I’ve been listening to another of my favourite neuroscientist talks and it was interesting to hear him speak about viewing social media as borderline, weaving between sane and psychotic. It’s a bit like the bird in this photo: is it going to be cute or just peck at us….
He was cautioning preparing ourselves before opening social media to view total adoration and/or total disgust. The latter is quite often the case, as I’ve said before. Accounts get far more “engagements” by being confrontational and this is sometimes becoming the norm which I find quite disturbing, as I am concerned about the effects this has on people permeating through into the real world. I would imagine someone seeing a negative comment about their favourite footy player might get wound up and then potentially being a bit negative with a family member as a result….
Does it do us any good to be looking at either airbrushed and posed pictures or the muscle men whose ripped abs will take most people a minimum of six months of concerned effort at the gym to achieve? Social media is an easy way of seeing posts from rugby teams I support and allows for fun exchanges with people from all over as well as my rugby group. However, in so doing, we expose ourselves to not only the good, the bad and the ugly, but a menu controlled by a wide variety of opinion holders and, these days, AI bots…
We all hate the keyboard warriors and the people who deliberately come into a chat group to cause drama because they love the effect it generates and gives them that dopamine hit and sense of power. It’s really hard to not respond back and yet it’s best for us to just block and therefore not get triggered by their behaviour.
I was reminded of this a couple of days ago when a newbie (female profile picture, but this is no guarantee that they are actually a woman) came into a group and asked where people were from. No biggie, but they then started to ask people’s ages and I immediately replied “this isn’t Tinder”. They then claimed they only wanted to talk to people in the age group 27-40, prompting an immediate “seller” vibe (meaning they are there to sell pictures and “services”).
For those of us who have to use social media for work, it’s something we have to negotiate and perhaps, as the scientist suggested, take that moment to acknowledge that we are stepping into an environment which is controlled by other account holders, the app algorythms that decide what we should see and this does not represent reality.
