour long
monologues about events in his life and people felt like
they knew him, they felt like he was their best friend.
And he would say that person who you're listening to

(10:29):
on stage, that's me, but that's not actually me. That's
a performance of myself. And he committed suicide before social
media really got big. So I would I would be
curious to see how what his opinion of Facebook or
Twitter would be, because I think that we're all kind
of doing the same thing. Now. Yeah, I mean, I've

(10:49):
I've read very compelling arguments that really even outside of
social media, where none of us are a particular individual,
where there's kind of this chorus of selves, right, with
some with louder voices than others, some with with voices
that are trailing off as we age, some with the
voices that are growing louder um. But yeah, the idea
that there's a particular you maybe doesn't even hold up

(11:12):
in the real world or in social media. Yeah, sure,
where that's that's I guess. Uh, this is the hippiest
thing I'm gonna say on stuff to bile your mind.
The beauty of humanity is where a myriad of identities.
All right, Well, that on that note, let's let's move
into a little bit let's uh, let's let's get into
the meat of this episode and uh and discuss where

(11:32):
we are with social media, where we what the research
is saying. Okay, So, reportedly one in four people worldwide
are on social media, and fort of online adults are
using multiple social networking sites. That would include both of us.
On average, Americans spend seven points six hours a month

(11:55):
using social media. That sounds really low to me. I
would think it would be more like three hours a
day or something like that. There's a lot of of
of using social media while you're doing everything everything else, right, Yeah, exactly,
So I wonder if there's some misreporting going on there
or something. I'm not quite sure. Um, sixty of American

(12:18):
Facebook users logging daily, of them logging multiple times a day? Again, guilty,
So I'm I'm even though I'm only doing it in
the bathroom, it's multiple times a day. Uh. And a
good starting point for this episode that I found was
an article called Online Social Networking and Mental Health. It's

(12:38):
written by a guy named Igor Pantic and it was
published in the Journal of Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking.
So it's two years old. It's a little there's there's
a little bit more research that's been published out there,
but it's basically a review of all the research on
this topic that was done up until this point. Uh,

(12:59):
And so we're gonna throw it in along with the
research that we did for this episode. Before we get started, though,
let's let's acknowledge it's difficult to assess social media's effects
on mental health. Most of the studies that we're going
to present here, they use an approach a methodology of
correlation analysis. And remember, correlation doesn't actually equal causality. So

(13:22):
for example, we can't tell if Facebook causes low self
esteem or if people who already had low self esteem
are more likely to use it. We just we can't
tell which is the cause and which is the effect.
But regardless, there seems to be a relation, as we're
gonna talk about between low self esteem and Facebook. UM,
So just keep that in mind as we're going through

(13:44):
these studies. Yeah, and some of the studies we turned
to as well, like they're they're more general media studies,
so they may refer either to an earlier mode of
the Internet they may or social media use. They may
refer even to other media um services out there or
platforms such as television, so as far as our social

(14:05):
media age, the place where we're currently standing in the
needed uh it it all started innocently enough. Um. The
author Nicholas Carr has a wonderful article from Ian magazine
published earlier this year titled The Worldwide Cage, in which
he discusses the rise and in a sense, the spiritual
fall of social media. So you know, he points back

(14:27):
to the summer of two thousand five just being the
time when when Web two point oh really arrived and
and pump new life and money into my space flicker
linked in in the recently launched Facebook. Car rights quote cyberspace,
with its disembodied voices and ethereal avatars, seemed mystical from
the start. It's unearthly vastness a receptacle for the spiritual

(14:49):
yearnings and tropes of the US. What better way, wrote
the philosopher Michael him in The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace,
to emulate God knowledge than to create a virtual world
constituted by bits of information and uh and Car points
to an August two thousand five Wired magazine cover article

(15:11):
that proclaimed the birth of a new world, empowered by
what he referred to as the electricity of participation. And
this is the quote from that particular article by Kevin Kelly.
We are the web. The electricity of participation nudges ordinary
folks to invest huge hunks of energy and time into
making free Encyclopedia is creating public tutorials for changing a

(15:32):
flat tire or cataloging the votes in the Senate. More
and more of the web runs in this mode. One
study found that of the web is commercial, the rest
runs on duty or passion. So we have this, this
this idea that the electricity of participation. It sounds great, right,
it does sound great, but it's also from the from

(15:52):
the inside of the media organization looking out. We know
that this is something that comes around and around again,
and if you google it you can learn more about it.
User generated content is the term that is used to
describe a lot of what Kevin Kelly is talking about here.
Now everything from reviews on Amazon to comments on a

(16:16):
YouTube video or every post on Facebook. Right, all of
it is content that's generated that makes somebody money. But
the but the people who are creating and the people
who are writing it or posting it or taking these
pictures or whatever, they're just doing it. Out of their participations.
Electricity of participation. Um, And I can't tell you how

(16:38):
many times as I've been working in this business. Every
couple of years it comes back around again. What if
we figured out some way to get the audience to
make something and then we can make money off of it. Right? Well,
and for me, the electricity of participation, it makes me think. Certainly,
you can think of all sorts of positive modes of
people getting involved, participating and creating great things, creating some

(17:03):
of the most amazing things in human history. But there's
also an electrictyer of participation to say, burning a witch
or something. Sure so yeah, so in these cases, particularly
what Kevin Kelly was talking about, it's really summoning up
to like the best high minded futuristic ideas of what
this could mean. But his car lays out these notions
were essentially blown up by quote over indulged rich guys

(17:27):
unquote who often went a bit cessational and forecasting the
coming tech utopia. So they based their predictions on their
early web, which was a smaller system and it was
populated by a smaller sampling of society. Yeah, you know,
I feel like the the ideal here was that like
the Internet was supposed to become sort of like the
modern era public coffee house, where there would be civilized

(17:49):
discourse and critical thought and everybody would respect one another.
And hey, it's early days yet, maybe it'll become that
at some point. But the most part what we see
is people trying to express really complicated ideas in a
hundred and forty characters or less. I'll read one more
quote from from car here, but I and and encourage
everyone to check out the article in full length. I'll

(18:11):
include a link to it on the landing page for
this episode. But he said, the culture that emerged on
the network and that now extends deep into our lives
and psychees, is characterized by frenetic production and consumption. Smartphones
have made medium machines of us all but little real
empowerment and even less reflectiveness. It's a culture of distraction

(18:32):
and dependency. Uh so here we are, Yeah, yeah, we
really have. I mean, it's it's kind of crazy to
me when I think back on how ingest a little
over ten years, we've just gone from zero to sixty
with social media. You know. Um, and this isn't to
be like I'm older or anything like that, but like

(18:54):
I remember getting my first iPod Touch and being like, oh,
I can take this with me anywhere where there's WiFi.
At the time, I had to have WiFi, and I
can write an email, or I can take a picture
or whatever, you know. And it was it literally was
like a sci fi thing had happened and just dropped
into my hand. And now it's just every day, you know.

(19:17):
And it's not just every day for our generation or
the generation before ours. I have friends who are baby
boomers that are in their mid to late sixties, and
they're using smartphones and Facebook and Twitter just as much
as the rest of us. It's a misconception to think
that it's just a tool for young people. Yeah, indeed,
I mean it's it's everywhere. It's it's through throughout society

(19:37):
and and the sci fi aspects of it. I can't
help but think back to to Doone Frank Herbert's done,
and the idea of the Butlerian Jahad, where people rose
up against against machines again, and we're empowered by this
notion that thou shalt not make machine and the likeness
of the human mind, which was never completely fleshed out
in Herbert's books. But it lends itself to different interpretations,

(19:58):
either the straight up termin or robots are coming to
get this idea, or machinery. Technology has changed the way
that we think too much, has changed the way that
we interact with the world, the way we process the world,
and that there is something inhuman about it it should
be rebelled against. Well, I'm gonna throw an idea out

(20:18):
here and then maybe let's go to an ad break. Uh.
This is based on a recent sci fi movie I saw.
I'm not going to say the name because I don't
want to spoil it, but we know there's a theory
that language. Different languages change the way we think. Yeah, yeah,
so if you think of social media as a language,

(20:39):
then of course the way we think is going to
be uh malleable around that absolutely. All right, Well on that.
Now we're gonna take a quick break and we come back.
We're gonna jump back into into the topic. We're gonna
get into some more research, some more stats, and see
where we are in terms of social media sanity. The

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So in the late nineteen nineties, studies were originally published

(22:08):
that indicated that the internet's use had general effects on
our social relationships and our participation in community life. The
findings here were that increased time spent online related to
a decline in communication with family members, as well as
a reduction of the internet's user or the internet users
social circle, and all of this led back to depression

(22:31):
and loneliness. Let's step back from this for a second, though,
and evaluate these early studies weren't able to take into
account the new ways in which humans were creating communication
and social relationships outside of real life. Uh. And some
of these studies really read to me like a long
history of academia's phobia of new media when it first

(22:53):
comes up. Think of television, think of comic books, even right,
all of them had this backlash when they had a
urgent popularity. Now, for instance, these studies refer to social
media interactions as being shallow and unable to replace every
day face to face communication. I agree that they can
often be shallow, but there's also a possibility for meaningful,

(23:15):
deep communication there that might not be facilitated in real life,
especially for some people who maybe have real life social anxiety. Yeah,
or you're you're you know, you're you find yourself in
an area where like minded individuals are not necessarily there,
or or individuals who maybe um have a philosopher have

(23:36):
ideas that are beneficial to your identity. Um. Yeah, I
I always have to remind myself, you know, it's we
shouldn't forget that there was There was this time not
long ago, when there was this definite weird otherness to
online society and relationships. Like I remember not to sound
old or to sound like I'm trying to make myself

(23:58):
sound like this was you know, asked, Yeah, yeah, but
you know, like what ten years ago or so or
more like the MySpace era. Uh. You know, I remember
when you you maybe were less inclined to mention that
you met your significant other online because that would would
be kind of weird, Like that the kind of thing
you would in the best case scenario, you might make
an amusing rom com about it. But it's like what

(24:20):
you're meeting people online and dating them? Uh, there was
a weirdness in discussing online friends versus real friends, like
and and maybe even processing it, like coming to terms
with the fact. And I've certainly been there where like
the the there have been times in my life where
I feel like the online relationships and discussions I'm having
we're definitely more meaningful than than the ones I was

(24:42):
having in the real world. Yeah I had, I don't know.
It's a profound experience with this. Uh. That definitely changed
how I approached electronic media mediated communication, which was I was.
I am a recovering World of Warcraft addict, and I've
talked about this on on our sister podcast here Stuff

(25:04):
of Life before with Tracy V. Wilson Um. We both
played World of Warcraft. I replaced my social relationships with
World of Warcraft when I moved to Atlanta because I
didn't know anybody, and my wife and I would spend
I would say, eight to nine hours a day on
it um and the people who were on that with

(25:26):
us were our friends, and that was where we had
social relationships and we talked about what was going on
in the real world and and it was and I
knew people who were all who were even deeper into
it than I was, and they would say things to
me like I like this better than the real world.
I would rather be in here. And so we would

(25:46):
remember all the articles that were coming out around that
time of like like I believe that there was one
pretty infamous World of Warcraft player who died and they
had a funeral for this person in the game, hundreds
of thousands of avatars all showed up in this one
location and maybe crash the server or something like that. Uh.
And I have to say that during that time I

(26:10):
was depressed and was certainly addicted to that game, especially
like when I read through the research for today's episode,
I recognized behaviors in myself from that era. Uh. That
doesn't mean like I was like, oh, I'm never gonna
play video games again, you know it could we talk
all the time on the show about video games and
stuff like that. But but immersing myself like that, the

(26:33):
way I did it, it wasn't healthy. So do you
feel like it was? It was more of a detriment
than a coping mech And because because you can, I
can also see like you could do the spin on
it where you could say, hey you it was a
kind of a lonely time and this was a social
um and biblical cord to connect you to like a
social existence. Yeah, it was both. Frankly, I mean like

(26:54):
it was it was one way to connect me with
people I had just moved to a new city where
I didn't know all to people. But then at the
same time, it was also like the the how do
I put this? World of Warcraft is a really good
job of stringing a carrot along in front of your face,
so you you have to keep playing right, And sometimes
it became outside of the social relationships. It was just

(27:16):
like I have to be on to do the thing.
I can't miss the thing. Uh, And man, did I
see a lot of human beings have meltdowns in that game?
So uh, it's just it's interesting. I mean, also, if
you if you go and look, I'm sure there's probably
a hundred dissertations that are written about social communication and

(27:37):
World of Warcraft. But that's just my personal experience with it. Yeah,
I don't have any personal experience with World of Warcraft,
but I've certainly turned to games at times, like I
remember when the first SIMS game came out. Yeah, I
was that like kind of a an unemployed, un unguided
phase in my life. I want to say, it was
like the it came out like the one of the

(27:59):
summers after I graduated high school, and I just wasn't
sure what I was doing. But you could go in
and play the SIMS game, and it was It got
surreal and depressing pretty quickly when you realize you're sending
your fake people out for job interviews and they're buying houses,
and then you're like, God, what am I doing? And this?
What am I listening to? This this awful ambient piano music. Um,

(28:20):
do you want to hear a really messed up story
about the SIMS that will probably make you think less
of me? Okay? And that goes for you too, audience.
When I played the SIMS, I got addicted to it
for about a month or so. And what I would
do is I was in a job that I was
very unhappy and at the time, and I used the
SIMS to construct my office uh floor plan exactly like

(28:43):
my office was. And then I would put SIMS in
who are all of my coworkers, including my boss, who
we all really hated at the time, and they gave
them personality attributes that were similar to what their's were
in real life. And then I would occasionally do things
like my boss would, you know, go into the bathroom
and I would freeze time and some put a put

(29:04):
a cement wall in front of the door. And and
lock him in there for a week with no food,
and that came fed into every like dark fantasy, you know,
and I would just sit there and and laugh at it,
and it was cathartic. But it's also looking back on it,
that's some that's some messed up stuff. Yeah. I certainly

(29:27):
can relate to some of that with some of the
Grand Theft auto games. I guess the Vice City when
that came out, I remember spending way too much time
in that. And it's not always being a you know,
like a positive expression of self. Yeah, this is very
West World now, Yeah, getting into that territory. Well, you know,
any of Philip K. Dick readers out there, if you've
read the story The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldric, there's this, uh,

(29:50):
there's this little plot. I don't know if it's even
a plot points, but once since I've read it, but
there's this thing that comes up. These perky pat dolls
they're called, that people were assed with and they build
these little houses, or that they buy these little houses
and they film with these dolls, and these dolls kind
of live out their live out their own little lives,
and people, you know, kind of live through them. I

(30:11):
feel like that in a way like served as a
as a as an excellent metaphor for a lot of
what's going on today with virtual worlds and in the Internet. Again,
not to say that that that encapsulates all of it,
not to discount all the positive aspects, but there's certainly
a perky patentist to it. Weird easter egg that I
just figured out from you mentioning that short story. Isn't

(30:33):
Palmer Eldritch the name of the bad guy in the strain?
So that must be an homage to Philip I think
it is. Yeah, I think the the old corporate guy
who's working together with the vampiresh How did I never
put that together? It's strange anyways. All right, so let's
let's move on and discuss some more of the depressive
symptoms associated with social networking. Right, So, after these nineties

(30:56):
studies that were just sort of generalizing the Internet, it
led to studies into pressive symptoms that were associated with
social networking. One study found a correlation between high school
students and depressive symptoms, and the way they did this
was by using something called the back depression inventory. Now, Robert,
you wanna give us just like a primer on how

(31:16):
that works. Yeah. So basically, this is a twenty one
question multiple choice self report inventory. So it's a common
psychometric test for measuring the severity of depression, scoring minimal
to severe depression based on questions such as, uh, which
of which of these you know expresses your feelings? I
do not feel sad, I feel sad, I am sad

(31:36):
all the time and can't snap out of it. Or
I am so sad and unhappy that I cannot stand it.
And those would be like you would score like a zero,
a one, or two or three depending on which one
you picked. Based on my Facebook feed in the last week,
I am seeing a lot of the last one. I
am so sad or unhappy that I can't stand it. Um.
And I don't know if that's hyperbole or if it's

(31:58):
what people are actually feeling or not, but these tools
seem to be adequate. Yeah, I mean it comes to
an important question, like the expression of feeling is his
emotional reality? If you if you, if you, you know,
accuse somebody of expressing something and say like, oh, you
shouldn't feel that or you don't feel that, Like that's

(32:18):
that's ridiculous. Yeah, it's kind of like a paranormal experience,
it's still an experience. What an individual's experience is their
subjective experience. UM, don't try and put this objective mold
over how they should be feeling A reactive Yeah. I
think we've said this on the show before, when we've
talked about like the paranormal and science and relation to it.

(32:40):
I may not believe in the paranormal, but I believe
that that the people who are experiencing it believe it right,
and so therefore it's real to them. So when they
use this study, they compared it to television, and they
found that there is no correlation between television and depression.
Other authors argued that this isn't true for older adolescents.

(33:04):
It's only true for younger ones that they get depressed
when they're on social networking. So there's a possibility that
different age groups react differently to the challenges of social networking.
Then there's this study that found that that young adults
subjective perception of well being and life satisfaction was possibly

(33:24):
being undermined by social networking. The way that they did
this was they would text message the participants five times
a day for two weeks to evaluate at that point
in time, what their mental state was, what kind of
social interactions they were having, and what their Facebook use was. Now, personally,
I'm trying to imagine the challenges I went through in

(33:46):
a high school being kind of a nerdy, geeky kid,
and I can't picture how Facebook would have made my
life better. I just I really can't. Uh So, It's
that's tough for me to wrap my head around. But
the other tricky thing here is that researchers have found
that Facebook creates altered perceptions of physical and personality traits

(34:09):
of other users, leading us to incorrect conclusions about what
their characteristics are. So, for example, when four and twenty
five undergraduate students at a state university in Utah were studied,
they reported that Facebook made them think other people's lives
were happier than theirs, which lead them to constantly feeling
like life wasn't fair. And then this in itself doesn't

(34:32):
lead to depression, but those who are already predisposed to
anxiety or depression may find that it negatively impacts their
mental health. And there's still no conclusive evidence that Facebook
causes depression. I want to reiterate that there's no there's correlation,
but there's not causation here. Um, where we are in

(34:53):
the infancy of these studies, there's still a lot more
to go. People have started confronting this on Facebook or
Twitter or wherever by writing about how they may look
okay in their profile or their feed, but in reality
they're dealing with anxiety and depression, and they're confronting that

(35:13):
it's a curated version of reality. Even when we're being
honest about the negatives in our lives, it's still a
curated version of reality. So when researchers have tracked online behaviors,
they've found that there are certain Facebook habits that accompany depression.
For instance, people are more likely to focus on features

(35:34):
that focus on depression tips and facts on Facebook if
they're depressed. Well, that seems like a no brainer. But
they've also found that depression is related to having fewer
Facebook friends. This one's weird to me. Location tagging, the
whole geotagging phenomenon is has a correlation to depressed users
as well. I guess you kind of have to be

(35:55):
excited about where you are on some level to tag
yourself there. Like I don't really use duo tagging a lot.
But if I do, it's probably because say I went
to the zoo with my son and we had a
good time, or we went to the Center for Puppetry
Yards we had a good time. You know, it's I'm
I generally don't do it, say at the doctor's office.
You know that's the right thing. Yeah. Um, And this

(36:17):
seems like a good point. I want to remind everybody
of something. This pops up on a ton of house
stuff works programming, whether it's a video or text or podcasting,
something called Dunbar's Number. We have a brain stuff episode
of this. The way it goes is like this, it's
a study. First of all, there's a study that indicated
that the average American knows about six hundred people. Okay,

(36:38):
another study said, no, that's wrong, the average American only
knows two hundred and nine people. Well why is there
such a difference. Well, it depends on how well you
actually know them. So incomes Robin Dunbar, who's an anthropologist
and evolutionary psychologist from the University of Oxford, and he
proposes that our brains are hardwired to have a cognitive

(36:59):
limit on the number of people we know. This is
based on the correlation between the size of a primate's
brain and the size of its average social group. Now,
for humans, Dunbar's number was one hundred and fifty on average.
This means you can only have stable social relationships with

(37:20):
between roughly a hundred and two hundred people. Again not
conclusively proven though, Okay, but when researchers at Indiana University
analyzed the history of three million Twitter users, they identified
that twenty five million of these conversations where people maintain
actual relationships only occurred between one hundred and two hundred people.

(37:43):
So this seems there seems to be evidence that's leaning
towards this that you know, Yeah, I've got six hundred
people I follow on Twitter or however many on Facebook, right,
but I'm really only having relationships that are like quality
communication with somewhere between a hundred and two hundred people. Okay,
but that's online, right, exactly. Well, and in real life too, right,

(38:06):
I mean you have to consider a lot of the people. Frankly, nowadays,
a lot of the people that are part of your
real life world are also your online friends. Yeah, yeah,
and I think I certainly don't know a hundred and
fifty people in my real life. Yeah, Like, like I
think about say, for instance, you, me and Joe, we work,
we work together, we see each other like I see

(38:27):
you guys more than I see uh like most of
my friends. So we don't. We don't actually interact like
socially on social media all that much because you kind
of don't have to. Likewise, um, you've probably seen these,
uh these little clouds of terms that come up where
people show like what they were facebooking about this year

(38:48):
and and you know it'll be the big world center. Yeah,
the word clouds. So so like, I found this this
trend with a lot of people where like the thing
in the center of their life was not their significant other.
And I'm one level you might say, like, oh, why
why wasn't your your wife, your husband, etcetera in the
center of your cloud in big bold letters. Well, I
think part of that is that, like the relationship with

(39:10):
your signal now that goes beyond it goes beyond face.
You see them every day, you're talking to them, uh,
so you're not having to tag them necessarily, you know,
in a post all the time. Yeah, I mean my
wife is one of the few people who's privy to
what my actual life is. Like, Yeah, she knows about
the ups and downs. Uh, so I don't need to

(39:31):
post to her. I mean we do, we chat on
Facebook occasionally and stuff like that and make jokes, but like,
you know, she knows what's really going on with me.
I know what's really going on with her, So we
don't need to have that mediation in between. Yeah. Yeah,
so that sometimes we lose sight of that, that fact
that that the this, this social realm and the social
media realm is not the be all, and it's not

(39:54):
Also it's also not a one to one reflection of
what our social life consists of. So let's also remember this.
There's other research that's out there that online communication with
friends and family is associated with a decline in depression
and can strengthen social ties to benefit mental health. So

(40:14):
there's contrary views here. Once again, I think it's how
you're using the medium, not necessarily that the medium itself.
Um yeah, it. So there's this Pew research study. We
bring them up all the time on the show that
I call them the Masters of Surveys. They do all
the surveys and they've got all this data on um,

(40:35):
just just contemporary life Uh, And they did a survey
to establish whether and how much social media is stressing
people out. And to this end, they used a different scale,
it's called the perceived stress scale, to quantify how people
were upset, maybe out of control, feeling stressed, nervous, irritated,
or they were unable to cope with things in their lives.

(40:57):
And these were their findings. Those who are more educated
and those who are married or live with a partner
have less social media related stress. So that's interesting. That
relates to what we're just talking about, that you've got
somebody to sort of be yourself with. I suppose the
frequency of social media use has no direct relationship in men.

(41:20):
And what they mean by this is that men that
they've studied would have the same level of stress regardless
of whether they're using social media or not. But in women,
the use of some technologies is actually tied to lowering
stress for them. Uh. Social media users may be more
aware of stressful events happening to their friends and family,

(41:44):
and they perceive higher levels of social support within these networks. Generally,
we see this as a benefit. Right. It's sort of
like returning to the sort of what what's the term
like world village, you know, that kind of thing where
we're we're interacting as if we do physically live in
proximity to one another, even though we don't. So it's

(42:06):
seen as having a benefit. But but what if it
comes at a cost. So the average adult they interviewed
experienced five out of twelve possible stressful events solely through
their family and friends on social media. So social media
users are much more aware of major events in the
lives of the people close to them. But also they're

(42:28):
getting this surge of all these bad things are happening,
all these major quote unquote negative events are happening. Oh
my god. But when you pull back and you look
out at the lens, it's like, well, they're not all
happening on your street. They're all they're just happening in
the world. But it it comes back to a cultivation

(42:52):
and it it reminds me of mean World syndrome, which
stems from cultivation theory. This is a social theory developed
by George Gerbner and Larry Gross of the University of
Pennsylvania in the mid nineteen sixties, and their whole focus
was examining the long term effects of television. So very
different form of media. But but but but very related

(43:13):
in many senses, because in essence, the idea here is
that TV was slash. He is cultivating our culture. Like
I can't help but think of you know, Shepherd, Fairies,
Obey and John Carpenters they live. You know, the idea
that TV is feeding our brains, that it's informing our minds,
both explicitly and implicitly on who and what we are,

(43:36):
what sort of world we live in, cultivating viewers conceptions
of social reality. And it seems that you know, much
of the same as going on in social media age.
We cultivate our cultivation to some degree, but we're still
shackled to external views of social reality, social reality on individual,
on the individual, on subcultural cultural international levels. What should

(43:58):
my life look like? What should my body, Addie look like?
What what should the world look like? Now? I'm thinking
that what the world needs, as John Carpenter to make
they live too. And it's all about social media and
it stars the rock and uh, you're more of a
wrestling fan than I am. Who else would work in there?
John Cena? I guess Uh, he's the roddy Roddy Piper

(44:21):
of our time. Either's not one that's true, you can
never be read, can't be replaced, and and he sadly
passed away. Um, but yeah, we need a roddy roddy piper,
somebody who's willing to fight through the subjective reality that
are that that social media and uh, the media is
reflecting on its someone that passes the shades. Yeah, absolutely so,

(44:43):
all right, before we get into whether social media is
quote unquote destroying our self esteem, let's back up what
self esteem. It's defined generally as the evaluative component of
the self, the degree to which one prizes, values, and
approves of or life makes oneself, and it's crucial to
maintaining quality of life. If you have low self esteem,

(45:06):
that leads to depression. It can also lead to eating
disorders and addiction and other health problems. Now, one explanation
for a negative relationship between social networking and self esteem
is that self presentation is the primary user activity there,
and it seems like narcissistic behavior to us if we're
watching it from afar. Right, So, a study of a

(45:28):
hundred Facebook users at York University found that individuals with
low self esteem are more active online promoting their own
content but another study included groups of students parts who
are participants and exposed them to first a mirror and
then second their Facebook profile, and third a control setting,

(45:51):
and the results show that there were positive effects on
their self esteem for Facebook. Uh. Objective self awareness theory basically,
see just that any stimulus that causes ourselves to become
an object, like looking in a mirror, for instance, will
lead us to a diminished impression of ourselves. Now consider
when you're looking at your own Facebook profile, You're looking

(46:13):
at photos, biographical data, your relationship status, all of this.
So some people theorize this may lead to a reduction
and self esteem. So again we've got some contrary research
and points of view going on here. There's also something
called the hyper personal model, and it proposes that there
are advantages to computer mediated communication for self esteem. The

(46:36):
argument here is basically that online you have the time
to select the aspects of your character that you believe
will be viewed most favorably by the receivers of your content.
When you contrast this to your real life interactions, you
don't have the time to constantly present your most positive
features to the people around you. So social media may

(46:58):
even spread happiness in some situations. So we we talked
about that Pew research study that said that women find
that it increases their their their happiness. Happy status updates
encourage others to post happy status updates about themselves, and
some some researchers even worry that it could cause something

(47:19):
that they're titling the epidemic of well being, that there's
no Heaven forbid too much. Yeah, of showing how great
your life is in the world. Uh, this is interesting
because this is something that will definitely come up later
again in the podcast when we're specifically discussing Facebook's utilization

(47:39):
of their algorithms. Oh yeah. Uh. All in all, again,
this is super complex. It doesn't necessarily seem that the
medium itself is inherently leading to poor self esteem, but
the habits of being competitive, comparing your achievements with others,
incorrectly perceiving others, as well as jealousy and narcissism all

(48:00):
contribute to negative self esteem. Now, from my point of view, uh,
you know, my my education background is in communication. This
all seems to relate to general communication theory and how
interpersonal relationships are maintained and how conflict is managed. It's
just in a different way, right, But but the general
sort of way that we model communication from one human

(48:24):
being to the next still applies here. Some studies even
indicate that social networking sites may actually be a useful
tool in identifying individuals with mental health issues. And I
wrote next to this, you think after looking at Facebook
profile for the last year, I think some of the
people I know who might have mental health issues are
starting to realize that themselves. But there are indicators that

(48:48):
there's fewer pictures, less communication, but maybe they have a
really long filled out profile and fewer friends. These people
were more likely to experience social in headonia while there
on social media, meaning that they did not have the
ability to encounter happiness from the activities in their life
that they normally found enjoyable. All right, so we have

(49:09):
this thing that paradoxically it seems to make us happy
and you know, help us live our lives, but then
at the same time just really pushes us to two
loads of of self loathing or you know, the apathy
and just despair. Uh. Are we addicted to it? Are
we addicted to this thing that makes us happy and miserable?

(49:33):
It certainly wouldn't be the first, uh uh property. Yeah,
I was gonna say that. That's the way you're describing it.
It's just it sounds like all the other things that
were It sounds like sounds like alcohol. Yeah. So we're
gonna take a quick break and we come back. We
will get into the social media addiction. Are you hiring?
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mind blown. Okay, we're back. So the big question here
on the table is are we actually addicted to social media? Well,
whether or not it's addictive has not been debated for

(51:02):
very long in psychiatric literature. But what would define it
is if social media users had a mental preoccupation with
social media that leads to their neglect of other social functions,
whether that's family or real life friends. In addition, they
would suddenly cease their online social networking sometimes and that

(51:24):
would cause signs and symptoms that resemble those of people
abstaining from drugs and alcohol. It's one of the problems, right,
is that with addiction you kind of have lower case
addiction and capital letter addictions. So there's there's the there's
the there're the little addictions that we talk about in life, um,
and then there are the big ones that you know,
a lot of us are fortunate enough to not have

(51:46):
to deal with, yeah, or at all. But then there
are things that seem to sort of uh, we've in
that space between yeah, I mean, for my part um.
So I grew up in a household with a parent
who was an alcoholic, and luckily they went through alcoholics anonymous,
they're sober now. But I recognized within myself from that experience,

(52:09):
I have an addictive personality. It's something that I inherited.
Uh And so yeah, I'm always conscious, especially if things
like this. You know, I mentioned that whole world of
warcraft thing earlier, that there's uh possibility there for me
to get too far into something like if it has
that addictive quality. Now with social media again, let's look

(52:31):
at some of the research. According to Dr Shannon m.
Rauch of Benedictine University, which is in Mesa, Arizona, one
of the main reasons we use social media is to
distract ourselves or maybe we're bored and we want relief
from that boredom. So every time we log in, we're
delivered reinforcement in the forms of likes and comments or

(52:54):
whatever people communicating back with us. So when behaviors that
are reinforced are heated, it becomes hard to stop doing them. Right,
You're you're being You're given positive reinforcement for them. This
is like Pavlov one on one uh. In addition, researchers
at I Believe It's Free University in Germany found that

(53:15):
this positive feedback correlation shows strong activity in the nucleus
accumbents of our brains where we associate reward processing. So
in two thousand twelve, a group of researchers developed something
called the Facebook Addiction Scale to score mood tolerance, withdrawal, conflict,

(53:35):
and relapse, and they tested it on four hundred and
twenty three students and found that it was relatively reliable.
What's worth noting here, though, is that there are a
variety of activities that you can do on Facebook beside
quote unquote social networking, right, Like people play games on there.
They're doing all kinds of things. Facebook has made itself

(53:56):
ubiquitous in our lives because it's not just social networking anymore.
I always forget that they have gains, Like they don't
get invites anymore to like whatever, you know, farm coaster. Yeah,
it's never that was never my thing either. But maybe
that's just maybe we're a different generation or something. Maybe
they're really fun, we're just missing out. Yeah. Another study

(54:17):
adapted the Internet Addiction Questionnaire, which was a pre existing document,
to test Facebook dependence with students, and then they tested
the sleep quality of these Facebook users. What they found
was that Facebook dependence may be related to poor quality
of sleep. What's worth remembering here is that we don't

(54:37):
know if social media addiction is an actual disorder or
maybe it's a manifestation of other mental issues. As it stands,
the good old d s M, the d s M
five is our our current one, I believe, which is
the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It does
not list social media addiction as an actual mental disorder.

(54:58):
If it is an addiction, per the latest revision of
the International Classification of Diseases and Health Problems, it would
have the following symptoms. A strong desire or sense of compulsion,
difficulty controlling consumption behavior, and psychological withdrawal after reduction or cessation.

(55:22):
I can I can relate to all of those. I
think I've mentioned on past episodes that when it was
January when with my family to Jamaica and our our
crappy phone plan just did not work at all on
on the island of Jamaica, so I just did not

(55:42):
use my phone and it was was it was maddening
at first, like I kept like reaching from my pocket
to make sure it was there, and and it took
it took a couple of days to sort of move
through the idea that I was not connected to this
thing anymore, right, Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I mean I know
I've talked to Joe about this before. Well Joe, uh,

(56:02):
not to speak for him here, but he for the
most part doesn't use social media, I think because of
a lot of the things we're talking about here, but
he's definitely taken like internet vacations you know where I've
done this before, to where you get you rent a
cabin in the woods somewhere, you have your phones but
you just don't look at them for a weekend or
something like that, and it could be cathartic. Uh. Last

(56:22):
thing here, Dr Cecil and Drayson from the University of
Bergen in Norway has developed the berg Facebook Addiction Scale
and they use six criteria to measure this thing. What
they found is that people who are already anxious and
socially insecure are more likely to use social networking. So

(56:44):
potentially Facebook addicts are using the site to gain attention
and boost their self esteem. So it becomes this like
vicious circle. Basically that like they're using it to make
themselves feel better, but they're already insecure and depressed. They're
gonna circle back around to that and then go back
to the uh trough literally for this reward, you know.

(57:07):
All right, So let's let's think about the children then
for a minute, as we we often do with the
technology and with the evolution of social media and the
and the Internet, because you always have the generation that
came into it more or less fully formed, and then
there's the generation that's born into it. Uh. And I
mean that's just going to continue. Uh. You know. For

(57:28):
for us, it's like, oh, I remember growing up without
the Internet in the house. Other people I remember growing
up about Facebook in the house, and then it's gonna
be I remember growing up with my my own organic
eyes as opposed to these uh metallic implants that are
now mandate eyes. Uh. Yeah. So a great quote that

(57:48):
I found that I want to start this off with
was from Time Magazines. Susannah Shrubsdorff. She wrote a piece
in Time that was called the Kids Aren't All Right,
and it uh is about general mental health issues in
teenagers in America, but does discuss social media a lot.
And she says in my dozens of conversations with teens, parents, clinicians,

(58:11):
and school counselors across the country, there was a pervasive
sense that being a teenager today is a draining, full
time job that includes doing school work, managing a social
media identity, and fretting about a career. Climate change, sexism, racism,
you name it. Every fight or slight is documented online

(58:35):
for hours or days after the incident, and it's exhausting.
So again, I said this earlier, I can't imagine my
high school experience, which I feel was challenging. I'm so
glad I'm not in high school anymore. I love being
an adult. Uh, how it would be made better by
social media? And then I think about these kids. I

(58:56):
thought about about you and Bastion, because you've got a
son who's grow growing up in a world of social media. Yeah,
it's uh, it's it's tough to think about. Hi, I
worry about it quite a bit. So we worry, you know,
about things that we've already discussed here today, like if
social media is addictive, it's especially going to affect teenagers
due to the social pressures to be involved in it.

(59:19):
And as we learned previously, a study has shown that
this could be damaging teenagers sleep and increasing their risk
for anxiety and depression. So teenagers require more sleep than adults,
which we know this, so waking up to use social
media in the middle of the night is actually really
bad for their health and this can subsequently lead to

(59:39):
cold's flu and even gastro and nitas. Another study that
was done by Britain's National Citizens Service says that teenage
girls seek comfort on social media instead of from their family,
So this suggests that they experience more stress more often
than teenage boys don't do. And that kind of lines

(59:59):
up with a Pew research stuff that we were talking
about earlier as well. Yeah, I mean I remember in
high school just watching like, you know, six hour blocks
of of television and that was kind of my coping mechanism.
Um and and playing magic the gathering. Now you do
all of that online, um M, you could do both online,

(01:00:20):
Yeah at the same time. Probably. Now where are you
touched on, you know, cultivation theory and the and in
the way that the are cultivated ideas of reality then
manifest in our our own anxieties. Uh, there's a there's
a spin on it. That's often referred to as thin
World syndrome. Uh And in particular, there was an article

(01:00:43):
two thousand three the effects of thin ideal television commercials
embodied U dissatisfaction and schema activation during early Adolescence published
in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence by Dwayne Hargrives
and uh Marika Tigerman. And. In the study, they presented
two groups of girls with different sets of ads, once

(01:01:04):
set with the undernourished women and one set without. So
the results saw that girls who saw the ads with
the emaciated models experienced immediate episodes of insecurity and distress
about their weight. What's more, two years later, those same
girls still reported greater dissatisfaction with their bodies as compared
to other groups of girls. Continued exposure to unrealistic body

(01:01:25):
types in the media affected the girls perceptions about what
a normal, healthy human female body looks like. So again,
if the idea that the media is cultivating our understanding
of reality, our expectations for self and in this case,
what a normal body looks like. And and it's certainly
that I think that the evidence indicates that the case

(01:01:45):
is stronger with with females, but that you also see
varying levels of this with with males as well, because
there's still there's still very much this, uh, this vision
of of what the perfect male body looks like, and
it's out there and it maybe isn't as it's not
stressed as much as the female model, but it is
there and there are people that they have been out
of shape over it. I was actually talking about that

(01:02:09):
we were preparing for this episode with our colleagues from
Stuff Mom and Ever told You, and they mentioned to me, oh, yeah,
we've done episodes relating to this before, and they said, yeah,
one study they came across and I definitely would recommend
going and seeking out this podcast on their site. Uh
found that the exactly what you're talking about with television
ads and comparison of body types is actually worse on

(01:02:33):
Facebook for people because they're comparing their body types to
people they know in the real world and it's easier
for them to create a disassociation. Still happens, but a
disassociation from models that they've never met before versus people
in their real life when they're looking at their collections
of photos. Okay, so this all this stuff is going on,

(01:02:56):
We're all stressed out. We're all anxious, our self esteems
low or depres rest. We're trying to deal with it.
Maybe social media is helping, maybe it's making it worse.
What are some coping mechanisms? What can we do? Yeah,
I mean the terrible thing is that a lot of
times the social media is the coping method because we
have this environment and then something bad happens. Right, there's

(01:03:18):
a terrorist attack, there's a match shooting, there's political unrefts,
there's a disaster, uh, be it local or larger in scale,
and we take to social media. Well. I think one
of the best localized examples is that you if you
hear gunshots in your neighborhood, what do you do you
in around here, you often head to the local neighborhood

(01:03:38):
association Facebook group and start asking questions, Hey, what's happening?
What's going on? Someone tell me, Yeah, I don't know
about other cities, but here in Atlanta. And this is
no slight to our news organizations, but we don't really
have reliable news sources that can very quickly tell you
what's happening on the ground, especially in your neighborhood. Yeah,
I mean, the the Atlanta Journal Constitution is great, but

(01:04:00):
they're not going to have an up the minute story
about the noise you just heard that it was just
a transformer exploding, especially and and not a Transformer robot.
I mean, I would hope they would really pick up
on trans But this is especially true if you hear gunshots,
which unfortunately, I guess you're getting a little insight into
what the neighborhoods are, like the Robert and I live in.
But uh uh, for me personally, when we hear gunshots,

(01:04:23):
we turned, like you said, to Facebook or next door
is the thing. And in fact, I finally, after doing
all the research on this, I was like, all right,
I gotta sign up for next door and so I
can go to my neighbors to find out information. And
this is just one example of how social media is
replacing our investment in journalism. Right, we're defunding journalism and

(01:04:45):
instead we're turning again, like I called it, user generated
content earlier. I don't know if my neighbor down the
street actually knows if it's a gunshot or not, but
I'm gonna go to next door dot com and see
what he has to say about it, you know. Yeah,
uh so yeah, it's the confusing time. And all this
is coming from a biologically authentic place. We're biologically hardwired

(01:05:07):
to try to understand and control our environment. We need
to know what's happening. We need to know the extent
of the threat to us personally, to our family, our friends,
and they figure out what to do next. But it
often means that in our media age, and this entails
certainly television news as well as uh as social media,
but we end up binging on the chaos and disturbing details. Uh.

(01:05:32):
You know that often just come detail after detail, right
uh Um. We also binge on the compassion that spins
out of it, also on the hate that spins out
of it. Uh. And all the while we're trying to
we're absorbing the fear, the anxiety, the story of the violence,
and it brings it brings me back to the mean
world syndrome which we mentioned earlier. So while while Gardner's

(01:05:53):
work centered around TV that the Internet is an even
more powerful media fund. It just accelerates the news cycle
and allows title pools of hermetically sealed extremism overreaction hate.
Uh you can, you can. In a way, it's like
a purification of it. It's it's it's it's uh. Um,
you know, it's completely distilled into a sticky paste. Yeah. Yeah,

(01:06:16):
and outright false information served up hot and steaming, just
the way we like it. Yeah. As you mentioned at
the beginning of the episode, this is a major debate
that's going on through uh digital media news right now
about the election in itself. Was it affected by false news? Yeah?
And this is a top this is a topic that's
it's being discussed right now, even like Facebook is putting

(01:06:39):
out new responses. So there's no way we're gonna be
up to the minute on this story. But uh, I
was just reading a New York Times article, uh that
that that came out in the wake of the election
said that forty percent of American voters used Facebook to
get their news. And Facebook, Uh, no matter, you know,
no matter what else it is, it's important to realize
that it is not a journal the stick organization. Yeah,

(01:07:02):
I really want to spell this out for you out there,
so our show stuff to blow your mind. We're a
part of a digital media organization, and in the last
three years we've had to completely change our business approach
because of the shift from what is called organic reach
which was basically like people going into Google and typing
in stuff to blow your mind. Social media to social

(01:07:25):
media reach, most people are just getting their information from
social media now rather than going out and searching for it.
Like it or not. Facebook is not only changing the
way that we're consuming news, but it's also changing the
way that news is made. Right, So think about these
organizations like ours. In order to survive, they need to
curate for that medium, and so they're doing a variety

(01:07:49):
of things to make them fit in better with Facebook. Right. Uh,
think about this the next time that you click on
a news feed in your article, and also in that
same vein, I'd like to remind you this is why
there is an industry for fake news sites. They can
monetize the web traffic by manipulating the social media game.

(01:08:10):
I'll tell you this, and Robert Kennon too. It's a
lot easier to write a fake news story, or even
a poorly reported news story, than it is to do
thoughtful research and critical evaluation. So for me personally, I'm
always wary of any story that comes out super fast,
even like I said, uh, whether I'm looking on Facebook
or or next door or whatever. If it's some neighbor

(01:08:32):
of mine and they're telling me something a little wary, like,
I don't know if that's a true, So you know,
give it some time. Uh. We we expect to have
all this knowledge, all this information at our fingertips, like
like where genies or something. Uh. And it's it's not
that simple. Um, So don't necessarily trust things that just
immediately come out, Yeah, such as and this is this

(01:08:55):
is a real one. I did not see this in
my Facebook feed, but apparently leading up to the U
s presidential election, stories were making their rounds that the
Pope u as in the the head of the Catholic Church,
that endorsed Donald Trump for president. And I don't believe
it happened. Um and uh And according to a report

(01:09:17):
in BuzzFeed News. And I know, just mentioning BuzzFeed News
in this conversation might be a little tricky, But there
was a report that a bunch of young people in
a town in Macedonia ran more than a hundred pro Trump.
But websites full of fake news and an attempt to
manipulate the US presidential election. So there's all this fake

(01:09:39):
news out here, this misinformation that is being Um that
that is going through the the curator system. The curator
is a business. The curator is not a journalistic uh
um enterprise and uh and and that can have some
very dire consequences. So Mark's upper Zuckerberg in the past

(01:10:00):
has claimed that that Facebook doesn't actually cause anyone to
make up their minds. And I'm and I'm not necessarily
suggesting that's the case either here, but Facebook's own research
suggests that it's no mere neutral arbitrator in the trade
of real or fake news. Oh yeah, sure, well, especially
again given the algorithm. We've sort of mentioned the algorithm obliquely,

(01:10:20):
but yeah, I mean the algorithm of Facebook is designed
to feed you what it thinks you want to see. Yeah,
and no matter where you stand politically, socially, what have you,
you've probably come up against the algorithm and ask, huh,
why am I seeing this? Why am I not saying
that two thousand and ten experiment with go vote boxes
with or without photos of friends who voted is one

(01:10:43):
of the studies that comes up. The second version, the
one with people actually turned out hundreds of thousands of
voters in this particular exercise. Then in twelve they secretly
tweaked the news feed, so that some users experienced slightly
more positive or negative streams, and the nature of those
streams influenced the nature of the user's own posts. So

(01:11:04):
negativity begot negativity, positivity begot positivity, which ties in with
some of the things we've been discussing here. Yeah. Um,
and I'm seeing this play out in my own Facebook
feed right now. There's a lot of people talking about
the quote echo chamber effect of social media, especially on Facebook,
that could have contributed to decision making for the election.

(01:11:25):
But also I believe it's the Wall Street Journal, is
that right, who has created this filter that allows you
to see what a Facebook feed would be like if
it was curated on like a quote unquote liberal algorithm
versus a conservative algorithm that's been shown up in my
feed as well. Links over to that. Well, there's a
piece that came out in the New York Times just
last week, so I guess it'll be like two weeks

(01:11:47):
ago by the time this episode comes out, And it's
from Za Nip to Feci and U two faccy rights
and the dangers of Facebook's current set up are not
limited to the United States. The effects can be even
more calamitous and countries with fewer checks and balances and
weaker institutions in independent media. In Mayan, mar for example,
misinformation on Facebook has reportedly helped fuel ethnic cleansing, creating

(01:12:09):
an enormous refugee crisis. Facebook may want to claim that
it is remaining neutral, but that is a false and
dangerous stance. The company's business model, algorithms, and policies entrenched
echo chambers and fuel the spread of misinformation. I mean
that that really strikes you right there. Like it's one
thing to say, like, oh, well this quote echo chamber

(01:12:30):
affected how people voted, But then when you hear well
this could have affected ethnic cleansing, you know, I mean
that's heartbreaking. Yeah. Uh. In December of will Or Amous
of Slate reached out to Facebook about the spread of
false information on Facebook and reported the following quote. I

(01:12:50):
ran this idea by Greg Mara, a Facebook news feed
product manager, in a recent conversation about another of the
company's efforts to improve the quality of users feeds. He
saw it vaguely intrigued, but said his team probably wouldn't
be making it a priority anytime soon. Quote. We haven't
tried to do anything around objective truth. Mar amused, It's
a complicated topic and probably not the first thing we

(01:13:13):
would bite off. So yeah, objective truth. Yeah yeah, why
why get involved in that? Uh? And then uh. I
also ran across an excellent piece in Ian magazine from
Liz Lenz and they shared the following quote. Facts are
at our fingertips, but instead of liberating us, they seem
to become a casualty in the war of ideas. My

(01:13:33):
husband has an aphorism that states, if you google long enough,
anything becomes the truth. That's nice. I like that. Uh.
And none of this even takes into account the rise
of bullying and trolling on social media. We're just talking
about the mental health issues that are brought to it originally,

(01:13:54):
not even the ones that are that are coming out
of it. The majority of those on social media are
under third two years old, and most of those are adolescent. Now.
The Enough is Enough organization reports that of teenagers who
have used social media have witnessed cyber bullying. And I
just want to give a personal aside about our work.

(01:14:16):
This isn't a SOB story, but um, given what we
do and how Facebook and Twitter and YouTube, I'll play
into our you know, our business, not just stuff to
blow your mind, but how stuff works in general. We
see a lot of cyber bullying and trolling, especially targeted
at our hosts on various shows. Video, Uh, definitely on Facebook.

(01:14:40):
And it's um, it's tough, you know, and it's it's
something that kind of comes along with this gig that
not a lot of people think about, Like the emotional
toll of constantly seeing people tell you I don't like
the way you move your hands or your hair is stupid.
These are things that I get as a man. Our
female colleagues get horrific abuse by trolls on the internet. Now,

(01:15:09):
how do you cope with that? How do you cope
with all of this? I often say, like, man, I
wish we just had like a counselor Troy here in
the office that we could go to to talk about
this stuff. Um, is it realistic to just go completely
cold turkey off of social media? Well after the election,
the Seattle Times actually interviewed one of their local mental

(01:15:30):
health counselors and several social media experts for how you
can set boundaries. So these are a couple of things,
And I'm also going to add in here that the
American Psychological Association says that fifty of adults expressed that
they felt stress related to the campaign. If that is
the case, experts then recommend limiting social media engagement and

(01:15:52):
definitely limiting engagement with the twenty four our news cycle.
But hey, like we said before, some people turn to
social media for support or to offer it, especially for
those who are already suffering from addiction, depression, or anxiety. Right,
so here's a couple of tips. One is, ask yourself
if you really need to log in? Right. I found

(01:16:12):
myself doing this today where I was just like sitting
there kind of hanging out with my dogs, and I
popped Twitter on and I was like, I don't need
to do that. I'm just I'm just doing it out
of habit. We'll log in. Is an interesting thing to
bring up here because log in and and it brings
the mind the idea that you're actually inputting your password. There,
you're sticking a key into the horrible box that you

(01:16:32):
keep under your bed umu. And either either way, like
this is the decision to unlock, it is in play.
But for the most like our browsers remember our passwords.
It's like the it's just this thing you do. I mean,
how many times have have have you the listeners found
yourself just at the site that you go to every day.

(01:16:53):
It's just like a muscle memory thing. And then you're there,
you're reading it. You're like, what am I even doing here?
I was here five minutes ago. There's not even any
new content to look exactly. Yeah. Uh so just think
to yourself. And I've been doing this in the last
couple of weeks. Maybe there's something else you can do. Right.
For instance, I've been listening to music a lot more
rather than going on to social media. I I finally

(01:17:15):
invested in one of those subscription services, and I'm just
listening to a lot of new music and listening to
a lot of music old music from when I was
a teenager that I don't have anymore. And it's just
been that's been very helpful. Maybe you could play a
video game, you know, uh, or hey, here's a novel,
idea exercise, or call a friend up you know, I

(01:17:37):
have a friend. A number of these can be done
at the same time. Yeah, I mean, I could play
video games and talk to my friends at the same time.
That's often how I have phone calls with them. But
you know, so that's one thing is like just always,
you know, ask yourself, do I need to be doing this?
Then here's the thing. If you're still going to use
electronic devices, prioritize which sites are important to you, and

(01:18:01):
then set a time limit for yourself to log off.
Don't just scan where we I do this so often,
especially given the nature of our work where I'm just
scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and looking for the next fix. Right,
I'd also throw in turn off those updates if you don't,
I've already yeah, I don't have any of that stuff.

(01:18:22):
Decide how much time in your day is devoted to
consuming news and whatever form, whether that's social media or
on television. If you're really committed to getting a fix
of news, look for well written, well reported articles, especially
by someone who has views that oppose your own. Okay,
try thinking from another person's perspective, even if you totally

(01:18:45):
disagree with them. If it's well written enough, it'll at
least give you pause for consideration. Uh. Also decide what
to keep out of your feed, right, skip past the
disturbing images or video h stuff that's in your feed.
Acknowledge that some people are more important to you than others.
So you know who to respond to and who to ignore.

(01:19:08):
And you can always, as I mentioned at the top,
as I do quietly unfollowed or unfriend people. I use
lists for this on Twitter. It's great cure. Eight year
feed You've become responsible for it yourself, and it's um,
it's just better for your mental health overall. Yeah, and
I want to drive home to that again. Remember that
the person that an individual is online on Facebook, it's

(01:19:29):
not the sum total of who they are. That's just
one aspect of their person. And so there there there
may be situations where you say, you know, I'm still
totally friends with this person, but you know, maybe all
they do is share turn up recipes on their Facebook
and you love them, but you're just not into turn
ups and you're not into turn up recipes, so maybe

(01:19:51):
this is just not the platform where your friendship exists.
I absolutely have relationships like that. Uh. And look, if
you've got to engage with people, try to do it positively,
either like those other people's posts or share something that
you found inspiring. If it's a political matter, try using
a neutral tone. I know it's tough, right now. I

(01:20:12):
know it's real easy to say that, and it's difficult,
but present evidence based information in your post or hey,
here's something you could do. Get involved in constructive causes
by signing petitions or writing letters, or calling politicians, or
or getting involved with some local group that you support.
The first thing that I saw when I um joined
next door this morning was that there was a long

(01:20:34):
post of my neighbors talking about, Hey, what local groups
can I go out and volunteer for and get involved?
Like I feel like I need to do something. Yeah,
And that allows you to act, to to do actually
act from from a position of of of of optimism,
because it's it's difficult to act from a state of pessimism.

(01:20:55):
And the last coping mechanism I would say is don't
let yourself start worrying about something that may not have
actually even happened. Remember what we said here about false
news and rumors that spread real easily on social media.
So people have researched this. It can take fourteen hours
to debunk false claims online. So wait before you get angry,

(01:21:18):
come back, do some research, look into whether this is
a real thing or not, and then move forward and engage. Now,
let's take this and flip it on its head. What
if we used social media as a data mining tool
to assist psychologists in community health forecast. Well, that is
something that that a project called the World Well Being

(01:21:41):
Project is talking about doing. They've evaluated a hundred million
tweets and they found that the preponderance of negative tweets,
especially those with anger or hostility linked in them, reliably
predicts a rise in deaths from heart disease in their
given locations. That's crazy to me that they can look
at Twitter and say, what the death rate is going

(01:22:04):
to increase, I don't know in Chicago or something like that. Well,
it's not surprising. I want to say there was a
I wish I had the study in front of me,
but I believe there was a German study years back
looking at like high engagement soccer games or football and
in looking at rises in heart attacks or heart conditions
around that. Just the idea that here's this thing that

(01:22:25):
everyone's a number a large sections is the population are
invested in. It's right right, raising everybody's blood their heart rate,
and they're going to be physical ramifications of them. Yeah.
Google is also tried doing this in a similar way
with flu symptoms. Um, so they track in real time
the emergence of flu outbreaks. They tried doing this and

(01:22:48):
they stopped. But what if we could apply machine learning
methods to determine areas where stress, anxiety, and depression are
breaking out? We could provide those areas with more assistance theoretically,
so could we end up in a situation where negative
to too much negativity on social media it causes the
metibots to come to your house they started administering give

(01:23:11):
us impacts. Um. Okay, so we've got over a lot
of stuff with you all in this episode. Let's extrapolate
what we've learned here and take what's going on in
the world right now with social media and and just
you know, what do we get out of this? Well,
first of all, Facebook could be altering our perceptions of

(01:23:34):
people in the world right and in the sense that
we may not be getting the full story through social
media and you know, beyond mere perception. Uh, there's an
ongoing conversation to what extent is Facebook empowering the dissemination
of false information, building at times dangerous perceived realities for
its users. Again, this is something that is an ongoing

(01:23:55):
conversation and this episode is not going to be standing
on the cutting edge of that, as there's a week
delay in it coming out. Uh. And look, if you're
already anxious, using social media could make your self esteem
even worse, so consider that before you hop on. But
positive feedback to political post is only going to reinforce

(01:24:16):
your own beliefs, so it's less likely to challenge you
to think from someone else's perspective. And this, in turn,
from what we learned, becomes addictive in how it forms
our worldviews. So we're combining our political philosophical society with
have Love's reward system. And that seems dangerous. Yeah, it does. Um.

(01:24:44):
As a final note, my personal advice, get a fish tank.
Fish tanks are great, so soothing, They're so great. That
does sound nice. I don't know how I've been living
this long without a fish tank in my life, but
I'm loving it so Uh. Here on stuff to blow
your mind. We wanted to take this opportunity, uh to
advocate for a group that would be related to this,

(01:25:04):
an organization ourselves that we looked into and that we
feel like we'd like to support, and the one that
we found for this episode is called stomp Out bullying
and they're a group that is the leading national bullying
and cyber bullying prevention organization for kids and teens in
the United States. They focus on reducing and preventing these

(01:25:25):
things as well as sexting and other digital abuse. UH.
They educate, educate against homophobia, racism and hatred, decreased school
absentee ism, and deter violence in schools, online and in
communities across the country. UM. We were looking at this
this morning and it seemed like a great way to
you know, if you're feeling I need to do something,

(01:25:46):
this is this is something to take a look at.
They've got seven ways that you can make a difference
by by you know, working together with their group. Of course,
the easy ways you can donate give them money. UH.
You can also participate in their campaigns. They have these
various campaigns that help with bullying prevention. UM. They have
an online store where you can shop, and that's kind

(01:26:07):
of like combining the donation with getting something that you can,
I don't know where, or give to somebody else out
in the real world. You can also volunteer. UH. They
actually have a help chat line and peer mentoring groups
in schools to help raise awareness about bullying, so maybe
you want to participate that way. And then finally they
partner with corporations, media, and celebrities uh to end bullying.

(01:26:31):
So if you're any of those three things, if you're
a corporation, media entity, or a celebrity of some kind,
maybe you want to participate in this. Yeah. Yeah, So
they seem like a really good group. They're doing a
lot of good work, so we wanted to highlight them
here real quick, and we would we'd like to do
more of this in the future. So if there are
any uh worthy causes out there, groups, nonprofits that are

(01:26:53):
engaged in some real positive efforts in the world, let
us know about them and uh and and we're gonna
we're gonna try and make this a regular thank here
on the show. And here's the irony of it. How
do you let us know about it? Well, social media.
So yeah, we're on Facebook, we're on Twitter, we're on Tumblr,
and we're on Instagram. We are trying to make those

(01:27:14):
positive places, uh. We do. We sometimes do live video
performances where we talk about um monster movie trailers and
how they relate to the science that we talked about
on the show. Sometimes we share links to things that
we're pretty excited about. Um. Sometimes we just share I
don't know. I like to take photos of bizarre things
that I find while we're doing research to give people

(01:27:35):
a hint as to what's coming up on the show.
But those are all places where you can reach out
to us, to talk to us about um, what we're
doing on the show, provide us with some feedback, or
like Robert said, tell us about another organization that maybe
we can promote here. Uh. The all those are in
somewhere or another. Blow the mind, yes, and I if

(01:27:57):
you want to cut all that out, just come straight
to Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, a social
media free website as celebration of everything we do, all
the episodes, the podcast, the blog post, you name it,
it's there. There will also be links out to our
so for media accounts, but you don't have to click
on notes. You really don't. And finally, there is an
old fashioned way to get in touch with us. Uh.
And I'm not talking about finding us on the street

(01:28:18):
and talking to us, though I guess that would work.
They can use ravens Ravens, yes, owls, um, you know,
whatever you have at your disposal. But Yeah, there's the
email address. Yeah, that's blow the mind at how stuff
works dot com for more on this and thousands of

(01:28:41):
other topics. Is that how stuff works dot com. The
homographic artises found back by

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