The Dark Side of Online Media: How it’s slowly destroying our lives, and how to avoid it?

Written by Ian McLaren

This article could grow into a book – in fact –  there are plenty of books to read about the harm of Social Media. The Anxious Generation, Stolen Focus or the Hacking of the American mind (applies to non-American minds too) are but three.

We believe that this is the most challenging problem of our current – and coming – lifetimes. As a team, we often talk at length about how it affects our individual lives (and our mental wellbeing, happiness, fulfilment and self-worth), how it affects our close friends and family members, and also society at large.

We’re extremely concerned about the future, and it’s almost entirely down to the phones in our pockets and the apps we scroll through daily.

As human beings, it’s healthy to spend time connecting with other humans and offline with friends, family members and even strangers. It has become apparent that using social media and mobile devices is eroding our ability to connect with the world around us. It’s making us sick and miserable.

The hidden problem – the blocking of experience.

The internet – and social media – changed our lives in the early 2010s. It upended the human experience and took us from one-to-one communication to one-to-many. It gave us as individuals the liberating opportunity to connect with our entire community (now the entire globe) at once.

For the first time in history, all of us can communicate with the world, and the world can communicate with us.

We’re allowing ourselves to be exposed to experimental technology and monitoring the outcomes in real time.

Jothanthan Hait, in his book, The Anxious Generation, looks at the effects on Children from 2010 onwards, when social media became most prevalent. He carefully outlines the catastrophic decline in mental well-being for children and the dramatic increase in the resulting emotional, social and potential economic problems.

Aside from the more obvious concerns of damaging our children’s mental wellbeing – self-comparison and access to potentially harmful content-  Hait speaks at length about how social media is an “experience blocker”. In short, his point is that children are spending more time on devices and less time doing things, connecting with others, and therefore, not gaining valuable real-world life experience. They are being deprived of the opportunity to live in the real world and are entirely trained in the online world, which, as we know, is not in any way a true reflection of our world.

The outcome is that our children are wholly inequipped to interact outside of online platforms, and as a result, they’re more anxious and more deprived of human connection. We can see them becoming emotionally fragile, less able to function in society and, compared to previous generations, perform worse in most outcomes. Hait provides many examples of young people becoming reclusive, volatile, self-loathing and altogether dysfunctional.

But, we who grew up before the wave of social media are safe, right!?

The radicalisation of adults.

While there is plenty of research looking at the effects on children,  adults are not as well researched – yet the evidence of dysfunction surrounds us.

Without being aware of it, the vast majority of us have social media addictions that are profoundly affecting our physical and mental well-being.

These little devices take up more and more of our time and blocking us from our lived reality. In the UK, we spend an average of between 4 and 5 hours on our phones – up to 28% of the day [source1, 2, 3]. That is a worrying amount of time spent in a world that is a spun-up, twisted and distorted version of reality.

In addition, social media apps are designed to hack us on a psychological level. In the same way, a magician can misdirect our attention to make something unbelievable happen.

Unconsciously, we’re being manipulated to spend more time on social media – why? because the business model of social media platforms is a marketing platform, and more engagement allows more opportunity for advertisers.

The apps combine a mixture of variable reward conditioning (intentionally designed to be addictive) and algorithms that encourage creating outrage and conflict for engagement. It taps into our deepest unconscious psychologies to draw us closer and closer to radical positions and steals our attention (hacking our fight & flight mechanisms).

It incentivises demagogues (on all sides) and voices who vocalise a fear that connects with our own. We collect in echo chambers where algorythms feed us content based on our micro-expression of interest.

Suddenly, it seems like the world is on the brink of chaos, and there is an enemy behind every corner. Slowly, we are treating each other in the real world, like we treat each other in the digital world, often with an undue amount of suspicious hostility. The only things that have measurably changed is the way we see the world, which is driven by our over-consumption of social media.

Sadly, as much as we try to resist, these tools are too powerful. There isn’t a human on the planet who can outsmart the machines.

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As more and more adults rely on devices to communicate and entertain ourselves, it feels as though we are missing out on everything if we are not connected online – the feedback loop makes us more anxious, more isolated, unhealthier and unhappier.

Our lack of connection in the real world is making us sick, mentally and physically. We’re disconnecting and pushing away friends, members of our families for what they believe. We’re becoming angry at strangers and situations we have no control over, and often our opinions are a reflection of our own social media consumption, rather than how things are in the world around us.

We’re being radicalised and slowly destroying our happiness and communities.

This is the bitter pill to swallow: it’s often easier to blame others and their actions, but only we have control over our own actions. We can only make a change by changing our own behaviour.

What’s the solution!?

The solution is very, very simple – but easier said than done.

Turn it off. The only cure for our collective madness is to TURN IT OFF.

Prioritise being outside, offline with friends and family, or putting the phone away in another room while reading or watching TV. Avoid the apps, avoid watching the news compulsively, try to connect with strangers and altogether try to live more offline.

True – it’s really, really hard these days. But once the phone goes off, the world seems altogether different.