What if I told you #DeleteFacebook doesn’t make sense & by deleting social media account you are actually causing more indirect harm than good. To answer this question, we have to understand nuance & concept of social media because it’s not an easy answer.
This video is divided into 4 parts, 1St part we will focus on fundamental concepts, 2nd part we will discuss important role of social media in our life, 3rd part will explore problems of social media and 4th part will be the conclusion.
You have understand these 3 basic fundamental concepts. Social Media, Content & Algorithm.
What is Social Media?
Any digital or technology which enables you to create content, share it with everyone and promote social interactions among users can be called social media.
Content
Inside social media, there is a fundamental building block known as Content. Content is always king if you want to grow on social media. Content has 4 elements Text, Image, Video & Audio. With the combination of it we can build rich quality of content. Example,
- Facebook, Instagram is focused on Image, video & text format content
- YouTube, tiktok, twitch is focused on video format content
- Whatsapp, telegram messengers are focused on Text format chat
- Twitter is pure text format
- Snapchat is image+video format
- Spotify, clubhouse is audio format
Algorithm
Great quality content needs audience & discoverability, that’s when algorithm plays important role in ranking & processing the content for users. In simple language, Algorithms are processes or set of rules to be followed during calculations by computer. algorithms play extremely important role for personalization of your timeline or feed and they are designed to serve you the most relevant content based on your likes, interest, location, age and other data points.
Importance of Social Media in Life
Believe it or not, but social media plays a very important part in our life either directly or indirectly. Some benefits are straight forward like with Facebook you can connect with you friend and family all the time, Instagram for sharing your pictures,memes & WhatsApp made messaging more easy but these are least important because the we are missing the single most underrated feature of social media ecosystem that is attention. We as human civilization always some how to find monetary value in Anything over everything else, in this case if you manage to get eyeballs of few million people using social media then you can literally build anything your personal brand, influencers, business. With attention here comes another advantage that is, social media enables you to capitalise on your skill. Before internet & social media, an average person has only few options available to make money ie job in MNC or McDonalds. In today's modern social media world, if you have certain skill sets it didn't matter which skill, you can capitalise it by creating content around it on social media. Example if you are good in drawing you can create drawing video on YouTube or tiktok or Instagram, if you are good in dancing then you can show off on tiktok or YouTube or Instagram reels. If you have great teaching skills then you can start you own education channel on youtube. Basically, if you are good at anything and have skills then you can create content & with the power of social media you can capitalise it or build business out of it.
Problems
Now let’s deep dive into problems of social media. If you Google search, you will find a dozen of mental health issues which are Related to social media addiction & there are also other problems like fake news, censorship etc. It’s very complex issue so for the sake of simplicity let's categories them into impact at individual level & Impact at social level.
Let's being with individual level,
Individual level
these are effect of social media on individual level. Mental health, depression, anxiety & all other psychological effects. Mostly cause because psychological reasons & being self aware educating yourself can help to minimise it. Now do keep in mind that social media alone itself is not directly responsible and there are other factors such as Genes, environment etc also play a role in mental health issues. in many cases it’s not about social media it’s more of your love for hedonic lifestyle on top of social media which is a receipt of disaster for your mental health. Now let's talk about social medias impact on societial level,
Society level
effects of social media on our society & how we perceive the world. The main difference is these are problems sprouts from individual to large community group. In a sense, it's like one bad infected apple destroyes entire basket of good apples & eventually you will end up with basket full of bad apples. Same is applied in social media. One idiot shit post something & other idiots will reshare it and eventually you will endup in chaos of misinformation, fake news, conspiracy theories and information warefare and a lot shit posting. Another problem that we all should be aware of is flow of information: social media companies are have been well known for censoring good stuff. Like for example if you search for #NaturalImmunity on Instagram you won’t find any post even though there are millions of post with hastag #NaturalImmunity in it. Censorship is how these companies control the flow of information.
Conclusion
You might think that algorithm will help to solve this but thing is algorithm is just doing it's work which is to provide most relevant content to you by understanding you, which means if you like cars, you always get car related content on your feed. Hmm.. I always wonder why Instagram shows me cat photos & Yes, mark Zuckerberg can fine-tune algorithm but technically it wont help much because human behaviour is highly complex & algorithms will eventually always copy negative patterns of human behaviour so we will always endup in same problem until n unless we as individuals become self-aware on healthy usage of social media. Once warrant buffet said,” show me your friend, I will show you your future”. Its still relevant in digital world. “the content you consume, will define you & who you will be in future.” If your social media content filled with people who talks about conspiracy theories such as flat earth, harmful 5G then you will go down into the toxic rabbit hole of internet and eventually degrade mental health too. But if surround yourself with good quality content creator then you will definitely make the best out of social media. My best advice is Autonomy over Abstinence, which means build more self-awareness, decipline, educate yourself about social media technology instead of simply deleting Facebook & being ignorant. And 2nd advice is train your algorithm like a dog and how can you do that, by simply consciously selecting liking post which you are genuinely interested in instead of mindlessly scrolling over web and to fine tune algorithm my favourite method simply tell algorithm what you dislike, in case of YouTube there is menu button which says “not interested” and same is for other apps. That's how you surround yourself with healthy content & content creator for healthy mental health.
