The double-edged sword in cyberspace

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<p>This is not a scam, but this is a process which has the backing of a plethora of scientific data, studies, and testimonies from experts. But first, it may be necessary to admit that an addiction has caused a big problem in our lives. This may have happened years ago, but now it is running our lives much more than we may ever have realised. But it’s time to take our lives back. It’s time that we were in charge again. It’s time that we were no longer addicted to the insidious double-edged sword of social media.<br />
Unlike other 12 step programs for addiction, it might not be feasible to quit social media indefinitely. We are going to have to be clever about this as cold turkey is probably not an option. During COVID, people who were not habituated in using social media found it to be their lifeline. Indeed, social media has literally saved lives. Then there is the reality that many jobs require using social media. Not everyone can go off-grid and live in the woods with their family in a log cabin and be some sort of self-sufficient farmer/hunter/gatherer. But social media is not an enemy per se to be avoided, but rather a double-edged sword that everyone needs to be able to control. We need to learn the skills to be able to maneuver it and not let it maneuver us. Social media in some form may well stay as part of our lives. It’s useful and it can be part of the toolbox that assists us in our work. But we need to work out how to use it without allowing ourselves to become addicted to it.<br />
How does social media seduce us into wasting hundreds of hours a year? And let’s be honest, these are hundreds of hours for which we have very little or nothing to show. Pew Research Center found that over half of Americans know that this is true, but they still have social media accounts and spend loads of time on them. Why do we go there?<br />
One reason is that our society has developed a fear of boredom. It’s almost become an inalienable right for people not to suffer even a few minutes with “nothing to do.” In such circumstances many people become anxious and feel stressed even though nothing is happening to hurt them. But that’s just it: nothing is happening. There is no stimulation, there are no bright colours, no moving objects, no customised music. The mobile spinning above the infant in the crib has stopped. All that is left is silence, and for some people that’s both boring and scary.<br />
And when things are quiet, people like us can finally hear our own thoughts. And perhaps these are what we have been avoiding. In fact, social media does more than keep people from falling into boredom. It also distracts us from dwelling on our real problems, facing our responsibilities, and dealing with our personality conflicts, for example. And it helps us forget that we don’t have enough money to pay the rent, that we need to clean the kitchen, or we must figure out a way to get along with our mother-in-law.<br />
Social media takes us far, far away, to a land where we don’t need to shave or put on any make-up. No one can see us unless we let them. In fact, we can reinvent ourselves as many times as we want. However, since we are discussing this subject, social media didn’t invent this reinvention of ourselves.<br />
There used to be a series of stories in the New Yorker magazine about a man called Walter Mitty. Walt was your typical loser who had lost his hair before it turned grey, who got a dad bod before he had kids, and couldn’t afford contact lenses, so he was stuck with coke-bottle glasses which meant no one could ever have proper eye contact with him. But somehow, he did get married, probably because as an accountant, he made a decent wage, and he found a girl who married him for his money. And oh, she liked to spend it. She would drag Walt to the Mall and spend hours there.<br />
At first, he would follow her from shop to shop, but eventually, like so many husbands, he would pick a spot and sit on a bench and wait for her to finish. It was much easier that way for both of them. But like most people, there was more to Walt than most knew. He had a vivid imagination. Each time his wife would take him shopping, he would find that bench, sit on it, and in a few minutes, he would place himself in some high-energy adventure such as being a knight in the Crusades, or a gunner on a fighter plane in WWII. So, on every shopping trip, he would go on a trip too. Eventually his wife would return and find him, and she’d be carrying a load of packages. But he didn’t care because he had been slaying dragons and saving pretty princesses. Fantasy is so much more fun than reality. Walter Mitty shows us that humans have always found escape mechanisms from the drudgery of life. In fact, there is even a term for this sort of thing, and it’s called the Walter Mitty Syndrome.<br />
But here’s the problem. Walter Mitty only had his fantasies when his wife was shopping. But when people are on social media all the time, checking texts every waking minute and basically spending more time in their fantasy land than in the real world, they begin to disconnect from their real lives and become a shadow of who they were and who they could be.<br />
As a result, their marital, family, and social lives might begin to suffer. In this situation they can find it difficult to concentrate at work. They miss deadlines. They make mistakes that they didn’t use to make, but they don’t seem bothered about it. Why? Because they have transferred to the wrong side of the double-edged sword. Social media is no longer serving them, but they are now serving social media. This is where the addiction to social media may become a real problem in the making.<br />
One of the unique aspects of social media that Walter Mitty didn’t have to contend with, is its ability to constantly generate neural stimulation, causing the body to produce dopamine, a hormone that gives the feeling of happiness, similar to that of cocaine. Normal life cannot generally reproduce the amount of stimulation which would cause the body to produce that amount of dopamine; therefore, people become addicted to this intense stimulation and can’t imagine life without the rush of scrolling and seeing new photos, new posts, new videos. This problem even has its own acronym. FOMO. This refers to the “Fear of Missing Out.” Yes, the person in question might miss out on seeing Beyoncé’s latest thoughts on a particular question. Oh, the horror! And, as with any addiction, they, and we, need more and more just to get the initial amount of dopamine. Interacting with real people just seems so slow. By the way, spoiler alert. Beyoncé’s latest thoughts were probably nothing of the sort. She hires some publicist to post all that stuff on her account.<br />
Even though social media itself has had enough articles on the hazards of using the phone or computer at night in bed when trying to fall asleep, the social media addict will feel the need to find out what’s going on, or to chat with one of his or her “friends.” Friends, mind you, whom they will probably never meet. Or maybe they will enjoy the anonymity as they begin to bully someone else online who has a different opinion to theirs. The nicest people in real life will suddenly exhibit a very dark side that their friends might never have suspected they had. This anonymity can lead some folk to be particularly nasty. Why do they do it? Because most of the time they can get away with it. Social media can give life to the dark side of humanity, that side which everyday civilization usually quells. There is simply not the same accountability in cyberspace.<br />
On the good side of social media, it has offered lonely people friendship. How else can one find a group of people who are passionate about building with pallets, or finding a particular rare animal species? In normal conversation and activity, it would be indeed rare to find others who have such a specialized niche hobby interest. But on social media, users can find a group that matches any one of their specialized interests. And they can join as many as they want. Do you have a basil plant that’s dying? Take a picture of it and send it to the group. Most likely you’ll get responses telling you exactly what the problem is and what you need to do.<br />
Yes, maybe you could have asked one of your neighbours, but that’s half the problem. It seems that you never see your neighbours these days. And maybe they wouldn’t have that specialized knowledge anyway. And for this aspect of bringing together people who have niche interests, it is hard to fault social media. But these days it appears that the character of social media has changed. It is not concentrating so much on connecting people of similar interests. Rather disturbingly, it seems to be concentrating on making money through advertisements. How many of these ads do you have to dismiss before you can finally get to what you want to read?<br />
But this is all part of the social media plan. The companies in question, like Meta for example, hire experts who specialize in knowing how to induce users to click on certain media. Thus, the users, and that is us, get hit with advertisements, or “sponsored” posts. It’s become this corporate conglomeration jungle with all types of would-be celebrities called “influencers.” And these folk make a living pushing products. Users will buy the product because they have a high regard for the influencer. And there are hundreds of other strategies for social media to monetize websites that were once friendly hangouts.<br />
This excessive monetization is just one reason why the giants of social media are starting to fall. And they deserve to fall, in the eyes of many. Users have grown sophisticated and are realizing that they are being played. Social media that was once free is now requiring subscriptions for various features, for example, Twitter. The millennials and Gen Zers have been leaving Facebook in droves, leaving it to the Gen Xers and the Boomers. This is one of several reasons why Facebook or Meta has not been performing so well. Twitter has become a free-for-all and is no longer the platform it once was. Tiktok has been banned by schools and by local governments as well. This is because reports have emerged that the Chinese developers have inserted privacy security risks directly into the app itself. Let the buyer, and the user, beware.<br />
In this way, privacy risks have become yet another reason why some people are no longer in love with social media. Quite rightly, they resent all the information that social media requires one to give up, and they want control on what these giant corporations do with their personal information. Google has been hit with a lawsuit saying it is unlawfully using all the data it has on users by feeding this to its AI platform. So, one could say that social media has been repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot. In fact, it has been through social media that many people have learned just how the corporate giants manipulate them, using their likes and dislikes to target them.<br />
But maybe this can be a silver lining to our cloud. With all these behavioural changes from the giants in social media, it might now not be as difficult as it once was to wean ourselves off social media. Especially when one considers another concern that Americans have, detailed from the Pew Research Center: “They also have concerns about users believing everything they see or read – or not being sure about what to believe.” Social media has given license for anyone with a computer to become a citizen journalist. There is no fact checking. People can say whatever they want. And sometimes it can all be lies.<br />
When they are outright lies, they can usually be easy to spot. But people have learned from propagandists over the years, and now they are much more likely to couch their lies in believable rhetoric. Thus people who never had a forum from where they could express an opinion now have a soap box to stand on, just as they still do at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park in London. But unlike the speakers in Hyde Park, where anyone is welcome to stand and talk, the cyber citizen journalists’ words can reach literally millions and never stop being reposted.<br />
Mark Twain, one of the first American writers, is attributed as saying, “A lie can travel twice around the globe while the truth is putting its shoes on.” Mark Twain might have used Speaker’s Corner because he did visit London. However, although he didn’t know about social media, nevertheless his statement is a very accurate summary of how it can be exploited or manipulated. It makes one wonder what he would have thought of social media. Well, with Artificial Intelligence (AI) being so available these days, we can now ask it and get an idea:<br />
“In the end, my dear friends, I urge you to use social media with caution. Don’t let it replace genuine human interaction or cloud your sense of self-worth. Remember that life is meant to be lived, not just documented for virtual consumption. Look up from your screens, breathe in the fresh air, and engage with the world around you. That, my friends, is where true inspiration and connection reside.”<br />
Smart phones and social media in its current form have now been around for about 10 to 15 years. That means that most children and young teens have never lived without them. No wonder that many of them consider that the smart phone is an extension of their hands. And maybe, no wonder that many of them consider that social media is essential to life as breathing and eating.<br />
I can remember back in 2009, when a friend of mine was the first person I knew to get an iPhone. He showed it to me, and I thought, “Ok, that’s interesting,” but I didn’t give it too much thought at the time. I mean I didn’t know the full extent of what it could do. Maybe Steve Jobs, its creator, had some idea of the revolution it would cause, but at the time I didn’t. But here we are a mere 16 years later, and these phones are literally everywhere. And sometimes this is not a good thing.<br />
For example, I will notice a couple out on a date. And what are they doing? They are sitting opposite each other, and they are both on their smart phones for extensive lengths of time. And it’s unlikely they’re texting each other. I think to myself, “What is going on? Talk to each other.” Then there are other people who stare at their smart phone screens as they walk along the street, and as they cross the road, which is highly dangerous in my opinion.<br />
But it gets worse. There are people who scroll websites and text as they drive along in their cars. I think someone who does this is not a car driver, but rather a kami-car-zi driver. This is endangering the lives of the driver, his or her passengers and other road users as well. It is amazing, but even as these young drivers were running off the road, their faces did not seem to register the danger they were in. Is social media so important that they would risk their lives to comment on that latest post? Surely life is worth more than that. Is it not?<br />
Well, if you are seriously seeking help and want to wean yourself off of social media, Fuller Life Counselling Partners offer these tips as to how to prevent social media addiction. If you or anyone else believes that you might be addicted to social media, or if you just wish to reclaim some hours of your life which are currently being wasted, you may want to consider engaging in some or all of these “digital detox” strategies. Here are some ways to disengage from social media and decrease your desire to constantly check your timeline:<br />
1. Disable your push notifications. Push notifications can distract you from what’s going on around you. Turning them off will help you focus less on your phone and more on the people around you and the task which you are performing.<br />
2. Place your phone in a different room. This is a continuation of disabling one’s push notifications. It simply places your phone in a different room and helps to remove the temptation to constantly pick up your phone.<br />
3. Designate periods of time to use social media. Like anything, moderation is needed to stay healthy, and this practice helps you prevent overuse.<br />
4. Find healthy alternatives to time spent on social media. Rely less on social media as a coping mechanism. Here is a list of coping skills that will give you some ideas of how to combat boredom and anxiety.<br />
Tell friends and family to help you with this. Telling those you spend the most time with is a good idea so they can help you stay accountable regarding your use and management of time.<br />
Partake in a social media fast. Abstaining from social media for a week, several days or even just one day can help you reprogramme your behaviour to be less dependent on social media. Personally, I have tried this for one 24-hour period, and I felt really refreshed afterwards. I found that I was able to experience a much deeper and more satisfying sleep. I also found that my thinking became more lucid.<br />
5. Seek professional help. The guidance of a professional counsellor is extremely helpful when it comes to making behavioural changes. In fact, it might be indispensable if the “do it yourself” approach is not having the desired results.<br />
But one way or another, we can all be at varying degrees of risk with social media. It can be a real addiction and if we are using it excessively, we need to work out a way to wean ourselves off it. `);

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<h1>The double-edged sword in cyberspace</h1>
<p>A young lady settled down to take a relaxing bath. As she did so, she did what most teenagers do when relaxing. She grabbed her phone to do some texting. After all, she didn’t want to miss out on an opportunity to text her friends and have some online interaction. Like many of her peers, she lived for the significance of her online friendships. However, her phone was plugged in to the mains, and she was electrocuted.<br />
For many people addiction to social media is a tragedy of our times. To be sure, this girl in the bath is an extreme example, but social media has become such an addiction that many people find that they cannot stop doing it, no matter where they are. And this has become a real problem in many lives. People cannot concentrate on their jobs, students cannot concentrate on their studies, hours and hours get wasted, and very little is accomplished.<br />
But instead of this compulsion, how would we like to be able to live differently? To be more productive at our job or business? To be more productive at home dealing with domestic details? To be able to focus on the job at hand and complete it satisfactorily? In fact, how would we like a new life with more happiness and less anxiety, depression, and loneliness?<br />
If we could just manage to do this, then we’d receive all sorts of benefits. We’d be able to relax. We’d know that we had finished what we had to do. We’d also be able to sit back and reflect, to connect our thoughts together, and perhaps come up with new ideas, ideas which we’d never have thought of if we hadn’t taken this time. We’d also be able to grasp new concepts, to learn new things and to grow more, hopefully branching out and being able to remember all the new things we had learned. This could work for all of us,<span> as it has for millions of others who have found better relationships, made more money, and been able to sleep better at night. What’s not to like?</span></p>

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