If you’re not in control of social media, this one’s for you!

Not sure if you have noticed this, but social media has changed. How?

If you’re new here, I’m Sandaru. Thanks for reading my blog.

Whether we like it or not, social media has changed the world. I live in Singapore, everywhere I go, if someone is sitting and waiting, they’re on the phone, most likely on social media.

I sometimes think to myself, it’s so rare to see someone reading a book, or maybe even talking to each other. Even among family members for that matter. We see families eating together at a restaurant dinner table, everyone’s on their phone, even small kids.

Well I am no different. I travel in public transport with my wife, both of us in our phones at times, a habit we’re fighting to get rid of.

This is an addiction. How did we end up here?

What did social media platforms do so well for us to forget our own other habits, everything else, even our family members, and open the app every time we feel bored.

Social media in its origin, was building a community. That was the tagline of every social media platform.

It all began with a closed community of your friends circle.

When brands, companies, organisations came into the play, we had pages to follow and subscribe.

But what’s important was, in your feed that was it. The friends you had connected with, and pages you follow. Nothing else.

There were no suggested content from people or brands you didn’t know, there was no content that “you may like”

Therefore, if you made right decisions in choosing who to follow, life was easy, social feeds were peaceful, times were good.

Era of “For You” content

But then the concept of “For you” page came to the picture. But this is when it started getting even more interesting.

In simpler terms, social media platforms now show you stuff from people that you don’t know, from pages you don’t follow, maybe even pages you do not vibe with, in any possible way.

And if you go through these notifications, they most probably will have no relation to you, or your loved ones, at all. But this is a trick of getting you to click on notifications, trying to see if that gets you triggered to start back engagement.

If you had push notifications enabled, you may even get them saying your friend A commented on friend B’s post, which has no relevance to you in the first place.

Social media is no longer your community. It’s a consistent series of traps to keep you seeing more ads. This is a reality, we don’t really seem to understand.

The algorithms are getting crazier every day trying to hook you as much as possible, if you show the slightest signs of inactivity, these algorithms will throw everything at you to see what sticks and gets you back in the scrolling game. Even if it’s not relevant to you.

If you see recommendations that say “you may like” that’s their way of saying, hey we have more stuff you can explore, so keep watching and clicking, so that we can understand more about what you like. As you can understand now, it’s a never ending loop.

The more time you spend on these platforms, they will earn more money from ads, and the cost to you either will be your own time, or your consideration to buy something you didn’t even know you needed.

Even though we feel we are in control of our apps, our devices, it sure is clear, that we’re not.

Would you pay a subscription to use social media and not see ads?

There’s another damage social feeds are doing to our mind. Think about it, because of social media, now we’re never bored. We never get bored, because whenever we get bored, we know where to go! exactly, to our social feeds to feed ourselves with some random different, mostly unimportant information.

Why is boredom important?

You need to be bored

There’s an important process surrounding boredom. When we don’t do anything, when we don’t have anything to do, that’s when our brain goes to the bored state. The importance of this bored state is that, it’s when you actually start talking to yourself. This is when the important conversations with yourself happens. You start thinking about your career, your life, your finances, your daily lifestyle choices, evaluation of your own self.

The simple fact that we don’t let our brain get into this bored state, and using our social feeds to keep feeding random different stuff to our brain, we steal that opportunity from our brain.

The damage this creates may not be visible to outside, but let’s stop and think, when was the last time you started reflecting about yourself?

It’s about control, not giving up

Social media is the greatest step forward in the human history. With social media, we challenge the mainstream media narratives. People do have a voice on what matters the most. Social media has helped build busineses from ground up, topple corrupted governments to the floor, exposed bad people in power.

However, we still need to understand the illusion of control it shadows upon us, and understand the reality of addiction.

I am not asking you to leave social media. I won’t either. It helps me a lot. However, think about your life’s choices, the time it consumes, and the boredom it steals away from you.

If you liked this article, check my other blogs as well.