In a world where people have devices in their pockets that provide instant information on everything from their bank account to federal politics, technology has outpaced the government’s ability to regulate information.
In the wild west of technology playing out today, people have access to personal insights like never before, namely, social media.
On social media, people, including children and teenagers, can spend hours monitoring interests and activities of friends while ingesting content that is tailored to them and openly designed to maintain their attention for as long as possible.
People spend hours per day scrolling through social media, and while much of what they ingest is insignificant and will be forgotten immediately, there are aspects of social media that keep people scrolling.
The term “doomscrolling” has entered the zeitgeist. This is basically the concept of people spending hours mindlessly scrolling social media instead of doing things to better themselves.
Doomscrolling can grip anyone, even teenagers and children, and on Aug. 26, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, reached a settlement worth billions of dollars over addictive aspects of its platforms with nearly every state, according to the Associated Press.
The company agreed to pay up to $18 billion to end a case that aimed to hold the tech giant accountable for contributing to undermining the mental health of children in the country, the AP reported. Meta also agreed to add stronger child safety measures.
To get a look at how doomscrolling and the addictive aspects of social media play out locally, the Temple Daily Telegram sat down with four Temple High School seniors to hear their perspective on the issue.
The students said there are positive and negative aspects of social media, but they all acknowledged that it’s something they regularly have to manage responsibly.
The students said they spend anywhere from two to five hours per day on social media, mainly Instagram, though apps such as TikTok and iMessage were mentioned.
When asked why they use the apps in the first place, the students said there are aspects that keep them coming back.
“I think Instagram especially is like the point of contact for many people, because I just don’t have their phone numbers,” said Kevin Jie, a 17-year-old senior.
“It’s also like a networking kind of thing,” Jie said. “Whenever I get a message, I always pick up.”
Another student said the advanced entertainment aspect of the app is what keeps him coming back for more.
“If you don’t find one video entertaining, you’re gonna find the next one or the one after that, and you just keep scrolling, and so it’s like an endless loop almost,” said Aryan Guleria, also a 17-year-old senior.
When asked how he feels about that endless loop, Guleria said it can be good for a time.
“It may be good for a short period of time,” he said. “But it’s to the point where you continuously do it and a lot of time gets wasted throughout the day on just scrolling through videos when you could be being productive and doing other things with your time.”
When it came up, the students all agreed they were familiar with doomscrolling.
“I do find myself, especially in situations where I’m procrastinating on doing school work for example, I definitely resort to doomscrolling as a way to just temporarily escape from responsibilities,” said 17-year-old Abby Jones.
“I feel like I get into a position where I realize I’m no longer finding entertainment in the videos,” the high school senior said. “I’m just finding satisfaction in being able to escape from reality.”
And while the apps can help teens escape from reality, it can put them in an equally uncomfortable or daunting place.
Jie said he finds himself comparing himself to others on Instagram.
“For me the aspect of anxiety comes from comparison videos or videos that I compare myself to, especially as a senior going into the college admissions process,” he said.
“College admission reactions and college videos can kind of make me draw those types of comparisons and kind of pushes me to think about my own application,” Jie said. “It just makes me anxious about the whole process.”
He said the videos can make him feel like he’s not doing enough.
The same goes for Guleria.
“I always see these college admissions videos, and it’s like they say: ‘Comparison is the thief of joy,’ and it’s almost as if it’s not even by choice, you’re forced to compare yourself to all these people that are on these platforms,” he said.
“By doing so you almost get scared or anxious or uneasy and then that makes you second guess what you’re doing as a person,” Guleria said. “That just like sends you into a loop of just like ‘you’re going downhill instead of going uphill.’”
Throughout the conversation, there was one clear solution to any issues caused by being on the app: close it. But for the students, it’s not that simple.
Jones said she’s scared she’ll miss something if she stops using the app entirely.
“I think for me, with Instagram specifically, (it’s) the social aspect and the subconscious desire to want to know what my friends are doing, how they’re spending their time, who they’re with,” she said. “I don’t want to miss out on something my friend posted. I just want to know what other people are doing in their life.”
And that fear of missing out is not unique to Jones.
“A lot of our humor comes from these videos. And a lot of my friends would reference things and I wouldn’t get the reference,” said Myrapaz San Juan, senior class president.
“So then I want to keep scrolling to get the joke,” she said. She added that Instagram continually adds new features she likes to check.
One of the provisions of the Meta settlement, according to the AP, is that the company will remove “like” counts from teen accounts, making it impossible for students to see how many likes their friends are getting on their posts.
It’s common for students to compare the performance of their posts to that of their friends, and disabling like counts will help stop that.
“I look at the comments of like my friends’s posts,” Jones said, noting her observations give her insight she wouldn’t otherwise get.
“I’m able to see who’s close, who’s friends, and that kind of alters my social world,” Jones said. “Because I’m paying attention to other people’s relationships through their commenting and their posts.”
Beyond comments, like counts are a quick way to gauge the popularity of a post.
“There was a point whenever I first had Instagram, I used to pay attention a lot to my likes or who liked my post,” San Juan said. “And then I’d be going to my friends post and be like, ‘Who liked their posts?’”
“I’d compare,” she said. But, after a while, she took it upon herself to enable a feature that removed the like counts on her account. Now, thanks to the settlement, all teen accounts will lack like counts.
“I feel like that helped me not compare myself as much,” San Juan said. “I did it because I felt myself comparing.”
“If me and my friend posted at the same time, I’d compare like, ‘Oh like they have more likes than I do,’” she said. And those comparisons would lead her to make assumptions about social dynamics that were unhealthy.
And while social media can enable conversations between people who would never have met or have had the time to meet otherwise, the students say it’s not the same as being in person.
“You’re able to actually talk to them on like a daily basis almost, but I feel like, at a certain point, if you keep talking to someone online, you’re not gonna be able to have personal like real life interactions with them,” Guleria said. “And you won’t know how to handle those type of interactions in real life.”
While the students acknowledge the negatives of the apps, they said there are numerous benefits to social media.
“Nowadays, social media is almost like this massive networking tool,” Jie said.
“More people just see the negative side of social media, such as the addiction, but I feel like a lot of people disregard the fact that you can use social media to reach out to these people that you probably otherwise wouldn’t have encountered in your day-to-day life,” he said.
And San Juan used social media to help her win her senior class president position.
“I did most of my campaigning all on social media with like bits and pieces being in person,” she said. “So I feel like having social media as that universal outreach to tell all your friends like an aspect that you want them all to know, I feel like it’s easier through social media than if it were to be in person.”
The observations of students were similar to that of Kyle Hodges, a physician and child and adolescent psychiatrist with Baylor Scott & White. But Hodges, due to the nature of his work, is more familiar with the negatives of social media.
“Social media is addictive, and it’s designed to be that way,” Hodges said, noting that replacing in-person interactions with online interactions can be detrimental.
He said the apps are designed to tailor themselves to the user and take up as much of their time as possible.
“As you’re watching these videos that you find interesting or amusing or (that introduce) you to different things that you don’t know, you get some kind of a dopamine reward from that, and that’s when it becomes addictive,” Hodges said.
He said similarly to a drug addiction, students end up almost automatically logging into the apps.
“They have this compulsion to check the app as soon as they wake up,” he said, and this can happen if they have a personal moment or even during class when they should be paying attention.
Hodges said the apps can provide support, until they don’t.
People get validation from likes and compliments on the apps, he said. But when those compliments turn into insults, things can get bad.
“If they post a picture and they don’t get enough likes or somebody says something (to) make them feel insulted, they can become extremely distraught and suicidal,” Hodges said about young people. “It jeopardizes your self-esteem very quickly.”
“One minute they can feel on top of the world,” Hodges said. “The next minute, they feel like they’re ugly, nobody likes them.”
Ultimately, compared to other regulated technology like cars or airplanes, social media is a new concept.
And similar to the way people were allowed to drive cars without seatbelts for years before laws were introduced, it will take time and consideration for the right guardrails to be put in place on social media.
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