GP Notes on social-media

Social media has a major influence on society but how does it affect the body? Below are three of such impacts that social media have on us.

Social media has rewired our brains and affects our cognitive abilities. Brain scans have shown similar impediments of regions that drug dependence has. There is a clear degradation of white matter involving decision making and attention which makes individuals crave neurological excitement. 

Social media influences individuals to multitask online but it affects our productivity. Multitasking online reduces our ability to filter out interferences, making it harder to commit information to memory. This affects our focus. Studies found that when comparing heavy media users to others, they perform much worse during task switching tests.

The excess use of devices alters our nervous systems and cultivates the phantom vibration syndrome. Technology has triggered our brains and this creates a Phantom Vibration Syndrome phenomenon where an individual perceives our phone going off, but it did not. In one study, 89% of test subjects said they experienced this at least once every two weeks.

Social media has been an invention that has only begun to emerge in the past decade. As such, we still do not know much about its ripple impacts on greater society. Even so, extensive research over the years has shed much more light about the inner workings of social media on our mind and spirit. We humans have come to realise that social media is devoid from its intended purpose. This view is echoed by pioneering Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan, who wrote the “diversity that the  world wide web had originally envisioned” has given way to “the centralisation of information” inside a select few social networks and is “making us all less powerful in relation to governments and corporations”. 

Social media empowers our voices. Do you agree?

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