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Part 1
Why We Need a âFood Pyramidâ for Social Media
Social media isnât the first technology in human history to disrupt our lives in a major way. The printing press, telephone, radio, television, and microchip have all dramatically changed society.
Yet many scholars agree that the rapid adoption of social media is unlike anything weâve seen before. While the term itself is only a couple of decades old, billions of people across the world use social media for hours a day.
In part, this is due to how strongly linked this technology is to emotion, both negative and positive. There is no shortage of scientific studies linking social media use to mental health issues, like depression, anxiety, and lonelinessâand each of these conditions is currently at epidemic levels across the globe.
When used well, however, social media can facilitate joy, comfort, and friendship. So, pulling the plug on this technology is not just unfeasible in todayâs worldâit also could result in squandering a lot of potential benefits.
Social media is powerful because it is personal in ways that previous technologies are not. The printing press didnât follow you around, learn from your behaviors, and use that information to influence you. Television didnât substantially leverage your relationships with your friends, family, and acquaintances to give itself greater impact in your life.
Beyond being personal and personalized, we also canât seem to stop looking, scrolling, or clicking because of the wide spectrum of feelings social media evokes.
Weâve had fabulous experiences on social media of feeling valued and included. Weâve marveled at how easy it is to stay in touch with people we had thought we might never see again, and weâve found information and content that delighted us or changed our perspectives.
But weâve also been disappointed by social media. To lesser or greater degrees, weâve had experiences that made us feel marginalized, belittled, or misunderstood. Weâve also had concerns about our privacy. This combination of good and bad experiences often sets up a classic yo-yo behaviorâa cycle of ups and downs that ends up leaving us feeling more alone, anxious, and stressed out.
We need an empowering system that keeps us at the center of the experience and helps us live in balance with this remarkable technology. We need a system thatâs flexible so that it will work across platforms and across time. We also need something simpleâa plan we can easily incorporate into our already very full and busy lives. And we need a system that works. I created the social media pyramid to check off each of these boxes.
But to understand how the pyramid worksâand to immediately put it to use in our livesâwe first need to explore why itâs so needed. Our story starts in London.
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1
The Minister of Loneliness
In 2018, the UK prime minister created a new position for a âMinister of Loneliness.â Usual ministerial posts are for things like foreign affairs, housing, and education. The last time a cabinet post in the United States was created was for homeland security.
Are loneliness and emotional health problems in the world really that bad?
In a word, yes.
Over the past couple of decades, loneliness has become a worldwide epidemic. In the United States, 61 percent of people feel lonelyânot just now and then, but on a regular basis. In many populations, people consider themselves closer to their television or a pet than to other people. Donât get me wrongâI love my pets. My dog and two guinea pigs bring me joy. But something is off-kilter when we connect more to a television than to our own family and friends.
We all understand that loneliness is emotionally painful, but it also can be truly damagingâand even deadly.
A 2015 report involving millions of people found that those who were lonely had a 26 percent increase in the chance of dying compared with those who were not lonely. Similarly, people who lived alone had a 32 percent increased risk of dying compared with those who lived with others. This puts loneliness and living alone on par with other serious risk factors for death like heart problems, smoking, and obesity.
How can loneliness have this powerful an effect?
One reason is because loneliness is closely linked to more serious mental health conditions. Sure, everyone gets lonely at times, but prolonged loneliness can lead to other conditions like depression and anxiety. Both of these conditions can increase stress hormones that increase the risk of things like heart problems and cancer. Also, if youâre isolated or living alone, you donât have as many people to help you take your medication, to take a walk with, and to remind you to take care of yourself.
Other emotional and mental health problems are also on the rise. One-quarter of Americans rate their own mental health as âfairâ or âpoor,â and this number has increased significantly even in the past decade.
In 2016, the New York Times reported that the US suicide rate had surged to a thirty-year high. Less than a year later, the World Health Organization declared that emotional health problems had replaced muscle and bone pain as the leading cause of disability worldwide.
What? The number of people who canât work because they are too depressed or anxious has become higher than the number of people who canât work because of injury, heart disease, cancer, or diabetes? Again, the answer is yes.
Emotional health issues are more ubiquitous than many people realize, because the millions of people who struggle with them donât just come up to you when they meet you and say, âHi! I have severe depression!â Studies have shown that about 20 percent of Americans will become clinically depressed in their lifetime, but recent reports say it may be even more common than that.
For example, a 2017 study showed that about 27 percent of people who visit the doctor for routine things (like ankle sprains, back pain, or diabetes) also have significant depressive symptoms at the same time.
Emotional conditions like depression and anxiety impact our physical health in different ways. Depressed people are less likely to take their blood pressure medicines regularly, which sets them up for heart attacks and strokes. And if they do have a heart attack or stroke, depressed people have a harder time recovering compared with nondepressed people. People with anxiety are more likely to smoke, drink alcohol to excess, and do other things that seriously harm their health. Ultimately, this translates into significant loss of life.
Spotlight on Social Media
Depression and anxiety have always existed, but they werenât always this bad. Why does Britain suddenly need a Minister of Loneliness? Why are things like depression, anxiety, and suicide increasingâall over the worldâwhile weâre spending billions trying to identify, prevent, and treat emotional health conditions?
Some experts point to our increased reliance on digital technologies like social media. Psychologists, sociologists, and epidemiologists are connecting the rise in emotional health problems with the rise of social media. Psychologist Jean Twenge is one, and in books like iGen: Why Todayâs Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happyâand Completely Unprepared for Adulthoodâand What That Means for the Rest of Us, she demonstrates how increased use of social media and related technologies seems to parallel increases in emotional health problems among youth. She also argues that impersonal technologies such as social media may be replacing more beneficial face-to-face social activities.
One reason social media may have such an effect is because of how relatively new it is; weâre still learning how to use social media and not have it use us. The term social media only originated around 2004âand yet by 2020 about four billion individuals used social media worldwide. So the number of social media users on Earth increased from zero to about four billion in a couple of decades. This makes social media one of the most rapidly adoptedâif not the most rapidly adoptedâtechnology in history.
Today, the most commonly used social media platform is still Facebook. But as we all know, there are many other platforms, like Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and Reddit. Facebook currently has between two and three billion users, if you define a âuserâ as someone who has logged on in the past month. This is more than seven times the population of the United States. In January 2018, TikTok had about fifty million usersâa pittance compared with the eight hundred million users it had by 2020.
Most young adults spend two to four hours per day on social media. But the fastest-growing population of users are adults sixty-five and over. In the past decade their use has increased by more than a factor of five.
Then again, weâre basically all users of social media now, even if we donât think of ourselves that way. The Cambridge Dictionary defines social media as âwebsites and computer programs that allow people to communicate and share information on the internet using a computer or cell phone.â Who doesnât do this? We are using social media when we join a Zoom call and when we watch videos on YouTube, even if we donât spend time reading or posting comments.
Video games are almost all classified as social media these days. In the 1980s, arcade games like Frogger, Pac-Man, and Tempest were solitary. Sure, you might alternate playing with a friend, but that was as social as it got. Today, nearly every popular video gameâsuch as Civilization, Minecraft, Fortnite, and Grand Theft Autoâinvolves interaction with people around the world. The interfaces make it easy to play and chat with those peopleâor obliterate them if youâd like.
What about texting? Some communications and marketing professionals debate whether texting âcountsâ as social media. However, there are good arguments for why todayâs texts qualify. First, using the Cambridge Dictionary definition, the texting app on your phone certainly allows people âto communicate and share information.â Second, texting apps are becoming more âsocialâ over time. Texting originally involved mostly one-to-one communication, but newer apps make it easy to form and communicate with groups. Finally, texting and other social media platforms exist synergistically. For example, Facebook Messenger (a âtextingâ application) seamlessly integrates with Facebook.
Many other platforms also count as social media even if they donât seem like social media. You might go to Goodreads to find a book recommendation and suddenly start debating with someone across the world about the merits of the most recent Jodi Picoult novel. This interactivity is also why sites like the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), Nextdoor, and LinkedIn are functionally similar in many ways to other social networking sites.
So, we basically all use social media, and use is increasing. At the same time, there is an epidemic of loneliness and an increase in rates of depression and anxiety globally. But does that mean these two things are related? Some say yes, and some arenât sure, so itâs worth looking more closel...
