Is the problem us or the social-media platforms we use? Brian Primack, a professor of public health and medicine, says it’s both
People are becoming more understanding of the fact that they need to think about how they use social media more consciously. These are things we’ve been thinking about, on a surface level, but we need to think about in a much deeper way.
Stove Cho and Ryan Prunty , part of a collective of social-media content creators in Holmby Hills, Calif., share videos with each other on their phones.These problems that some people have with social media: Are they problems with us as consumers, or are they problems with the platforms?It’s a little bit of both. And the interaction. Platforms often capitalize on natural vulnerabilities that we have as human beings. And what certain processed foods do is also capitalize on our vulnerabilities.
Their experience was very mixed. Generally there’s a lot of positive, there’s a lot of negative. And when they don’t think very carefully and critically about how they’re using it, the negative often outweighs the positive, leading to potential depression and anxiety. But then we found this other interesting tidbit, which is that the number of platforms that someone uses is independently related to those negative outcomes, like depression and anxiety.
Ultimately however, we really don’t know exactly the reason for what’s happening here. We need to do more research. Also, these are all tendencies. This doesn’t mean that every single person who uses a lot of platforms is immediately going to become depressed.