Internet Addiction

Clint Watts’ closing chapter in his fascinating book, Messing with the Enemy, is titled “Surviving in a Social Media World.”  He tells how “Fake News” social engineers can infiltrate, manipulate, and amplify their message using social media platforms with bots.  He tells how they can choose a receptive social media audience who will “like”  the “rumor,” retweet it, and share it with their particular “tribe” and how even rebuttals to the false story can be blocked.  It is a bit disturbing to think that I might be singled out  in an “audience herding” tactic just because I happen to “like” something you put on Facebook.  Social media provides a form of propaganda the likes of which we have never known before.  Watts quotes Craig Silverman of BuzzFeed News:  “With the emergence of digital social networks, our instant evaluation of a rumor can now be followed by a remarkably powerful act of push-button propagation.  Once we decide that a rumor is worth propagating, we can do so immediately and to great effect.”  Be careful of thoughtless clicks.  Do a little investigating before you push the button.

The power at the tip of our fingers to propagate via social media and the fake news epidemic can do us great harm.  But what may really be our undoing, according to Watts, is our own “internet addiction.” With the advent of mobile devices—a device we can’t leave home without, or drive without—increases the potential for this insidious internet addiction. Checking our phones every few minutes becomes habitual and irresistible.  I know this to be true because it is happening to me!  Fifty-nine percent of people say they are dependent on social media according to one study and their reliance on social media “ultimately makes them unhappy.”  “Why,” Watts asks, “would we continue to use social media so much when it makes us feel so bad?  It is an addiction!

Studies have shown that social media damages our critical thinking skills by shortening our attention spans.  “Social media requires us to evaluate thousands of pieces of information each day, a massive exponential increase from previous analog generations…this is further compounded by attention deficits that severely damage our ability to successfully parse fact from fiction.  

Like any other addiction, internet addiction or social media addiction, leads to greater consumption and creates new and strange behavior outside traditional norms. Habitual use of social media leads to several new “diseases” like “Facebook envy” (envious of the lives your friends present via social media) and “Facebook depression” (when a person feels unable to live up to the idealized portraits of life posted by others).  And there is more!  I recommend Watts’ book, but if you can’t read the whole thing, I recommend reading at least the last chapter.