Every year people spend more and more time tapping a finger on the smartphone screen or clicking a computer mouse. According to the statistical data provided by Statista (2021), in 2015, people spent approximately 80 minutes on the smartphone, whereas in 2021, the average time increased up to 155 minutes a day. I spend about 1.5 hours a day on my phone, whereas some of my friends waste more than 4 hours. The present essay discusses the topic of addiction to social media and smartphones.
Personal experience suggests that the main reason for excessive social media consumption is a fear of missing important information. What is more, experts even developed a notion of “phubbing,” the mixture of words “phone” and “snubbing,” which means a habit of using a gadget even during face-to-face communication. In this context, Tunc-Aksan and Akbay (2019) are talking about such phenomenon as fear of missing out (FoMO).
The authors emphasize that FoMO makes people addicted to social media and, hence, gadgets because they “need to stay on social networks to not miss something on the sites or the activities of others” (Tunc-Aksan & Akbay, 2019, p. 560). Personal experience shows that person could logically understand that the world would not collapse if not check a Facebook account for a day or two, but there is irresistible internal craving to open the app.
Six months ago, I conducted an experiment to see how difficult it is to overcome social media addiction. The outcome was pretty deplorable because I realized that it is much easier not to eat sugar for a week than not to check social media for a couple of days. I felt withdrawal symptoms such as nervousness, irritability, anxiety, and a strong desire to flip through the feed on Instagram. The study by Eide et al. (2018) shows that such symptoms are typical for people who are restricted from using the smartphone. However, the positive side of my experiment is that I have deleted my account on Instagram because the short-term restriction enabled me to comprehend that I have much more spare time without this social media. Additionally, it has become much easier to concentrate on study.
Another point that makes social media addictive is the strong link with positive emotions. Vermeulen, Vandebosch, and Heirman (2018) reveal that people generally share positive emotions in their social media accounts. Bazarova et al. (2015) also argues that social media are marked by the dominance of positive emotions. At least, this was true in the pre-COVID-19 times. Indeed, when life is full of stress, deadlines, and sleep deprivation, watching funny or cute videos and photos helps to get distracted and relax.
To conclude, the fact that social media causes addiction is undeniable. What is more, it is hard to overcome this addiction because social media and gadgets have become an indispensable part of our reality. Social media help to relax, express emotions, find like-minded people with similar interests, and keep in touch with friends. Nevertheless, adverse outcomes of addiction to social networking sites outweigh the previously listed advantages. Social media destroy our ability to concentrate for a long time and contribute to the increase of the level of anxiety. Still, it seems that this problem could be mitigated if people become more conscious of the information they retrieve from social media and spend more time doing interesting things for which smartphones are not needed.
References
Bazarova, N. N., Choi, Y. H., Schwanda Sosik, V., Cosley, D., & Whitlock, J. (2015). Social sharing of emotions on Facebook: Channel differences, satisfaction, and replies. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM conference on computer supported cooperative work & social computing, pp. 154-164.
Eide, T. A., Aarestad, S. H., Andreassen, C. S., Bilder, R. M., & Pallesen, S. (2018). Smartphone restriction and its effect on subjective withdrawal related scores. Frontiers in psychology, 9, 1-11.
Statista (2021). Daily time spent with the internet per capita worldwide from 2011 to 2021, by device (in minutes). Web.
Tunc-Aksan, A., & Akbay, S. E. (2019). Smartphone addiction, fear of missing out, and perceived competence as predictors of social media addiction of adolescents. European Journal of Educational Research, 8(2), 559-566.
Vermeulen, A., Vandebosch, H., & Heirman, W. (2018). # Smiling, # venting, or both? Adolescents’ social sharing of emotions on social media. Computers in Human Behavior, 84, 211-219.